Competitive Purchasing of Technology

The intention of state purchasing guidelines is pretty simple – to ensure a competitive bidding process for significant technology purchases (normally over $5000.00). But complying with purchasing guidelines can be time consuming and difficult.

What’s a school to do?

The answer to this question varies with each financial manager. And sadly we have seen a few clever attempts to circumvent purchasing guidelines as we have bid competitively on posted items. But for purposes of this article, we will assume that your brother-in-law is not part of the equation, that you are not getting kickbacks from favorite vendors, and your IT provider has an arm’s length relationship with your financial manager. With few exceptions, we have observed great integrity with the charter schools and managers we have had the pleasure of serving.

However, the sheer volume of purchasing in a school can lead to unintended purchasing that is less than compliant. Here is a suggestion that we have found to be pretty simple and complies with the intent of purchasing guidelines.

Disclaimer: I do not pretend to know every states purchasing guidelines and this may technically not comply with the rules of your state. Check with your local state office of education.

First, let’s illustrate an important concept and consider a story of two guys selling watermelons.

Two men formed a partnership. They built a small shed beside a busy road. They obtained a truck and drove it to a farmer’s field, where they purchased a truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. They drove the loaded truck to their shed by the road, where they sold their melons for a dollar a melon. They drove back to the farmer’s field and bought another truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. Transporting them to the roadside, they again sold them for a dollar a melon. As they drove back toward the farmer’s field to get another load, one partner said to the other, “We’re not making much money on this business, are we?” “No, we’re not,” his partner replied. “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”

What does this have to do with technology? More than you might imagine.

Margins for most technology purchases are razor thin and the marketplace is very opaque, meaning you can in an instant determine the best price for nearly anything digital. Just do a quick search on Amazon or eBay. By taking this small step, the chances of overpaying significantly for technology is reduced greatly. Know what it is you are purchasing.

So why not purchase from an online venue such as eBay, Amazon, or others? Good question; and the answer is you just might! Especially for the occasional one or two items that are primarily consumer electronics/technology. However, using eBay or Amazon becomes more problematic when you need a specific type of technology, a specific quantity (often large), and with the manufacturers warranty included (or extended warranty if you choose).

Furthermore, it is a little difficult for most schools to actually specify the correct solutions, they need. That is presumably why you have technology managers in your organization. The biggest mistake we see with respect to purchasing is what to purchase rather than how to purchase, or from whom. And then there is the installation and management of that technology going forward.

But I digress…

One of the simplest ways we have found to provide our schools with a competitive bid is to take three simple steps:

1. Identify clearly what technical solution is required (this is the most important step).
2. Utilize a technology distributor that represents a large variety of vendors.
3. Arrange for a cost plus, or percentage of invoice markup for your purchases.

Let’s look at an example of how this works:

 

Assume that a school administrator comes to us with a requisition for new desktops for all staff members. Specifications are agreed upon in advance and would include features such as form factor, operating system, memory, and storage requirements. Added to that feature list is a general idea on the budget available.

 

Our next step is to provide our distributors with those specifications and obtain competing quotes from their list of vendors. Now if you are dealing with a single vendor, your purchasing program will break at this point. So be sure you deal with a distributor’s representative, not a single vendor’s representative.

 

We work with two of the largest technology distributors in the US and, with few exceptions, receive a wide variety of products that match the required specifications. We then select based primarily upon price (all other considerations being equal). The school is then presented with our recommendations and the PO is obtained, the invoice is marked up the agreed upon amount, and the items are ordered.

This simple process provides our partner schools with a fair and competitive bid for items requested. The cost plus markup scheme can be easily audited to verify fair pricing and we provide the interface for warranty claims, service, etc.

 

One of our competitors claims to sell hardware at cost to their customer schools. Perhaps this is to offset the high fees charged for services, or perhaps they just need a bigger truck!

Technology Outsourcing: In House or Out House….

That didn’t exactly come out the way it was intended, let me start over. The subject of this week’s post is the physical location of your technical support staff, particularly those doing higher level support. Providing support in house is having your technical staff on premises at all times. Providing your support remotely (or out of house) is having your technical staff work from their office.

Which is better? Let’s take a deeper look.

There is a very wide array of remote access and connectivity capabilities now available to Information Workers. This creates an opportunity for your IT staff to provide remote support in some cases more effectively than being on premises. But there can be significant perception issues in those situations and it might be problematic if not managed properly.

Before you start down this road, here are three questions you must answer:

1. Do you have a high level of confidence that your technical support staff acts with integrity?
2. Are you able to provide meaningful measures of performance and results?
3. Is your support communication infrastructure instantaneous and rock solid?

As you think about those questions, let me describe a scenario that occurred shortly after relocating our office from Texas to Utah a few years back.

 

We were providing technical support to an organization that was going through a major system upgrade. They needed someone onsite each day for a few weeks to bring all the new pieces together and train a large influx of new staff members. And they were looking to our organization for that support.

 

Only problem was, we were 1200 miles away!

 

So, we set up a remote control system on each desktop and started to provide the support needed and found we were significantly more effective than being there in person. Here’s how:

1. It is quicker to move room to room by tabbing to a new window than by physically walking there.
2. It is far less disruptive to be virtually in front of a computer than being physically present. And there is no competition for the same physical space.
3. It is more effective for technical support to actually observe new staff attempting to do a process than to ask them to describe a process or problem.
4. It is far easier to transfer support files, help documents, or simply chat when the support technician is at his workstation than at the workstation having problems.

However, there was just one small problem. Although our support of the staff was very effective, the administrator who was dealing with an entirely different set of problems was not happy about the arrangement. Her ongoing question was “Where is IT when we need them?”

 

Perception made short work of this very happy arrangement.

I’ve thought about this experience often, when discussing the manner in which we provide technical support at our partner schools and have been much more careful to ensure everyone understands the process. What appears to be very effective from the perspective of your technical support team may appear to be getting taken advantage of by an unconvinced administrator.

 Some organizations just feel the need to be able to walk down the hallway to the server room (closet in many cases) and talk face to face with technical support. Fair enough, but when we are trying to spread limited resources as far as humanly possible in a charter school environment, this may not provide the most bang for your buck.

What tools are required to do this? Good question. In short, Office 365 for education – specifically the Lync client now integrated into the latest release. Earlier versions work equally well. There are other solutions, but none as simple or as effective – especially if your staff uses Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

Using Lync (see previous articles for more details) our partner schools have a very effective support mechanism. It starts with presence, which indicates availability of technical support; then provides an escalation of communication methods to solve the problem at the required level. For example, a simple text message exchange can solve many minor issues. If more detail is required a phone call (via Lync) may be required. And if necessary, either party can share an application or entire desktop view to the other while communicating about the matter.
And if we need to involve more folks, or just talk face to face, we do an instant video conference or video call. And all of this can be accomplished without prior arrangement, meeting invitations, or software installation.

You’ll probably want to evolve into a remote (out of house) support mechanism over time, should you decide it is practical. It is very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of your support team when they are operating remotely, if you have no baseline of experience on premises. And you will definitely need to have a proven help desk solution in place to track and report on help desk issues.

And this discussion makes a couple of very important assumptions – trust being the one and capability the other. If you don’t have complete trust that your support staff will bill you according to services provided, or if you have doubts about their capability to effectively solve problems quickly then this long distance relationship may not work.

As distance learning has proven, proximity to support resources is not always necessary. And if the teacher or technician is competent and provides the right set of tools, the experience can be very effective and enjoyable. I personally think it is grand to go to work right after my workout when it is only 20 steps away – never mind the shorts and T-shirt!

If your technical support is inhouse or in the outhouse (so to speak) and you would like to explore ideas on improving it, give us a call.

What we have here is a failure… of Leadership

One of my favorite lines comes from Paul Newman, in the movie Cool Hand Luke. It is similar to this weeks blog title, and most of you over 40 have probably heard it. Newman repeats the phrase, “What we have here is a failure to communicate!” He repeats it often and until his eventual demise.

I substitute the word Leadership, because communication is the single most important aspect of the Holy Grail called leadership.

This is not an article criticizing anyone in leadership at any school. Leadership is a tough business, a worthy objective, and a never ending quest. It is very hard work for most of us average folks who don’t possess the skills of (pick your favorite leader).

And I hesitate writing about leadership, because I have my own failings. But I’ll do it anyway – mostly because I can, and also because I believe there are a few key ways that leadership can be enhanced in the area of Information Technology in a Charter School.

It’s pretty simple, really. Somebody has to be in charge and everybody needs to follow. How you get there is not so simple.

We recently had an exceptionally talented teacher approach us about a new online learning system that she was excited to share with others. Fair enough, we always welcome new ideas and ways of improving things. Problem is, she wanted us to essentially pressure the other staff members into seeing the world in her particular view. Of course we could have pushed her agenda and made it difficult to use other similar services had we been so inclined, but that would be a conflict of interest and contrary to sound and ethical leadership.

Do you have similar challenges in your organization? We frequently see these shooting stars of good ideas hurling across the proverbial campus sky, only to flash one last time and crash to the earthy reality of resistance to change and failure to get people on board. Change is hard and change requires leadership.

Again, this is not about criticism, but better ways of doing things.

May I suggest a very old fashioned approach to this very common problem? We have observed positive results at schools that have implemented these ideas.

It starts with a committee, okay if the label of a committee is a turn-off, try “focus group” or “change engineers” or whatever you like. But assemble a group of enthusiastic individuals - preferably volunteers who enjoy technology – to meet as a Technology Advisory Committee. Include one or more individuals from the following stakeholder groups – students, teachers, parents, administrators/BOD, and IT.

Establish a set time to meet and give it a high priority, perhaps even throw in some perks for participation.  Don’t waste time or meet without an agenda, be organized and serious. Then begin the process of listening to ideas, problems, suggestions, and challenges and collectively formulate a game plan that is agreed upon by the group. Don’t rush things. If more information is required, delay a decision rather than rushing forward for the sake of decisiveness.

When ideas are vetted in a fair and open manner, the best ideas will ultimately bubble to the top. A wise leader can encourage this process by maintaining order, giving all stakeholders a fair voice, and ensuring the dialogue does not become personal or vindictive.

You should observe three important principals in these interactions:

1. Most good ideas come from the troops – teachers and students are where the rubber meets the road. They often have great ideas that bubble up because they are the primary consumers of IT.
2. Wisdom and perspective comes from experience –administrators will guide the conversations to avoid the pitfalls of policy limits, government mandates,  and budget realities.
3. Practical aspects of implementing are best addressed by your IT managers – building upon existing infrastructure is often a necessary compromise with new ideas.

Individual efforts, by any one group alone will never win the day. There has to be an agreed upon direction, with buy-in from all the stakeholders after vigorous debate, and a practical implementation plan put together that doesn’t completely undo the infrastructure already established.

Is your school missing the proverbial forest for all of the trees when it comes to Information Technology? Do you apply the same seriousness to deploying IT assets as you do financial assets?
Or is the culture at your school focused on position, power plays, and pet projects? 

By implementing regular Technology Advisory Committee meetings you are more likely to have a single, rational, and agreed upon process to determine what is best for the school.

Summary

It is possible to provide concise leadership in the area of technology. In our view it starts at the top by establishing a Technology Committee, with representatives from each stakeholder group. The committee meets regularly and deliberately to evaluate the desires and needs of the students through the advocacy of teachers, tempered with the wisdom and experience of the administrators, and guided by IT.
 
Bonus: A suggested methodology for your periodic TAC meetings:

1. Start Positive: Begin on a positive note.  Report on a new implementation or project that highlights success in your efforts.
2. Train Constantly: Have a 5 minute training session about something really useful that needs wider adoption. It may be the very issue you report on in the first item.
3. Encourage Participation: Have each stakeholder representative review one or two high level technical challenges or ongoing problems. Avoid getting too deep into the details.
4. Find Consensus: Informally poll your group to discover which challenges are your most pressing issues, then discuss it in more detail.
5. Propose Solutions: Encourage each stakeholder to propose a course of action associated with your top issue(s) without interruption.
6. Debate Proposals: Open the proposal up to vigorous, but moderated debate. Explore alternatives, question every aspect of the proposal, review cost/benefits, and consider implementation challenges.
7. Assign Action: Develop an implementation plan or resolution plan for the issue. Complex issues may take multiple meetings to solidify, but act to the extent possible.
8. Require Reports: Make assignments and reports on those assignments the subject of your next meeting – agenda item 1.
9. Repeat as needed: You might need weekly TAC meetings at first. Eventually you should be able to meet just once each month.

To outsource or not to outsource… that is the question

We recently learned that one of our partner schools is proposing to hire full time staff for their IT, finance, maintenance, and other services, which had previously been contracted out. Okay, at first glance this seems like a legitimate management decision, but is it?

While I cannot speak to other types of services, we experienced this exact scenario once before with respect to IT services at a K-6 charter school and it was disastrous.

Several years ago in Texas, a Vice-Principal was hired at one of our partner schools. He quickly determined that his expertise was sufficient to supplant ours and within a few months found a way to eliminate our contract to provide IT support on one day each week. This was a school that we had built from the ground up and was operating with a high degree of efficiency.

I will spare you the details, but by the following year the Vice-Principal was fired, the school was in financial distress (which led to the dismissal of the business manager), and the technology had pretty much been re-outsourced to the Regional Service Center (the state). And the terminated Vice Principal had so maligned our service model in the process of making the case for our contract termination, that we were not considered in rebuilding the infrastructure.

The whole process diminished efficiency, caused significant service disruptions, cost significant sums of money, and accomplished nothing of value.

So are there times when it is a good idea to hire a full time IT administrator for your school? Maybe, but in the dozen years or so we have been doing this we have found very few. For starters, the numbers (as in cost) just don’t add up. Furthermore, the administrative oversight of personnel is not significantly better. And the level of expertise is greatly diminished.

Restated, these are three reasons why outsourcing IT is normally a better idea than hiring full-time: Cost, Control, and Expertise.

Cost

According to a January 2011 survey by PayScale, the average high school principal in the United States earned a total salary package between $68,167 and $101,560. The Bureau of Labor Statistics validates those numbers, finding that administrators at elementary and high school receive an average annual salary of $85,220.

On the other hand, a similar study by the BLS for computer administrators employed in the highest-paying industries, computer equipment manufacturing and securities exchanges, salaries averaged $89,840 and $89,340, respectively. The number was less in the academic world, but not by a large margin. Granted there is a wide range of qualifications for Information Workers, but even non-degreed, yet certified Network Engineers earned up to $56,000 on average.

When competent Information Workers can earn nearly as much as School Administrators, it is difficult to understand the justification to hire a full-time Technology Director at most Charter Schools. This is particularly true when very few schools need full-time IT administrators. They rarely even need full-time technical support.

Our standard management model provides 1 day per week of onsite Network Administration, supplemented by the daily support required for the particulars of a school, either by a less qualified support engineer or a faculty member assigned to technology. The best scenario is having a faculty member assigned to support technology and serve as the point person in IT matters.

Let’s do the math, assuming a 50 week annual contract. A network engineer charging $65.00/hr. at 8 hours per week would cost $26,000. A desktop support technician charging $15.00/hr. for 20 hours per week would cost $15,000.  The total cost is $41,000. And this provides the full range of technical services required for most freestanding Charter Schools.

This is about half of the cost of hiring one competent Computer Administrator. I emphasize competent, because like in the experience described above, hiring to the level of your budget may in fact cause you to hire an incompetent Computer Administrator. The unintended costs of doing so can be enormous.

Control

Not long ago we had to let one of our desktop support engineers go. We were informed that he was not a good fit for one of our schools and our coaching him on his work ethic was not going well.  We reluctantly terminated this employee, only to find that the school had decided to rehire him as their employee instead of ours.

The situation went from bad to worse. Now, not only did we have the same HR problem as before, but now we had less supervisory oversight.

You will in all probability always need to have entry level desktop administration support. This is where competent Computer Administrators get started. Managing desktops, while getting training on network administration and specific line of business applications is the common pathway for information workers. And there is always an abundance of desktop administration to be done in a school.

But having administrative control of information workers is a tricky business. It is crucial that those so employed are extremely trustworthy and able to work well with others. After all, they control all of the access to information resources in the school and can without much difficulty view sensitive documents and even your email communication in many cases.

Having an outside entity manage your Information Systems can provide an important element of integrity into your infrastructure.

Expertise

You don’t hire a doctor full time to evaluate a medical condition and treat it. Nor do you typically hire a CPA full time to do your bookkeeping. And most schools only retain legal counsel for specific compliance or legal matters where specialized knowledge is required.

There are reasons, both economic and practical why outsourcing Information Technology is wise. Obtaining the requisite technical expertise is the most important reason. Some technical expertise is only required once, as in the design of your network or major system implementations. Other technical specialization may be required only intermittently when upgrading servers or network infrastructure. And much technical expertise is only required infrequently, such as network administration.

So why would you hire full-time to the highest level of expertise for those rare occasions when needed if the bulk of your technical support requirements exist at the entry level? This is a classic misallocation of resources.

Summary

At the risk of self-serving, it seems that outsourcing Technology Management is a pretty common sense approach. It costs less, provides more control, and delivers a higher level of expertise. And these are all good things.

But alas, a wise individual once told me “Common sense is not so common”. 

Please call if you would like to discuss the right mix of Information Management and Technical Support resources.

What are the practical limits of Windows Multipoint Server?

One of our favorite vendors (hint: starts with an H and ends with a P) recently discontinued a popular line of specifically designed hardware components for Windows MultiPoint server. This included both the Multi-seat server and Zero Client components.

We were very surprised and a bit disappointed!

I called to speak with the HP product champion at our distributor and was told that although the product had been quite popular, the overly optimistic hardware specifications published by Microsoft had caused the unraveling of the product line. Apparently there were too many schools out there attempting to install the maximum allowed zero clients onto an underpowered server at a ratio of 20:1.

And when the system (with 20 students trying to do online gaming) slowed to a crawl, the buyers got upset. Go figure…

As one wise military commander told me many years ago at Officer Training, when asked about the wisdom of doing a particular thing; “You can, but you may not”. This pretty much sums up the wisdom of the aforementioned scenario. Perhaps it is better stated that while you CAN attach 20 Zero Clients onto a modestly provisioned MultiPoint Server, you may in fact not WANT to do so.

For the record, MultiPoint, as of this writing is not going away. Nor has it been an unsuccessful new product, not by a long-shot. It is working very well in the schools we have installed it when a reasonable effort to design the system has been employed.
And not to worry, there are still plenty of vendors supporting the technology and the required Zero Clients that are required to easily roll it out. But you may want to curb your optimism just slightly as you do system design and engineering. A reasonable allocation of server resources, client connections, and bandwidth utilization will help you make MultiPoint the home run in your school.

Here are three specific suggestions that will ensure your project does not get bogged down:

1. Determine the purpose of the MultiPoint installation
2. Start with a properly specified server
3. Calculate the Server/Client Ratio conservatively

Determine the purpose of the MultiPoint Installation

 

There are widely divergent requirements for a MultiPoint installation. Some are managed with the strict control of a well-organized teacher leading a discussion and managing the student sessions. Others are a free-for-all student study hall where anything goes. And on occasion (at least a few times each year) there will be standardized student testing where workstations are configured precisely for a sterile testing environment.

 

As you design you MultiPoint installation, start with the designated purpose. And if you can’t ensure that designated purpose then design conservatively. You will be happier in the long-run (although your financial managers may not share your entusiasm).

 

In our rather unscientific, but thorough testing, we have found that a ratio of 5:1 with a reasonable MultiPoint Server is a very solid place to start. And on the upper end of the scale, we have found that exceeding 10:1 under most conditions is not going to deliver the needed performance for anything more than casual web-browsing.

 

Start with a properly specified server

 

It has been said that “Common sense is not so common”. But it makes sense in this scenario to have a Multi Core processer (more is better), as much RAM as you can afford, and a fast Hard Drive with at least 500GB of space. Additionally, the server needs to have the capability for rendering graphics. This is normally accomplished by installing a graphics card in one of the open slots if it is not built into the mains system board.

 

And while there are many different connection configurations for MultiPoint, we have had the best luck using USB. Accordingly, you will need to have as many USB ports on the server as you plan to have zero-clients. This might require you to purchase a USB card and install it in your server.

 

Some manufacturers design servers specifically for the MultiPoint Server Operating System, but a bare box system is fine. Other than what is mentioned above, there is nothing special about hardware required to run MultiPoint. If it will run Windows7 or Windows Server 2012 standard, it should work fine with MultiPoint Server.

 

Calculate the Client Server Ratio Conservatively

 

The ratio of clients to a single server is the last thing you should determine. We simply call it the client/server ratio. Microsoft advertises a ratio of 10:1 in Windows MultiPoint Standard and 20:1 in Windows MultiPoint Premium. With few exceptions these numbers are (characteristically) hype.

 

For hard core computer lab workstations, keep the ratios low. For occasional browsing of the library collection or standardized testing increase the ratios accordingly.

 

One other aspect of determining ratios is the simple matter of logistics or layout. Depending on how the rows or clusters of workstations are configured in your lab, you may need to adjust your ratios purely based upon space and distance. The USB cables included in the HP Zero Clients were 25’ long. Distances greater than that may not work well. Check with your specific vendor for the lengths of included cabling (if included).

 

Summary

 

Windows MultiPoint Server is a great technology that will dramatically reduce the cost of provisioning a computer lab at your school. Not only do you save tons in buying hardware, but you nearly eliminate one of the more costly components of your technology budget - technical support. And you will see a commensurate reduction in both electrical and heating/cooling costs.

 

You will also have a much, much quieter computer lab (not counting student noise!).

 

But don’t be ridiculous, while you CAN connect 20 clients to a single MultiPoint server, you MAY NOT have a good experience in doing so. Good advice for me back then and for you today…

 

If you need assistance in designing your MultiPoint Server project, give us a call.

Introduction to SharePoint – Part 4

I never thought I would write this article, it’s contrary to what we’ve been recommending for over 10 years. But after a recent experience attempting to train staff members to use the Joomla Content Management System (CMS), I have come to appreciate how difficult it can be to manage content on your website – even using a Content Management System.

There are cases when required changes to content on your public facing website are insufficient to justify the complexity associated with a full blown CMS system. If your website is less content centric, then SharePoint might work just fine.

One of our core philosophies is that it always takes more resources, in terms of time (if self-managed) or money (if outsourced), to manage content on your public facing website than it does to build it in the first place. This is almost universally true. And while managing your own website content sounds like a great idea, it needs more planning than an afterthought.

You must be very purposeful in your website design because managing your own content needs to be really simple if you expect your staff to do it. And I mean REALLY easy. What may seem a simple process for a technically inclined individual is not necessarily easy for the typical administrative assistant or teacher.

SharePoint brings the familiarity of Microsoft Office Professional (mostly Word) into the content management arena of your public facing website. If you can create a Word document, then with just a little introduction you will be able to create and modify web pages in your public facing website.

So why would you want to do this? Good question…

It boils down to three things:

1. Cost
2. Timeliness
3. Appearance

It’s interesting that these reasons mirror the frustrations we hear about when discussing a schools experience managing their website. It costs too much to change content, it takes too long to do so, and the appearance is often inconsistent or outdated.

You can spend a small fortune on hiring a graphic design team, implementing that design into web pages, and then making all the moving pieces work together. And that may be an important part of your overall marketing strategy. Or you can use a free website package that comes with your $4.95 per month hosting package and creates your website automatically by using one of a few selected templates. Both options, while at opposite ends of the spectrum are viable; but you might consider a more balanced approach.

By using SharePoint, a core component of Office 365 for Education you can have a professional looking website that also functions well. Setting up your website is quite simple and there is no cost associated with hosting your website – it’s part of the package offered free for Education.

In fairness, don’t plan to get by without spending some resources for your website – otherwise it will look like a free website. Rather, spend a modest amount to have a professionally designed logo and decide upon a color scheme, and then get some guidance on the layout. You’ll also need some initial help in setting up the basic pages. Once these preliminaries are accomplished, the rest is honestly very easy to do.

Let’s review each proposed advantage and see if you don’t agree:

Cost

When evaluating costs for your website, be sure to calculate total cost which include your domain name, hosting, graphic design, site construction, and the biggest of all – content management going forward.

The most common mistake is to assume that the largest cost component of your website is building it in the first place, this is rarely the case. While graphic design, site layout, and site construction can be costly, they determine the process by which you either begin to save money (self-management capabilities) or by which you are locked in to spending money (professional management).

You may be fine about having your website professionally managed. But don’t make the mistake of assuming it will manage itself or that you can easily manage it internally if you provide no blueprints to your website design team. You must determine, in advance, the correct technology upon which your website is constructed in order to enable self-management.

SharePoint saves you money by providing an unparalleled hosting platform (at no cost for education) and a robust set of tools to layout your website in an attractive manner utilizing your design elements and color scheme. Then it provides a WYSIWYG ribbon, similar to all Microsoft Office programs to add and manage text, images, links, forms, and other widgets (also called add-ins or plug-ins).

Let me emphasize the concept I opened with. We have recommended Joomla for over a decade as the Website Content Management System of choice for Charter School. The variety of features (widgets, plug ins, add-ins, extensions, etc.) is unparalleled, and far exceeds SharePoint. But, if you have a simple website design in mind, don’t update your website multiple times each day, and don’t have special functional requirements (ie. dual language, newsletters, etc.) then SharePoint will be perfectly adequate.

Timeliness

It is said that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. While true, the distance between points is equally important as the route in most cases.

The quickest way to update your website is to enable those who create content in your organization to publish that content on your website. This is both the straight path and short distance you want. I have never understood why a school would tolerate waiting days or weeks to have a paragraph or two changed on their website. This is as nonsensical as it is inefficient.

Appearance

The moniker of “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” applies to your website. Ask a dozen individuals from your school about your website appearance and you will get a dozen different responses.

So what really constitutes an attractive looking website? This is the Holy Grail of site designers around the world. It is a question that I cannot answer, only one that your school – through whatever process – must answer. And I have seen this literally take a year to do!

From a non-design perspective, all I can suggest is that a consistent display of page sizes, fonts, color schemes, and layout add to the overall appearance of your site.  Well sized and place imagery, logos, and other design elements are also important.

SharePoint does this far better than individually coded pages of html. It has only slightly less flexibility than Joomla to do this and allows non-programmers to pick a basic page layout, type in text and insert images, then publish a new web page that looks similar and complimentary to the rest of your site.

Summary

If your school has a very simple website, you may find that SharePoint (included in Office 365 for Education) is a perfect platform for your public facing website. It allows you to manage your website in a cost effective and timely manner that yields an attractive result.

If you are tired of paying significant fees and waiting too long for website content updates, consider changing your public facing website to SharePoint, part of your Office 365 for Education system.

Introduction to SharePoint - Part 3

If the notion of browsing to the Office 365 for Education portal, logging in, and navigating to a document before you even get started is just too much trouble, well – your right. It is too much trouble.  If using SharePoint to manage documents is not at least as convenient as using your local hard drive, then getting your users to embrace it will be a challenge.

Sure, when they really need to access a document that someone else created, they will go through the trouble. After all SharePoint is better than sneaker net;  but  without easy access to documents, both coming and going, they will likely not venture outside the My Documents folder.

So how do we make the wonderful world of collaboration possible? There are three ways that come to mind immediately. Let’s take a look at them from a more practical point of view.  I’ll even suggest a bonus method at the end of this article.

1. Through an app from your favorite app store
2. Using one of the Office Professional Plus programs
3. Using the SharePoint Synchronization tool

Applications from the App Store:

 

If the first thing that comes to mind when I say app, is the App Store, then there is a good chance you are using an iOS device (iPad, iPhone, etc.). There are a huge number of apps that have a SharePoint component.  This is also called a WebDav connection.

 

Check in the settings of your favorite app to see if there is not a SharePoint or WebDav connector. If so then you have the capability to connect to SharePoint. Now what you may or may not be able do once connected is a function of that specific app and outside the scope of this article.

 

In summary, most apps are designed for mobile devices to improve the function of a product or service offering as compared to simply browsing to the respective website. This is especially true of iOs (Apple) devices which do not always display content designed for Windows endpoints. For Windows phones the content is generally more accessible by browsing directly, vs. through an app, thus there is less of a need for apps in the first place.

 

Office Professional Plus Program:

 

A much more elegant and practical tool for managing documents is to do so directly from within one of the core Office Professional Plus programs. The most common of these is Microsoft Word, but the interaction is similar in other programs. The exception is OneNote which does the synchronization automatically (see my article about OneNote).

 

From within Microsoft Word for example, you simply create a file, complete with all of the complexity you can muster, then instead of selecting “S” for Save, or “S” for Save As, you instead select Save and Send and choose the SharePoint option. Although this will take just a few seconds longer, including a login screen for the first time you are using this program in the current session. You will be prompted to save your document directly into the SharePoint Cloud.

 

Opening a document is also straightforward, but instead of browsing to a folder, you browse to a SharePoint Workspace.

 

A word about sessions and session state is in order. One of my personal frustrations is the limitations on sessions in the Office 365 environment. You can actually map a drive letter to a SharePoint document library and save documents directly to a lettered drive, but only during the time a session is alive. Office 365 sessions expire after a couple of hours of inactivity. And the mapping will cease to work, unless you recreate it.

 

 SharePoint Workspace Synchronization Tool

 

One of the most efficient tools to manage your document library on SharePoint is with the SharePoint Workspace Synchronization tool. This utility works in the background and automatically synchronizes documents in a specified folder on your computer with a specified folder in SharePoint. This is an incredible tool, but use it with caution!

 

The caution is advised in two ways. First, be cautious that you don’t try to synchronize a folder that has multiple GB’s of documents, otherwise you will spend a lot of computing resources constantly keeping two large data sets in synch. Second, be cautious about synchronizing a folder accessed by more than a few users.

 

The presumption of a synchronization tool is to keep two locations in synch. Adding huge amounts of data or additional storage locations into the mix can be problematic.

 

Bonus

 

I could have mentioned this in last week’s article, but there is also a very powerful drag and drop capacity within SharePoint by using your browser. And this is where you will need to use Internet Explorer, and a later version at that. You can open your SharePoint site collection in an Internet Explorer browser window by ftp and then select the option to open the folder in Windows Explorer (not the same as Internet Explorer) and navigate the folders directly on your desktop. This would enable you to open two folders side by side on your desktop and drag and drop multiple files between your SharePoint site collection and your desktop.

 

Summary

 

If you have not yet gotten beyond browsing to the Office 365 for Education Portal, then signing in, and choosing the Team Site option, you are not using SharePoint efficiently. While this may in fact be more efficient than your previous experience of sharing files, it is SharePoint kindergarten. We want you to earn a graduate degree in SharePoint and become the model of efficiency.

 

Next week we will discuss using SharePoint as your public facing website and why it may be an excellent option for you. 

Implementing SharePoint - Part 2

The best place to start when attempting to understand SharePoint is your favorite internet browser. And we could easily get sidetracked into a discussion about browsers, but I’ll pass on that. SharePoint plays well with all Internet Browsers, but as you may have already guessed, it works optimally with Internet Explorer…. no surprise there!

So let’s browse right on over to the Office 365 for Education Portal. And if you don’t remember or write down anything else in this series of articles, remember this: https://portal.microsoftonline.com. This is the portal or gateway into all of the services offered in the Office 365 for Education solution. Once you log into the portal, you will have access to all of the services. And if you are an administrator, this is where you will also manage services for your organization.

Upon logging into the portal, you will see a link at the top for Team Site. This is your default SharePoint site. Once you are comfortable with accessing your SharePoint site, you can browse directly to it, rather than from within the Office 365 for Education Portal.

During signup or trial, your domain name will be assigned a default domain name similar to myschool.onmicrosoft.com. You will want to add your own domain name to the service as soon a possible, otherwise the URLs in this article might be confusing. Ultimately, the URL you you use to access SharePoint you will be something like myschool.sharepoint.com and that will also be the shortcut I referred to earlier.

Note: The “myschool” part of the domain name represents a third level name that belongs to your organization, names are available on a first come first served basis, and once accepted by the Office 365 for Education system, is registered with Microsoft as belonging to your Office 365 for Education subscription.

So now that we have got through all of the preliminaries of getting access to your Team Site, lets focus on what you can do there.

Your first experience with SharePoint may be similar to my first experience with a Personal Computer back in 1982. I anxiously hooked it up, powered it on, and was presented with a black screen and a blinking cursor. Hmmm, reality is such a harsh companion. SharePoint is not really like that, but the analogy is fair.

If you are expecting a default SharePoint site to be automatically customized to your organizational structure, filing system, internal process and work flows, you will be disappointed. In fact, the first takeaway from this article is that SharePoint requires you to become an information architect. You really need to think about your organization, how you manage documents and information, then begin the process of configuring SharePoint accordingly.

And since this is a team effort, it is essential that you engage your team. Doing so will accomplish two things. First it will improve your design and configuration experience, but perhaps as important it will engage your users so they will take ownership of SharePoint project and participate. Adoption among team members is always a challenge when rolling out SharePoint in your organization.

Admittedly it is unfair to be tasked with designing an information system for your organization when you do not know the capabilities of the information system at hand (SharePoint); hence my attempts at education in this series of articles. But as counterintuitive as it may seem, I would suggest that you start not with SharePoint, but with your own organization.

Take inventory of the types of documents you create, share, and file. Consider how you schedule events, meetings, and appointments. Evaluate how you create, update, and share lists and directories. And look closely at important relationships between organizations and groups and the projects they manage. Only after you have done this homework assignment, will you be capable of bringing your ideas and SharePoint’s efficiency into your organization.

Of course you will need to understand the basic capabilities of SharePoint in order to complete your design project, so let’s summarize the major SharePoint features and see if the workflows and processes you’ve dreamed up are possible.

Here are my top 10 favorite capabilities of SharePoint as it would apply to a charter school. Think about these ideas as you consider your SharePoint design project. SharePoint is:

A cloud based centralized filing system for all of your school documents

SharePoint is like a hard drive on the internet or a cloud based network share that gives access to authorized users and denies access to those unauthorized.  It stores documents of all types and formats, including forms, manuals, letters, reports, lesson plans, policy manuals, tests, assessments, lunch menus, etc. If you create, modify, or store information on a PC, it generally can exist in SharePoint.

A centralized store of lists, directories, and databases

Consider all of the lists you have in a busy school, everything from addresses, to school supplies, to vendors.  SharePoint can serve as the single repository of these lists and other data sets, that is both search and filter enabled. Consolidating all of your lists, directories, and databases, to the extend possible will greatly improve the efficiency of referencing information for all of your staff.

A centralized calendar of events for the school

Do you have challenges managing your calendar? SharePoint can serve as the one authorized and consistently updated calendar for all school activities. This calendar can be managed by one or several individuals and can provide automatic notifications for changes or pending approvals. This calendar can also be published to your public facing website eliminating the never ending process of updating the schools calendar on the website.

A discussion board, forum, or online meeting place

Amazing things happen when creativity and collaboration collide. SharePoint can serve as an internal meeting place where questions and documents can be posted and then discussed, without formal meeting times. The byproduct of this dialogue is a very useful knowledge base.

A Wiki

An intersting phenomena called Wikipdia, exists on the same platform as SharePoint. A SharePoint wiki can be a free flowing digital asset where all team members can contribute ideas, thoughts, insights or resources and links to resources.

A school wide issue resolution & tracking system

Technology and facilities management can be greatly improved when all interested parties have the latest information on issues and problems. SharePoint can serve as an issue tracking system that is continuously updated and available to all users. It can be created with complex work rules, time stamps, escalations, and automated communications or be as simple as a system a tod do list, with a status indication and user identification.

An image library

An important legal requirement for using photos at school includes protecting the identity of students and others. SharePoint is an excellent centralized storage facility for all approved imagery for use in school publications, communication, and presentations.

A video library

Yes, there is You Tube and other video sharing sites, but carte blanche access to these resources can put you at odds with CIPA requirements.  SharePoint can serve as a centralized storage facility for instructional videos. This can include both actual videos or links to approved videos for use in the classroom or for administrative purposes. And you can keep these organized by groups or simply lump them all together and allow the built in search features of SharePoint to provide you the access needed.

A social media system

Many schools prohibit the use of Facebook at school, which may be wise; but in doing so they limit students ability to learn important behavioral skills in the social arena. SharePoint, in the default Office 365 for Education configuration, provides a robust social media system that is restricted to the school, yet enjoys many Facebook like features. And the entire system can be managed by school administrators.

A Learning Management System

Some of the worlds most well know universities run on SharePoint LMS, a learning management system built on SharePoint. While this may not be appropriate for your school, SharePoint is a great way to share lesson plans with precise groups of students, discussion forums for each teacher/grade, resource listings, links, and social connections within classes.

All of these features listed above can be configured for your organization with SharePoint. And all of these systems would be present to you when you login as an authorized user at myschool.sharepoint.com or at the Office 365 for Education portal.

Next week we will discuss ways in which the management of SharePoint documents can be improved.

Implementing SharePoint at Your School

One of the core technologies I recommend for managing information at school is SharePoint, a core element of the Office 365 for Education system. I have mentioned SharePoint in several articles over the past two years and it continues to be a favorite tool at some of our partner schools. And while SharePoint is an enormously popular solution in larger commercial enterprises, it tends to have poor adoption in the Charter Schools community, as well as many other smaller organizations. 

While working with our partner schools, I constantly evaluate the barriers to implementation and have come to the conclusion that the primary reason SharePoint has lackluster adoption is its complexity. My purpose in the next few articles is to explore different ways you access SharePoint and what it can do for your organization.  Like many complex systems, SharePoint can be mastered - and the benefits are quite compelling.

 

SharePoint is a web based technology that allows you to share information from most endpoints with an Internet browser or from one of a myriad of applications on those endpoints. An application can exist on either a desktop or laptop (Windows or Mac), on a tablet (Windows, iOS, Droid), or on your smart phone. Understanding the difference between accessing SharePoint from the browser vs. an application installed on an endpoint is a key to understanding how it works. 

Once you understand the mechanics of connecting to SharePoint, using it becomes a little less confusing. It is probably helpful to also broadly categorize the kinds of SharePoint sites you might use.

SharePoint sites exist in two broad categories. There are public facing (Internet) websites and private facing (intranet) websites. Public SharePoint sites are just like other sites on the World Wide Web, containing images, text, forms, and features. Private SharePoint sites are collections of data that you share internally, or at least share in a controlled manner. Access rights is another very important SharePoint concept and mirror the access rights to files found in all computer operating systems. 

One of the most popular uses of SharePoint is document collaboration, which is often associated with sharing documents as we once did using “Shared” folders. But, this is not just document sharing, rather it includes a wide array of features associated with creating, sharing, storing, distributing, securing, and archiving documents. Furthermore, SharePoint provides clever notifications about your documents and automates the filing of those documents. And finally SharePoint contains a built in search mechanism which enables you to quickly located documents within a variety of site collections – like a Google search, except just for your website.

There are a number of reasons we use SharePoint instead of SkyDrive, DropBox, Google Docs, Evernote, or another cloud based sharing service. It boils down to features, function, and capacity. SharePoint has many features not found in consumer grade sharing sites, it functions well with all types of computing platforms (Windows, MAC, iOS, Droid, etc.), and has the capacity to grow with us into a fully integrated system. Consumer oriented technology that works well for a few users , does not always work well in larger organizations.

Document sharing, the most prevalent use of SharePoint, is the most common starting point for an organization. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t get beyond this functionality to enjoy the more robust features of Sharepoint.

Think of SharePoint as a cloud based shared folder, with all of the advantages and none of the disadvantages of a network “Share”. The advantages are numerous – collaborative work, document libraries, forms repository, document control, revision tracking , anywhere and anytime access, convenience in working from multiple locations, platform independence, and the list goes on.

The disadvantages associated with normal “shared” drives are significant, but do not apply to SharePoint. They include having your document overwritten or deleted by another user – intentionally or otherwise, lack of security for sensitive documents, and lack of controls to prevent simultaneous edits of a document. SharePoint solves all of these and other problems associated with collaborative work.

So how does one access documents on a SharePoint site? There are a number of ways, but they boil down to three overall methods:

1.       Browser based access

2.       Mapped Folders on your computer

3.       Apps or program that automate SharePoint Access

Over the next few weeks, we will address each of these access methods in detail giving you an introduction to the basics of using SharePoint.

With that introduction in mind, let’s take the next few weeks to consider the different ways you can access the SharePoint in your organization. And let’s approach this from the perspective of using Office 365. Few of our schools have the technical resources or capabilities to do SharePoint on premises. It requires servers, configuration, and administration resources that are not typical for most Charter schools.

See you next week...

Migrating to Office 365

OK, you’ve watched the cool videos from Microsoft, read review after review about the merits of Office 365 for Education, and decided it’s just what the doctor ordered for your school’s ailing IT infrastructure. And it's time to act on that New Years Resolution of improving your school.

Now what?

Fair question. Regardless of the current state of affairs in your school, you will need to manage this migration in an orderly and methodical fashion. This, most likely, will involve a weekend, holiday, or other day off for your staff in order to minimize the inconvenience.

There are three major components of Office 365 for Education solution which you will address in this migration. In order of most to least difficult difficult to migrate, at a typical school, they are:

1.       Email - Hosted Microsoft Exchange
2.       Lync – Unified Communications
3.       SharePoint – Team and Public Websites

This is also the order in which I would recommend the migration or setup occurs. And please note, this is not a technical support document, but an overview of the process. If you are not comfortable with the subject matter at hand, you’ll want to get some help.

Practically speaking, the only real migration is email, as the other services generally do not yet exist.  Most everyone already has an email account. The closest thing to unified communications in organizations without Lync is texting from a cell phone or other mobile device. And the starting point for a SharePoint migration is normally a Team site for each organization in your school and a document library. Neither of these is difficult to setup, once you have done the harder task of designing how you want to organize your intellectual goodies.

One final thought before we dive in. It is very important that you have full buy in and the moral (and organizational) authority to do this. Change is difficult and there will be resistance. Furthermore, unless you have made a persuasive case as to the benefits that will flow to each of your end users, they may not follow your lead. In my experience most migrations spend 80-90% of the energy on the technical process and 10-20% (or less) on staff introduction, orientation, and training. Be wise and considerate.

OK, so let’s get started with a few generalities in the administrators control panel. There are several basic setup tasks that are not covered by the clever wizards that Microsoft provides. These steps can be done without impacting your users.

1.       Select the right licensing Plan and purchase sufficient licenses for your organization. (This is a bit tricky because most of you will select the A2 Plan for Staff and Students, which is free; but you still have to add it to the shopping cart and checkout).

2.       Add all of your users to the correct domain name to eliminate having the convoluted default domain name of you@yourschool.onmicrosoft.com . If you have not yet obtained a domain name from Godaddy, Network Solutions, or another registrar – STOP and do so, then follow instructions on how to verify that domain name so it is available within the administrators control panel. (Note: we recommend different domain names for staff and students)

Email

The general idea with most technology migrations is to establish the new solution while keeping the old one intact to the extent possible. Then we do a cutover at a minimally impactful time (weekend, holiday, etc.) while keeping the old system available for fallback should the migration fail. Finally we have a period of validation where we confirm the new system is working and then at an appropriate time deactivate the old.

If you do this properly, you will not lose any email and the change will be mostly transparent. If you plan and execute poorly, you will have an email outage and could lose important messages permanently.

Your email migration begins with the modification of Domain Name Records at your Domain Name Registrar. So when you are ready, head on over to Godaddy, Network Solutions, or your registrar and make the necessary zone file modifications. If you are not 100% sure how to do this, get assistance. This is the most crucial step for a successful migration. It only takes a moment to modify the actual Domain Record, but it can take up to 72 hours for those changes to distribute to the right places – so be sure you know what you are doing.

While DNS changes are propagating throughout the World Wide Web, you can start gathering the data from each of your users email accounts. The primary data you are gathering is email, but don’t forget the contacts. You should know which email accounts are most important to your organization and which users actually engage in email messaging, focus your priorities accordingly. Hint: I would probably start with the principal.

Your email migration will take different paths depending on three key factors:

1.       The type of email server in use – commercial or private, IMAP, POP3, Exchange, etc.

2.       The degree to which personal and school email is comingled
3.       The method by which your users currently access their email – webmail l or Outlook

Note: This is not technical support article on the particulars of exporting and then importing your email, contacts, notes, etc. But in one way or another, you will have to export email from each user’s old account into their new account if you wish to retain existing messages. This process gets a little tricky if your users are on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. as these email accounts are their personal property and you can’t do this without their permission (as demonstrated by a username and password).

For the end user, email migration begins when you deliver the welcome message and temporary passcode to them. This temporary passcode is generated when you create a new user, but you can (and probably should) delay delivering this information to the user until you are ready to start the migration.

Write in big bold letters the following URL on any migration documents (email or paper) you hand out.

https://portal.microsoftonline.com

This URL is the sole place to acquire, modify, and access all of the Office 365 services. We will discover shortcuts to the various services later, but this single URL is vitally important. Before a user can do anything with the Office 365 for Education system, they will need to visit this URL and change the temporary password issued at the creation of their account, to a permanent one that ONLY they should know.

Once logged into the Office 365 for Education Portal, the Outlook link at the top of the screen will take your users to their new email account. And if you have managed this migration well, all of their messages and contacts will be waiting for them.

For some of your users, the Outlook Web Access experience will be all they desire. And while there is nothing wrong with using Outlook Web Access, they may enjoy a much more productive email experience if you install Outlook on their main desktop. For more information about Outlook on the Desktop vs. Outlook Web Access go here.

At this point, your Microsoft Exchange email hosted on the Office 365 for Education is setup. Your users can now access it from any browser capable device or email enabled phone or tablet.

Lync and SharePoint

As mentioned at the outset of this article, there is generally not a migration involved with Lync and SharePoint services within Office 365. For Lync it really boils down to getting your users to try it. We have literally had schools almost shut down when the staff had that ‘ahah’ moment regarding Lync. They were so excited to try all of the cool features, like instant video chat that they almost forgot to teach their classes.

With Lync, you can communicate with your team using a variety of methods all based upon an indication of presence or availability. These methods include text, voice calls, video calls, desktop sharing and file sharing, and of course email. Lync has the ability to transform the communication within organizations that utilize it wisely.

Likewise, SharePoint is a very transformational technology, but it requires a serious commitment to train and develop the system to the advantage of your organization. Watch for a series of articles about SharePoint over the next few weeks.

Summary

Implementing Office 365 for Education can be very straightforward for schools with chaotic or non-existent informational technology infrastructure. On the other hand it can be fairly complex for schools that have significant on premises facilities and resources in place. At either end of the spectrum, Office 365 provides a robust communication and collaboration platform that requires no hardware or no administrative staff onsite. The business case for Office 365 for Education is compelling and we recommend it enthusiastically.