GWExtranet Contributes to Making Pflugerville ISD a Model School District
Background
Pflugerville Independent School District provides quality education with a commitment to excellence by facilitating learning in a safe and nurturing environment. It has been consistently earning recognized and exemplary ratings from the Texas Education Agency for the past several years. PISD has more than 23 campuses. They primarily consist of Administration, 3 high schools, 4 middle schools, and 15 elementary schools with 3 more campuses planned within the next three years. The general strategy of the school district is architected around the following goals: prepare students to reach their potential by ensuring a safe, nurturing, and diverse school environment and providing state-of-the-art facilities and cutting edge technology to enhance and ensure student achievement. In meeting its objectives for technological advancement, PISD depends on Novell’s GroupWise for its collaboration infrastructure. 12 clustered nodes running GroupWise maintain more than 21 thousand active mailboxes across the district. Unlike most other educational institutions, in addition to the 3,000 faculty members, each of the 18,500+ Pflugerville students are given a school GroupWise account.
Challenge
One of the greatest challenges facing PISD was to find a solution that could extend beyond the limits of GroupWise. GroupWise’s powerful calendaring feature was already being used internally by the different campuses and departments to announce activities and events. The next step was to make the calendars available to parents, board of trustee members, and the general public, irrespective of whether they were using GroupWise or not. Publishing the calendars dynamically to the web seemed like a good idea.
Solutions
In so far as publishing GroupWise to the web, GWExtranet presented itself as a perfect solution. The fact that it supported multiple calendars which could be maintained by designated administrators was a bonus, since it freed up the IT group from having to deal with supporting it. Once the various templates were created according to the needs of the respective departments, updating the calendar information became an automated process of entering the information in the GroupWise calendar and making it available to everyone. The learning curve for the respective administrators was practically non existent since they already knew how to use that GroupWise feature. "Our instructional technologists made sure to familiarize themselves with all the capabilities of the product and prepared training sessions for power users who could then take advantage of GWExtranet’s functionalities and pursue the school district’s strategic goals towards excellence," continues Flemming.
PISD contracted with Tenacious Integration Services, Inc., a consulting firm founded in 2001 by former Novell consultants specializing in Novell-based solutions that allow organizations to maximize their technology investments while minimizing implementation times and risk.
"School districts in Texas are looking at Pflugerville as a model. The key features of our strategy include the fact that we are working as a team and your products are assets that contribute to our success," concludes Flemming.
Richard Flemming
Senior System Administrator
Pflugerville ISD, TX
