Digitization of the
entire Chamber

FUF develops and runs the portal akbw.de on TYPO3 12.4 with 31 packages of its own: register of architects, seminar program, education provider portal, online applications, classifieds, document database with order form, building database, firm profiles. In 2018 we renewed the portal through a redesign and refactoring instead of a relaunch, and since then it has kept growing one building block at a time.

The connection to Business Central runs over OData V4 with token authentication, across both companies and 161 entities. Whatever the portal sends to Business Central (applications, bookings, registrations, changes) goes into a queue with a log, which is processed every four minutes. Whatever changes in Business Central, change tracking brings into the portal every two minutes, plus hourly and daily runs. If Business Central is briefly unreachable, the jobs stay in the queue and go through afterwards.

Registration as a member, registration as an architect in training, an additional discipline, a change of employment status, deletion: every application is a definition in a file. For each field, it states how the field is validated, when it appears and which field in Business Central it belongs to. Sections such as “Practical Experience” can be added up to four times, and conditions link fields with “and”, “or”, “is empty” or “contains”.

The membership application has 91 fields. It shows 46 of them only when the case needs them, 23 are supporting documents to upload, and 64 write directly into a field in Business Central. Known data is prefilled, and applications can be saved as drafts and supplemented after submission. In Business Central, the application arrives as a web application with sublists for activities, education and documents, and the case workers check instead of typing.

Whatever is in Business Central comes into the portal automatically: for the login to the members' area with the register number, for the public register of architects and, through an interface of its own, for the firm directory on architektenprofile.de. When a member changes their data in the portal, the change goes back to Business Central.

Data protection is part of the sync. Every detail carries its own permission: address, phone, mobile, fax, email, website, birthday and publication in chamber media at all. Whatever is not permitted is emptied before it reaches the portal and appears nowhere.

Education providers register in the portal, enter their events and apply for accreditation as continuing education. There is almost always a flyer for it already. The provider uploads it: Mistral OCR reads the text and tables of the PDF, Mistral Small transfers the details at temperature 0 into a fixed JSON schema with 37 fields and allowed values, and the application form is prefilled. Whatever is not in the flyer stays empty instead of guessed. It also enters the times for breaks and for sponsored and off-topic program items into the matching fields.

A one-page flyer takes 3.8 seconds. The AI only handles the conversion of unstructured into structured data: the provider checks and completes, and the chamber decides as before. Mistral is a European provider. The feature is currently running in the test environment.

Accredited continuing education appears in the course search on akbw.de, around 620 courses today, together with the IFBau program, searchable through a Solr full-text search. Members book seminars and the state congress ARCHIKON directly in the portal, and the booking goes to Business Central. If a seminar is full, they join the waitlist.

The same program also leaves the portal as a file: as XML for the education server, as XML for the prepress of the seminar catalog and as CSV.

For the plastic membership card, FUF developed a digital card for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, as a lean PHP class for the portal. It puts name, professional title and register number into the card image, in 0.2 seconds per member, signs the file for Apple Wallet and creates the card through the interface of Google Wallet.

When a membership ends, the card can be visibly marked invalid. The card has been tested on iPhone and Android.

For the public, the chamber maintains the database “Beispielhaftes Bauen” (exemplary building) with 2,634 award-winning buildings today. For it, FUF built the building database in the portal and from it developed the app Architekturführer Baden-Württemberg, an architectural guide for iOS and Android.

An interface of its own delivers to the app only what has changed since the last sync, and images in the size the device needs. The building data comes from the database of the award procedures, supplemented for the app with texts of its own in German, English and French. It is stored on the device: search, favorites and nearby buildings work without a connection too.

The editors write the newsletter as HTML, and a converter by FUF turns it into the template for CleverReach. Signups and unsubscribes run through the portal and the interface of CleverReach, with double opt-in, and also end up in Business Central.