Student Housing Software Company To Offer Mobile Apps

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 08/24/10

An American company that sells software to manage university student housing will be broadening its product line by teaming up with a British firm that sells campus mobile applications. Residential Management Systems, which has applications for managing housing and conferences, performing recruitment, and allowing students to self-select roommates, will be selling and implementing oMbiel's CampusM in North America.

CampusM, first introduced in September 2009, is a set of programs that provides campus users with mobile access to location-based information, enabling them to use their phones to locate car parking; find their way to buildings, lecture halls, residence halls and other university facilities; and locate friends using the Friend Locator in real time. The app, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, also feeds information about university events, pulls up library records, provides a contact directory, feeds news, and sends alerts.

The two companies will offer versions of Residential Management's applications for mobile use. According to Andrew Tanner, vice president of sales, a mobile app for conferences will allow an organization to set up a delegate list, define the agenda, create announcements, do alerts, add to social networking sites, and allow delegates to communicate with each other, read alerts, and do on-site voting, among other functions. A mobile app for recruitment is intended for recruiters out in the field to manage leads. The mobile app for housing will allow students to interact with their school's residence life office, see their room assignment, apply for housing, monitor laundry, and view their school banking account. He said that developers are currently working on new functionality for that app that would allow students to report maintenance issues and view floor plans for available rooms.

According to oMbiel, an application takes about four weeks to customize and deploy for a given higher ed customer, which Residential Management will be doing. Tanner added that customers for the mobile apps won't have to run the full-fledged applications to be able to use them.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • computer with a red warning icon on its screen, surrounded by digital grids, glowing neural network patterns, and a holographic brain

    Report Highlights Security Risks of Open Source AI

    In these days of rampant ransomware and other cybersecurity exploits, security is paramount to both proprietary and open source AI approaches — and here the open source movement might be susceptible to some inherent drawbacks, such as use of possibly insecure code from unknown sources.

  • pattern of interconnected glowing nodes and lines forming a neural network structure

    Meta AI Releases Open Source Machine Learning Library to Tackle Dataset Management Challenges

    Meta AI has announced LeanUniverse, an open source machine learning (ML) library designed to address the growing challenges of managing datasets in large-scale machine learning projects.

  • modern college building with circuit and brain motifs

    Anthropic Launches Claude for Education

    Anthropic has announced a version of its Claude AI assistant tailored for higher education institutions. Claude for Education "gives academic institutions secure, reliable AI access for their entire community," the company said, to enable colleges and universities to develop and implement AI-enabled approaches across teaching, learning, and administration.

  • glowing brain, connected circuits, and abstract representations of a book and graduation cap on a light gray gradient background

    Snowflake Launches Program to Upskill 100,000 People in Data and AI

    Cloud data platform Snowflake is embarking on an effort to train and certify more than 100,000 users on its AI Data Cloud by 2027. The One Million Minds + One Platform program will provide Snowflake-delivered courses, training materials, and free access to Snowflake software, at no cost to learners.