Campus Technology

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Mystery Content

Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together

10/7/2004

By Linda L. Briggs

“Our goal was to involve the students in the decision-making process,” says Cal Poly professor Patricia McQuaid. In making the selection, students looked at general layout, system features, and ability to connect with other systems, among other things.
The school’s IT department was also interested in specific features, including ease of migration from the existing legacy systems, and how easily the new system could be supported, along with maintenance, cost of ownership, platform scalability, usability, efficiency of the workflow, and the general functionality of the system. Cost was also an important factor, of course.

The new system represents much more than a new way to handle e-mail. Since realizing that the school’s large legacy e-mail system was due for replacement, Cal Poly decided to do more than replace it with a new e-mail system, according to CIO Jerry Hanley. Instead, the school decided to use the e-mail system as a building block for future collaboration technologies that would include e-mail, but wouldn’t stop there.

Cal Poly started with a request for proposals a year ago that listed over 100 technical requirements, and settled on Oracle last September. With the previous system, perhaps a third of students didn’t even use the school’s e-mail. There were several reasons, including cumbersome Web access and an unfriendly interface that drove students to choose Yahoo or other free e-mail. But with the new system’s extensive features, project manager Bob Bojorquez is confident that those numbers will change dramatically.

For one thing, the Oracle system presents a single in-box for all e-mail, voice mail and fax messages, so users can access messages from Outlook, Web browsers, phones, and PDAs. That means students will eventually be able to check e-mail and calendars over cell phones or other wireless devices—“a big benefit,” Bojorquez says. Equally important is the stability of the new system, Bojorquez says, since everything is incorporated into a single Oracle database.

The consolidated database means far better access to information, Bojorquez explains. Before, data was stored in separate flat files, and different systems might be looking at different data. Now, whether through e-mail or a calendar, users see the same information.

Also possible with the Oracle system is shared file access, a tremendous collaboration technology. Although the school hasn’t implemented it yet, students, faculty and staff will eventually be able to share files, which Bojorquez sees as a tremendous benefit.

Lansing Community College

As with Cal Poly, looking ahead at the big picture drove the move to new collaborative software at Lansing State Community College.

Lansing, just an hour outside Detroit, wanted to save money by consolidating and simplifying its systems. A quick move and immediate savings characterized the school’s move to Oracle Collaboration Suite. Lansing immediately cut direct IT costs by $600,000 a year by consolidating its infrastructure.

CIO Glenn Cerny says the school also wanted to enhance the quality of its data, and allow different aspects of the school to work together. Whatever software choices the school made needed to drive its strategic plan as well. That meant all decisions needed to feed into “using data more wisely, having it more accessible, and having quality data in general,” Cerny says.
The data needs were important—the school registers 20,000 students a semester, and as a community college, sees lots of turnover.

• Campus Technology |
• Education Plaza |
• EduHound |
• T.H.E. Journal

Copyright 1998-2008 1105 Media Inc.. See our Privacy Policy