ALMA University OS

The brief

Getting a simple certificate from an Albanian university often means queueing at the registry office, waiting for a signature and a stamp, and coming back another day: ALMA's own research puts it at 4 hours 20 minutes for one certificate. The administration works from paper, email and disconnected systems, and employers and embassies have no easy way to check that a document is genuine.

ALMA is for both sides of that counter: the students who need documents, the registry staff and deans who issue them, and the employers, banks and embassies who need to trust them. The longer aim is one entrance to the whole university, with 46 product ideas in five pillars: administration, academics, student life, community, and AI and careers.

What we built

The website

A bilingual Albanian and English site that presents the problem, the five pillars, the market and the roadmap, with a live tour of the prototype and a link to the working Document Center.

A clickable prototype of the whole product

All 46 ideas in the browser, with seven roles (student, lecturer, registry, finance, rector, company and alumni) and two demo universities that keep their data apart. Its data is scripted: it shows the vision, not live software.

The Document Center, live

• Students request one of four documents, in Albanian or English, and follow each step live without refreshing.
• The registry works from a live queue and passes each request to the dean or rejects it with a reason.
• The dean approves, which generates the official PDF with a QR code and a verification code, records its SHA-256 fingerprint and stores it privately.
• Anyone can open the public verification page from the QR code, or drop the PDF onto it to check it is the untouched original. The check runs in their browser and the file is never uploaded.
• Every action goes into an append-only, hash-chained audit trail that staff can re-verify at any time.
• Row-level security on every table, every write through role-checked database functions, private file storage with short-lived links, and data hosted in the EU.

The stack

• Web app: TypeScript, Next.js 16 and React 19.
• Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL with row-level security, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions), in Frankfurt.
• Documents: pdf-lib for the PDFs and qrcode for the QR codes.
• Website and prototype: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Hosting: Vercel, with server functions in Frankfurt.

Our role

We built ALMA's website, the clickable prototype and the Document Center, from the database and its security to the public verification page. It is the kind of work we do as MVP development and custom software development.

What comes next

The Document Center is in beta on test data, with a demo university. Next is a pilot with one university faculty, with sign-in through the university's Microsoft 365 accounts, then document revocation, a qualified electronic signature and the next live modules, chosen with the pilot faculty.