Customer Solution Case Study
/ The Alberta Teachers’ Association Improves Communication with Integrated Technology Integration
Overview
Country or Region: Canada
Industry: Education
Customer Profile
The Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) is a professional organization of teachers that aims to advance public education, safeguard standards of practice, and serves as an advocate for its 33,000 members.
Business Situation
The Alberta Teachers’ Association was a decentralized organization with each department responsible for its own IT procurement, which led to a disparate, heterogeneous, and unstable IT environment across the organization.
Solution
The organization looked at competing technologies from IBM and Oracle, but decided to migrate its platform and entire software stack to Microsoft® software to help boost efficiency and improve communications.
Benefits
n Improved communication
n Better integration
n Boosted productivity
n More robust functionality / “A great deal of our decision to go with Microsoft was based around the interoperability and integration features that it offered us.”
Stewart Zimmel, Team Leader, Information and Technology Services, Alberta Teachers’ Association
Established nearly 90 years ago to promote the teaching profession in Alberta, Canada, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) advances the goals of public education, safeguards standards of professional practice, and advocates for its 33,000 members. The Association maintains offices in Edmonton and Calgary. A traditionally decentralized organization, the ATA made a strategic decision to centralize IT operations and upgrade and standardize aging, heterogeneous systems. To realize this vision, the organization needed a technology foundation that would help improve interoperability and integration, ensuring a seamless flow of information among departments and external stakeholders. The ATA chose to migrate all aspects of its technology platform to Microsoft® software. Employees are now able to more easily share documents and can communicate more effectively with co-workers and other stakeholders.
Situation
Established nearly 90 years ago to promote the teaching profession in Alberta, Canada, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) has evolved into a professional organization of teachers with the goal of advancing public education, safeguarding standards of professional practice, and serving as advocate for its 33,000 members. It maintains offices in Edmonton and Calgary.
A traditionally decentralized organization, one in which various departments were responsible for their own IT procurement without any overall guiding principle, the ATA made a strategic decision to centralize its IT operations and upgrade and standardize its aging, heterogeneous systems. “We really needed to improve services to our membership and improve the systems within the organization,” says Pat A. Dalton, Coordinator of operations at ATA. “We were running mainly Lotus Notes, and the servers were so old that one was literally being held together with duct tape.”
The ATA also found its deployment of the Lotus platform to be unstable and prone to downtime. “On occasion, staff dealt with outages that lasted more than 60 per cent of the work day. We had three servers, all of which were configured differently, and they were supporting applications that shouldn’t have been running in that kind of environment,” says Stewart Zimmel, Team Leader of Information and Technology Services at ATA.
With an unstable platform that did not enable seamless workflow across the organization, effective and timely communication was becoming a problem. Staff at the ATA head office was forced to distribute critical membership and activity data on paper. If the information in those documents needed to be changed, it was done by hand and sent back to the office for re-entry. This process cost the ATA valuable time and resources and was prone to errors.
Realizing that its technology infrastructure had to be upgraded and standardized, the ATA executive team approved a five-year plan to overhaul the organization’s IT infrastructure. The organization considered competing bids based on IBM/Linux and Oracle technologies before ultimately choosing to lead the project itself and to migrate its technology infrastructure to Microsoft® software.
Solution
To ensure that the ATA could send information and communicate effectively, it needed a platform that could provide it with near-seamless interoperability. This platform also had to provide improved stability and ensure a smooth flow of data with external government departments and agencies.
The ATA is taking advantage of the Microsoft .NET Framework to help it realize that vision. The .NET Framework is an integral Windows® operating system component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and Web services. “A great deal of our decision to go with Microsoft was based around the interoperability and integration features that it offered us,” says Zimmel.
As its primary platform, the ATA chose the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system with Active Directory® directory service. To help facilitate more efficient communications both internally and externally, the ATA built an intranet using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, to be used in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. The organization also uses technology partner applications for documents and membership information, which now pulls data from Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000.
“We’re also implementing Microsoft Business Solutions-Great Plains® software to help us track membership dues collection, as well as our finances and accounting. We have at least another 12 projects ongoing or planned,” says Dalton.
To provide a more comprehensive solution for all of ATA’s sub-groups and partners throughout the province, the organization also implemented Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client to help its staff better collaborate, and Microsoft Office 2003 Editions to enable staff to work together more effectively. Desktops were also upgraded with the Windows XP operating system.
Benefits
Choosing Microsoft software helped the ATA meet its budget goals. “The Microsoft-based solution was the least expensive when we considered relevant factors. The others were less expensive up front but had a lot more hidden fees over time—to the point where we didn't even know if we could afford them seven years from now,” says Zimmel.
Having migrated the entire organization to Microsoft technologies, ATA now enjoys a technology platform with robust functionality. By taking advantage of Exchange Server 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003, ATA staff are able to share documents and communicate more effectively, both with each other and with external stakeholders, including the Alberta government.
Standardizing on Microsoft software has also enabled the ATA to take advantage of Microsoft-based technology partner software, and ensure that common IT and business processes and standards are practiced across the organization.
Improved Communications
Before implementing Microsoft software, the ATA distributed its membership and other information to its outlying offices and stakeholders on paper. Making changes to data was a time-consuming and resource-intensive process and often led to delays in sharing critical information.
Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, the ATA now has an automated, electronic means to distribute its membership information instead of the paper-based processes used in the past. Staff, partners, and stakeholders now access documents using Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software and member queries residing on the portal using SharePoint Portal Server. They also can manipulate data as needed. All of these new automated processes help them save valuable time.
“Trying to manipulate data on paper was a nightmare, so switching that process over to SharePoint was a quick win for us,” says Dalton. “Members can also send e-mail from within SharePoint—another quick win. Our people are really excited about the workflow possibilities this technology affords them.”
More Integration and Standardization
The ATA staff found the Lotus platform made it difficult to communicate with teachers in the field and with the organization’s various sub-groups and partners because most of them used Microsoft software. By migrating organization-wide to Microsoft technology, the ATA has helped ensure that information flows smoothly across a common operating environment without hitting barriers along the way.
As well, the ATA is taking advantage of integrated software from the technology partner community, using products from two Microsoft Gold Certified Partners: Meridio for storing records and document management, and the K2.net application from SourceCode Technology Holdings for workflow. The ATA is also using the Softworks Group Alinity application for membership management.
“The biggest benefits for us are manageability and interoperability—we now have the ability to run a common set of tools that we can all use,” says Zimmel. “And by using .NET connection software, we can ensure the necessary integration to make that happen. We find it’s a lot better.”
Prepared for Future Growth
The ATA is now halfway through its five-year migration to Microsoft software, and it continues to lay the groundwork for future business productivity enhancements. Officials plan to expand the use of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 from a document and messaging intranet to a much more comprehensive private members site. This will help ATA members do their jobs more effectively by providing them with access to a range of important teaching and administrative documents, and enabling instant collaboration among virtual teams across the organization.
“The list of potential benefits Microsoft software provides for us is quite long, helping us to be more efficient and to run our organization more effectively,” says Dalton.
Microsoft .NET Framework
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows component for building and running the next generation of applications and Web services. For more information about the .NET Framework, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/netframework
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET development system is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice. For more information about Visual Studio, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
Acquire Visual Studio .NET:
shop.microsoft.com/devtools
MSDN® Subscriptions:
msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/prodinfo