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Special Annual Awards
2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Collaboration Tools
8/1/2008
IT leaders knew they were fostering a culture of engagement throughout the campus, with better storage, mobile options, and a thorough collaboration experience. Calendaring was turned on from day one, immediately offering the whole campus an entirely new communications hub.The intensive conversion to the new platform was successful and timely, but the Texas A&M IT team isnt stopping there. "Zimlets" that create an interface for third-party programs to be hooked into the collaboration suite allow more applications to work inside the suite. Business units on campus will be encouraged to develop solutions tailored to their departments. The IT department already has received dozens of requests for new collaboration Zimlets incorporating Flickr, Twitter, Amazon, RSS feeds, the iCal standard for campus events, and more. Many paper-driven processes already have been replaced with e-mail, offering a huge cost savings, and the university will leverage other paperless processes. Technologists currently are working on a secure IM system for researchers and for other document-sharing applications-- services that university administrators and educators hope will increase collaboration further. The team also is expecting improvements on the back end. The university's NetApp storage solution ultimately will leverage the migration of e-mail from high-performance disk to possibly slower, higher-capacity storage. Customers will receive even larger storage quotas while the university realizes cost savings.
Says Bolton, "When we completed the conversion and the servers were back online, the first message we received was a big thank-you note from a student. When we implemented the service, we never anticipated how popular it would be; customers who never used the server are now asking for accounts." His advice to other IT organizations considering extensive technology upgrades? "Dont be afraid to step into such a big change; just remember that keeping people informed is key."
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