Buying airtime through the NWU mobile app Buy Tool is not new.  The service was established in 2014.

Students can buy airtime from Vodacom, MTN and Cell-C through the app by loading money beforehand onto their NWU-Vending “wallet”.  On entering the app a student is informed of the amount of money that is available on his/her vending wallet.  The student can then continue with the purchase process.

A new service provider, SMS Cellular, was recently procured.  This enabled broadening the product offering with data and SMS bundles as well as airtime amounts as specified by the purchaser.

The project took 10 months during 2015 to complete and required participation from the following parties:

• OpenCollab who developed the code of the buy tool and partook in the integration with the NWU-Vending system.
• Extended Campus Technologies coded changes to some of the existing NWU-Vending services and managed the contract with SMS Cellular.
• IT Academic and Office Solutions: Barend Pretorius, Senior IT Consultant, the project manager, coordinated the different aspects of the project and was involved with the testing.
• IT Business System Development and Support: Karl van der Merwe, Systems Analyst, and Jean Raath, Business Analyst, implemented and managed the business system changes and integrations.

Future planned enhancements to the NWU mobile App Buy Tool include broader offerings.