Six years inside a university's systems estate
At St Mary's University, Twickenham, Brad McAllister integrated more than twenty applications, ran the SQL Server estate and led the migration from a legacy student record system to SITS — the unglamorous work that decides whether automation is even possible.
- Client
- St Mary's University, Twickenham
- Sector
- Higher education
- Period
- 2019 – 2025
- Role
- Senior full stack developer
Delivered by Brad McAllister, founder of Real Code Ltd, while embedded in the institution's engineering team.
01
The challenge
Like most universities, St Mary's ran an estate that had grown organically: door control, library systems, catering, Moodle, finance and student records — each owned by a different team, each with its own data model, few of them designed to interoperate.
Manual transfers and overnight exports were carrying processes the institution depended on daily.
02
What was delivered
Integrations between more than twenty applications — including ACT Enterprise door control, Ex Libris Alma and Leganto, MCR catering and Moodle — replacing manual transfers with automated, observable flows.
Lead role in the migration from the legacy QL student record system to Tribal SITS, with synchronisation export procedures designed for minimal downtime.
A data warehouse with Power BI gateway for institutional analytics, Active Directory integration for staff data management, and REST API automation for students' union data and finance invoicing transfers.
Database administration across 45 SQL Server instances, including a primary server upgrade from 2012 to 2016 using dbatools, plus VersionSQL and Azure DevOps CI/CD to bring the estate under version control.
03
The controls
Change was governed through the institution's weekly Change Advisory Board, in which Brad was a standing member — every integration shipped through review, not around it.
Authentication secrets were consolidated into managed storage across Infrastructure and Application Services, replacing ad-hoc credential handling.
04
Why it matters for AI
Agentic automation proposals fail when they meet the real estate: undocumented integrations, unversioned databases, load-bearing exports. This is the experience NetEvolution brings — the work of making an estate legible before asking AI to act on it.