Customer Solution Case Study
/ School District Portal Speeds Communications, Cuts Prep Time in Half for Paperless Meetings
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Education
Customer Profile
Keller ISD, based in Keller, Texas, is one of the fastest-growing school districts in the state, with 35 campuses serving more than 30,000 students.
Business Situation
The district relied on e-mail for communication and collaboration—with the result that the overworked system could not deliver the levels of reliability and usefulness the district required.
Solution
Keller ISD created a custom intranet portalbased on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Serverthat is used by students, faculty, administrators, and board members.
Benefits
- Portal use increased
- Board meetings now paperless
- Board meeting preparation time cut by 50 percent
- Support calls down by 90 percent
Joe Griffin, Executive Director of IT, Keller Independent School District
Keller Independent School District, a fast-growing district in Texas, relied on e-mail for almost all communication and collaboration—and its Linux-based GroupWise system couldn’t keep up. So, the district built an intranet portal based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Uptime has increased from 80 percent to 100 percent, sparking widespread portal use and earning immense popularity with students, faculty, administrators, and board members. As a result, meeting preparation time has been cut in half, printing costs have been reduced by 20 percent, and support calls are down by 90 percent, saving U.S.$300,000.
Situation
E-mail is still the lifeblood of many organizations, and the Keller Independent School District (ISD) in Keller, Texas—a fast-growing suburb north of Ft. Worth—was no exception. Administrators, board members, the superintendent, and teachers all depended on email to communicate and collaborate. E-mail was the way the superintendent issued operating guidelines for the schools. E-mail was the way the board circulated its agenda and documents in advance of meetings. It was the way principals and teachers stayed abreast of what was going on in their schools.
And it wasn’t working.
The district was operating on a software platform of disparate components, most notably the Novell SUSE Linux 9.x operating system with GroupWise 6.5 as the e-mail server and e-mail application on the desktops. “We had turned to Linux when finances were an issue,” says Joe Griffin, Executive Director of IT for the Keller ISD.
The Linux system crashed and was out ofservice so often that uptime was downto 80 percent—so low that district employees and others on the system weren’t even depending on e-mail much of the time. “People would phone each other to conduct their business or to confirm that an e-mail message had been received,” says Griffin. “We had difficulty getting the level of support needed to fix the problem.”
The e-mail and operating system issues came to the attention of the school district’s board of trustees, and the administration was tasked with addressing the issues promptly. The administration took the challenge as anopportunity to go beyond the narrow issue of e-mail and to reconsider its entire vision for collaborationamong board members, administrators, educators, and students. When the district’s third-party portal product began to fail as well, and when it became apparent that the portal’s Google-based search engine couldn’t accurately search intranet content, the district also began to reconsider those parts of its infrastructure.
“We were at a crossroads,” says Griffin. “We’re in the business of education—we wanted a total collaboration environment that would permit the best possible education of our students. We took a hard look at whether we could get that collaboration environment from Novell and Linux.”
District administrators considered and rejected the option of upgrading their Novell and Linux e-mail environment. Instead, they decided to migrate to the “best of breed”Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 messaging environment, and they wanted a broader collaboration environment that would integrate fully with it. Novell and Linux wouldn’t do that, they concluded. Further, requiring the district’s four-person IT department to manage dual Linux and Windows® operating system environments and directories would be a costly and time-consuming prospect. Griffin and his colleagues also rejected the option of using off-the-shelf portal software specialized for education because it was clear to them that proprietary technology would limit the district’s options in the future and require specialized maintenance and support, starting with deployment.
Solution
The district chose to create a custom collaboration portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
“The more we looked at what other districts were doing, the more we saw them going to Microsoft and to the Office SharePoint Server solution,” says Vaughan Hamblen, Director of Network Services, Keller ISD. “We saw Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 e-mail integrating better with SharePoint Server than with any other product—which was important, because we wanted teachers and administrators to be able to share calendars, task lists, and other items; and we wanted IT to be able to support a single directory structure between e-mail and the portal. Office SharePoint Server was it.”
Building Interest in the Intranet
To implement the design and deployment of the new portal, Keller ISD turned to RCM Technologies. District managers had intended to handle the migration in phases, with the e-mail system migrating first. But a 2007 pilot of Office SharePoint Server was so successful that the district administration decided to go for a “big bang” that would give administrators, teachers, students, and others all of their new technology at once. Over the summer of 2008, RCM implemented the migration to the Active Directory® service, Office Outlook 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and the new environment was ready to greet returning employees and students when school started in the fall. The district’s new intranet portal, called KConnect, was born.
That’s when the district faced its first challenge with the new collaboration environment: how to train personnel touse it. “We’d had a small portal previously, but it was largely unused,” says Griffin. “The concept of all content being available on a single internal site was a huge shift in thinking for our people. We had the struggle of trying to decide how to communicate that to them. You can’t train people on the intranet unless you have content there, but you don’t get content there unless people are using it.”
To solve this challenge, the district created an initial focus for K-Connect around four areas: events, announcements, links, and document libraries. Information from the district office gave personnel in the schools their first taste of SharePoint site–based content.
The district also sought to increase the initial appeal of K-Connect by using the personalization and notification features of Office SharePoint Server. This way, each person visiting K-Connect sees a version automatically customized to his or her role in the district. This capability, which takes advantage of the Active Directory profiles created to support Exchange Server e-mail, makes content more relevant and thus more appealing, helping to ensure that people return repeatedly to the site. Alerts are another feature that the district used to generate interest in K-Connect. People receive email alerts when information of interest to them (again, based on their Active Directory profile) is added to the site. The district has since added other advanced Web tools such as RSS feeds that direct employees and others to relevant content.
Use of K-Connect was also encouraged by assuring employees and others that security measures would keep sensitive documents private. In addition to role-based permissions, K-Connect runs Microsoft Forefront™ Security for SharePoint antivirus software.
Providing Resources for Students, Teachers, Others
As Keller ISD continues to expand KConnect, it is carefully addressing the distinct needs of each of its key audiences: students, faculty, administrators, board members, parents, and others.
Students—Students now submit class assignments and interact with their teachers and peers through class-specific team collaboration sites. The students upload homework assignments to folders on the sites and receive the graded assignments back through private folders that only give them access to their own work. The uploading of assignments ensures that teachers know if an assignment is returned on time and—unlike a public folder—prevents students from revising their work after submission. The district plans to add online instructional content to the class sites.
Faculty—Curriculum development and related content shared by faculty members is one of the key uses of KConnect. In place of public folders that required teachers to search laboriously through all content, SharePoint document libraries make it possible for teachers to go directly to curriculum content—for example, sample lessons, presentations, and lists of links—at the grade level and for the subject matter in which they’re interested. Discussion boards are a forum to discuss how to optimize curriculum use. Permissions make it possible for curriculum coordinators to control what is added to and removed from the site.
Administrators—Administrators, who used to do all of their work on paper, now work almost exclusively through KConnect. Shared calendars on team sites make it possible for administrators to share information about meetings and events at the 36 schools throughout the district. Based on their roles, administrators may see only information relevant to their school or their grade, or may see “feeder pattern” information that includes other grades or schools that will eventually promote students into an administrator’s area of responsibility. The district superintendent proudly operates a nearly paperless office. Administrative use of K-Connect is facilitated by the ability to keep sensitive libraries and documents private, and to grant varying levels of rights—that is, read-only, edit, upload—to specific personnel.
Board—Board members, who are community volunteers, conduct all of their business through Tablet PCs and KConnect. Using board team sites, board members can grant access to—and thus gain the expertise of—people who aren’t available to attend a particular meeting. For instance, board meetings are videotaped and made available through the site. Access to document libraries makes it possible for board members to work on the current version of a document wherever and whenever they wish, with an audit trail providing an automatic record of who has checked in and checked outeach document.
Parents, Vendors, the Public—Additional audiences weren’t included in the initial rollout of K-Connect, but they will be included in future rollouts. Griffin envisions parents serving on board committees or reviewing their children’s class work through K-Connect. Vendors, which supply school necessities ranging from classroom materialsto cafeteria food, will havelimited access to relevant areas, facilitating just-in-time inventory processes. And relevant content will be shared on the district’s public Web site, making district operations increasingly transparent.
Benefits
“Our portal, K-Connect, which is based on Office SharePoint Server, is a complete success,” says Griffin. “It is immensely popular with students, faculty, administrators, and the board, enabling them to learn and work more productively.”
Portal Use Is Up
Hamblen notes that the use of KConnect has soared. He attributes that increase to a variety of factors. Most basically, the greater reliability of Office SharePoint Server, compared to the former portal, has increased uptime from 80 percent to 100 percent. “We haven’t had a single unplanned outage due to the software,” he says. “When people know the portal will be there for them, they use it.”
Beyond greater availability, Hamblen notes that the district’s use of personalization features combined with the increased relevancy of search results makes the intranet a more useful tool. In fact, search relevancy is up 90 percent over Google search. And the integration of security measures such as Forefront Security for SharePoint gives teachers and administrators greater confidence that the documents they place on the intranet will remain protected.
Board Meetings Go Paperless; Preparation Time Cut by 50 Percent
The greater use of K-Connect, in turn, is making the district more productive in a variety of ways. With all board documentation distributed through the portal rather than on paper, the time it takes administrators to prepare for board meetings has been reduced 50 percent, because documents no longer need to be copied and distributed.
The broader use of K-Connect as a communications tool has cut costs and sped communications throughout the district. The superintendent’s office is now completely “paperless,” with all documents in that office distributed solely through the intranet. Printing costs throughout the district dropped by 20 percent soon after the introduction of the portal—with greater reductions expected. District documents and forms now reside on K-Connect and are easily shared with staff. The yearly cost of printing and updating district forms has been virtually eliminated, and the district is in the process of eliminating all paper forms for the 2009–2010 school year.
Not only are costs reduced, but administrators operate more efficiently. For example, the use of collaboration sites has reduced the need for traditional in-person meetings, saving travel time and expense. The District Technology Committee, which makes recommendations on district technology, used to meet monthly after school to review and update the district technology plan. “Scheduling the meeting time to accommodate the majority of the committee members was nearly impossible,” says Griffin. “Some teachers would have to get substitutes to cover their classes, while community members would need to leave work early. Now, the committee has a collaboration site on K-Connect that includes discussion groups, shared document libraries, wikis, and survey tools to exchange ideas and collaborate online.”
Support Calls Are Down by 90 Percent, Saving $300,000 Annually
Griffin also measures the success of KConnect by the effect it has had on the IT department—and on the IT budget. Despite far greater use of the intranet, support calls related to it have dropped by 90 percent, an annual savings of U.S.$300,000. Now that administrators and others can directly access the data they want, Griffin has been able to redirect internal IT personnel, who formerly provided reports, saving another $70,000. And an 80 percent reduction in duplicate files has freed 6terabytes of data storage, helping to ensure that hardware is used far more efficiently.
“By building K-Connect on a foundation of Office SharePoint Server, we’ve made it a winner for students, faculty, administrators, and board members,” says Griffin. “But we’ve only just begun. We look forward to expanding the portal to the public Web site so we can make information, as appropriate, available to parents and to the community at large.”
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