Coop highlight: Web and Mobile Computing students integrate Booker Tools with Portuguese Immigration Services

August 18, 2021

Gaining relevant work experience during college is more than putting knowledge into practice. Aside from learning what it really looks like to work in an industry on real-life business cases, students get a chance to see how they like working in a particular industry sector, profession or even organization-type. This further helps them to learn where they see themselves career-wise. At RIT Croatia cooperative education through internships in the chosen field of study is mandatory. Students spend 800 hours of gaining work experience during their studies. This is done by conducting two coops during 4-years of study.

"Coops are really helpful", says Web and Mobile student Mark Marušić. "They give all the necessary experience of either what it's like working in an actual office, how to problem solve any issues or features, all the things you have to look out for while communicating with customers, work buddies. Personally, I also learned a bit of programming on an actual system that I had to inspect from top to bottom so that I can know what's really going on in there. Co-ops are quite helpful if you want to expand your skills, and if you want your life to be a bit easier when you actually go working for a company with a similar premise."

Mark Marušić and Dominik Bečić are our students currently conducting their internship at Direct Booker. By providing vacation rental solutions - management for homeowners, booking for travelers, software for property managers and franchise for entrepreneurs, Direct Booker positioned itself as one of the most unique brands in the short term & vacation rental industry. Our students helped integrate company's main product Booker Tools with SIGA, Portugese Immigration Services. The company representatives were more than pleased with our students' work.

Internship is a great starting point for a career in the IT industry

Praising internships if they are conducted properly, Ivan Bogoje, Direct Booker's Head of IT, believes that the biggest value for students is understanding that business is, first and foremost, all about problem solving. "Students learn how to look at the problem from the right angle and propose the best possible solution in that moment. That is the reason why Mark and Dominik were involved in important projects for Direct Booker."

As this industry relies on integration, Booker Tools integrates with major online travel agencies, several payment processors, guest registration and enterprise resource planning systems. During the internship, Mark and Dominik worked on, among other projects, integration between Booker Tools and SIGA, portuguese integrated management tool for property owners that enables reservation management, invoicing and sending guest data to Immigration and Borders Service. This was an important project for the company.

Learning by doing and helping the company expand its target market

"It was an interesting project for Mark and Dominik because they participated in the entire integration process from defining a business need, communication and collaboration with SIGA developers while designing API, developing and testing API", commented Bogoje. "Not to mention, with this integration Booker Tools has expanded the potential market to a new country."

Mark says that there were many challenges they encountered while working on this project, and anticipation of potential issues was very important. "The "problem" was that we had to send lots of different data from our database to the client, and we encountered many following problems: how should that data look like, do we include all the data, what if some data is missing, do we send all the data at once, etc. Lots of questions later, but the thing was that we had to anticipate a lot of rising problems that could potentially happen. Another key element was the communication with the client, so that they know, and can request any changes we do to the original "problem". The solution wasn't difficult to think of, but the other smaller problems that would rise up, had to be thought of somehow."

In any case, Direct Booker was really pleased with what they saw from both Mark and Dominik's performance. "From the beginning of this journey they showed interest in active participation and I have a feeling they liked the projects they were involved in", says Bogoje. "Who knows, maybe tomorrow they will be part of the Direct Booker IT team!"