Tuscaloosa City Schools Case Study

Instantly publishing GroupWise info to the Web

Case Study

Client Since: 2007
Number of Users: 1000
Product: M+Extranet

Objective: Roll out a unified platform for calendaring, blogging and information sharing with zero end-user training

Background

With more than 10,400 students, 11 elementary, 3 middle, and 5 high schools, as well as 3 additional programs, the Tuscaloosa City School system is consistently selected among the 24 Alabama systems for the “What Parents Want Most” national award. This award recognizes academic excellence in areas such as test scores, national average expenditures and small class sizes. Over 1000 faculty and staff serve the students on 19 campuses to ensure they are competitive academically, artistically, and athletically. About 2 years ago, the IT Department deployed GroupWise as the schools’ collaboration system replacing the inadequate Mercury email server and Pegasus email client in use by the faculty and staff. A year ago, they also implemented M+Extranet from Messaging Architects to optimize the way the teachers and administrative staff interacted with each other and the Tuscaloosa community.

Integrated Calendaring and Information Sharing with M+Extranet

Andrea Gilbreath, Technology Coordinator at Tuscaloosa City Schools, was in charge of the GroupWise deployment and later the introduction of M+Extranet across the school system. “We decided we needed to replace the old email system with GroupWise, as our collaboration needs were growing, email was becoming a dominant form of communication and at the same time the old messaging infrastructure was very rudimentary. We didn’t have encryption nor integrated calendaring with the old Mercury Server. After we successfully made the switch to GroupWise, we started looking for applications that would extend the calendaring capabilities of the system and allow us to schedule our resources efficiently with as little IT involvement as possible.”

Gilbreath found M+Extranet in Novell Cool Solutions and read about it on the GroupWise forums. The application offered the types of group scheduling capabilities Tuscaloosa City Schools were looking for - it enabled users to schedule events and reserve resources and rooms directly through GroupWise. Moreover, M+Extranet could dynamically publish GroupWise calendar and folder information to the web by using GroupWise proxy, thus requiring no learning effort from the end users.

With M+Extranet, Tuscaloosa City Schools solved the problem of managing its Central Office resources, which are heavily used, and overcame any scheduling issues with very little overhead. “It’s an ideal solution for us,” explains Gilbreath. “All the resource accounts are accessed by the respective employees in charge of them using GroupWise proxy rights. I don’t have to worry whether the users managing the resources know what to do as they have already been trained on GroupWise. This application saves me and my team a lot of time because it is easy to use and I know that the end users aren’t getting into trouble.”

“If teachers want to expose their calendars to their students, they can do it through M+Extranet and they are fully in charge. There is no need for the IT Department to get involved, the end users are 100% responsible for the content,” continues Gilbreath. “In fact, the teachers use their GroupWise calendars extensively to post homework and ensure the students have access to the material no matter where they are. They truly appreciate the ease with which M+Extranet offers them this capability.”

Tuscaloosa City Schools also found a creative way to use M+Extranet’s blogging feature as a forum of communication for the School Board’s meetings. According to Gilbreath, “The blogging feature provides us with the right tools to properly publicize the Board meetings to the community. It’s easy to use and really useful. It also puts us at the cutting edge of technology when we compare ourselves to other schools.”

“M+Extranet is a very useful feature and we all love it. It saves me countless hours and has been embraced by all the end users. People typically resist change but when they realized the ease with which they could publish their calendar and share a wealth of information with very little effort, they have become great fans of the application,” concludes Andrea Gilbreath.

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