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!

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.

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.

Online Marketing Part 2 of 3

I have a confession to make. I am not a marketing expert.  So what presumption causes me to write an article about email marketing? First of all, I get slammed by marketing emails daily and have a reasonably good idea about what works for me. And I also subscribe to a number of very helpful newsletters.

As a consumer of both good and bad marketing email, I have experience. As an architect of such systems for customers, I have understanding of system requirements. And there are a number of common sense practices about this subject. Consider the following and see if you don’t agree.

Sending an email newsletter is one of the most cost effective ways of reaching an audience. Once configured, it costs virtually nothing to send and if created with some artistic consideration, can be a welcome addition to the mindless advertising that prevails in your subscriber’s inbox.  And if managed properly, your electronic newsletter can be self-supporting. Subscribers can add, remove, and modify their email and choose the format of your message.

So what is the difference between a helpful email newsletter and mindless email advertising?

I would boil it down to three simple ideas. You might want to conduct an internal review. Of course your own situation will depend on your intended audience, but develop your email newsletter with these concepts in mind:

• Permission
• Content
• Frequency

Permission

The most important principle that you should observe is permission, as in having it. There is nothing more annoying than to receive unsolicited email, which is primarily advertising, that pretends to be an informative newsletter.  Well, there is something more annoying, getting the same message several times at once (duplicate emails) or repetitively (too frequently).

So as you think about permission, please be considerate. There are wide ranging audiences for your electronic communication. Some may not know you at all, and have little interest. Others may be deeply connected to your organization and be very interested in your messaging. Most will be somewhere in between.

Be sure to have permission to send, in the case of familiar contacts; and a very easy and reliable unsubscribe feature for messages sent to those who may not have interest at the present time. It is important to note that there are laws on the books of some states requiring that your unsolicited email messages contain an “Unsubscribe” link in them. Regardless of the law, this is always a good idea.

The surest method of obtaining permission is to provide a sign-up link on your website (or in an email) for subscribing to your content. You may also gather email addresses from referrals, printed media, or word of mouth. In the world of commerce, it is very common to buy lists of potential recipients of your newsletter, but that may not be practical in the real world of Charter Schools.

Content is King

Much like your website, prospective students (and parents) will read your message for content. So find a good balance between too little and too much. I have seen entire newsletters that only amount to three solid sentences of information, and I have seen multipage tomes that require a serious read. You ought to be somewhere comfortably in the middle

A common format for electronic newsletters is to publish an introductory paragraph with a catchy headline and solid, well written introductory paragraph. And then include a “Read More” link for the remainder of the article.

This allows your readers to hit the highlights, and then expand on the articles of interest. This will save space, allowing a full set of articles on a single page. Be sure to dress up your email newsletter with some nice imagery, but don’t overdo it and ensure your images are formatted for the web.

More advanced newsletter solutions will allow you to accommodate both html and text based email messages. If you don’t understand the difference, html is better if you want graphics to accompany your words. Text is, well… text only, no pictures provided.

And one last thing, don’t embed music in your electronic newsletter. That can be highly embarrassing and/or annoying. Imagine sitting quietly, catching up on your email, waiting for a meeting or event to start while reviewing an email newsletter just received. Then without warning, Bon Jovi begins blaring out of your computer speakers when you open the email from one of your favorite organizations. That’s a sure way to get an unsubscribe request, at a minimum.

Frequency

Finally, be sure to keep the frequency and consistency of your email newsletter at a reasonable level. And be sure that your system has the capacity to detect duplicate recipients, one good email newsletter is good – but more (of the same newsletter) is not better!

Be careful as you determine a publishing schedule for your email newsletter. Remember that it takes time and effort to create useful and interesting content. And consistency is important if you want to build/maintain an engaged readership. Don’t overcommit yourself to creating content, or you may find yourself trying to be creative and dilute your purpose.

Frequency is a function of content and audience. If your newsletter is to highlight this week’s events at your school, then a monthly newsletter may not be sufficient. If it is a monthly Board Report, then weekly won’t quite work either.

Summary

Periodic newsletters to your community can be a very engaging and helpful service, but do this purposefully and with planning. There are open source (free) software solutions that will provide the functionality you need, assuming your website has been designed properly. So paying for a service such as Constant Contact may not be necessary. However, if the budget allows, commercial services may be easier for you to manage. Either way, obtain permission from your recipients directly or indirectly, produce good content, and publish your newsletter at a frequency that you and your audience can maintain.

If you need guidance on which email newsletter solution is best for you, please contact us. We are always eager to help.

Online Marketing Basics - Part 1 of 3

During the crucial planning year, you need to get your marketing game on. After all, the most important measure of your success is student enrollment. And unless you are deeply connected to your proposed student population through some other non-profit association or group, that means doing some good old fashioned marketing.

There are many ways to do marketing and I don’t pretend to be a marketing expertise. My experience with those who make such claims is not favorable.  However, when it comes to the basics of online marketing, or marketing driven primarily by the Internet, there are some reasonably well established ways of doing this.

Let’s consider three areas you might want to review with respect to your Internet oriented marketing strategy, we’ll review one each week:

1. Your website as a marketing machine
2. Email marketing and online communications
3. Social media sanity

Your website as a marketing machine

 

The notion of a “well designed” website is a bit  subjective. It starts with artistic style, design elements, and color combinations created by an experienced design team. But it also assumes an underlying quality of hosting platforms, server technologies, and functionality. And it assumes dynamic and current information that is relevant to your potential site visitors.

 

There are several articles on this blog addressing website construction, but let’s set that completely aside and focus on your website purely from a marketing perspective.

 

From a marketing perspective your objective is pretty simple. Help potential students (or their parents),  find your school online, make it easy for them to engage, develop a relationship with them,  harvest or gather their contact information, and develop a process to follow up and answer their questions and guide them through enrollment. You will want to automate this process as much as possible to keep costs down.

 

Improving the ability for potential students to find your school on the Internet is often referred to as search optimization. Doing search optimization well is an ongoing challenge and consists of two general categories of activities – paid optimization (such as Pay Per Click advertising) and native or organic optimization. In my mind free is always better, but good optimization always comes at a cost. You either spend money for search optimization advertising, or you spend time placing high quality content on your website that produces high organic search results. In real life you will probably want to do both, this is particularly true for new schools.

 

One of the most frequently overlooked features that will improve organic search results is to place video on your home page. A recent study I found suggested a 1200% increase in search results by using this technique alone. In addition to that you will want to tag (label) or provide keywords called meta data on each page, use sufficient headers in your articles, label each and every image or video on your site with accurate and descriptive words,  and of course write useful content. All of these things will make it easy for search engines to properly index your site. Indexing is an ongoing process by which search engines crawl or evaluate your site and quantify relevance of your content, these measurements will determine your placement on their service.

 

There is an entire industry on the Internet, indeed an inexhaustible supply of individuals and groups who claim to have expertise in Search Engine Optimization. No doubt someone out there has to be an expert, but in every case (and we have tried more than a few) that we have hired these so called “SEO Experts”, they have collected a lot of money and without exception delivered little in the way of improved results.

 

Google and the other search engines closely guard the metrics associated with search optimization, in similar fashion Coca Cola closely guards the formulation of their products. And they (search engines) are continually changing the formula for search optimization to produce better results. Good quality content that is fresh and relevant and linked to other sites and networks will eventually produce good organic search results, in the interim you may want to do some search word advertising.

 

Want to take a simple test to see how well your school does in organic search? Just open a fresh browse and clear all of your cookies and cache, then type in a few key words that you would use to find your school (hint: don’t use your school name – that’s cheating and a prospective student would not know that information). Now count the pages of results and if you don’t appear on the first few pages, you have work to do.

 

Bottom line is that a free web site put up by one of your parent volunteers, while an admirable effort, may not garner the kind of organic search optimization you need. And with that quality of website construction, you may need to spend significantly to buy search optimization.  This of course, assumes the volunteer is not one of those hard to find SEO experts!

 

Measure your progress

 

Google analytics is no doubt the industry standard tool to measure your site traffic. But many website authoring frameworks provide their own measuring tools, often in the form of raw page counts. However you choose to measure your website traffic, do so regularly. Even with just basic page counts, you can quickly determine which content on your website provides the most interest for site visitors.

 

Don’t forget the mobile platform

 

The statistics associated with mobile devices as a share of Internet search makes a very compelling argument to optimize your website for mobile devices. Mobile access is the fastest growing segment of Internet traffic. Accordingly, it would be a very good idea to ensure that your website is mobile friendly.

 

There are several ways to do this and the techniques are outside the scope of this article, but a good start is to take a look at your website through your mobile phone or smart phone.  Then enlist your friends, with different brands of phones to do the same.  Taking a look at your site and attempting to navigate it will provide you a great deal of insight into what works and what does not.

 

The simplest way of managing the mobile access on your website is to use the right technology in the first place. Mature open source platforms, such as Word Press or Joomla do a very good job of mobile optimization right out of the box. “Build your own website” tools on many of the popular hosting companies may not do an adequate job.

 

If your budget allows, it is possible to place code on your website that senses a mobile device and redirects site visitors to a portion of your website that is designed specifically for mobile web browsers.

 

Summary

 

Your online marketing begins with a well designed and constructed website with fresh and relevant content, particularly video. Your website should be the communications hub, much like a bicycle wheel, that serves as the end point for all of your Internet communication. Invest the time and money necessary to develop the search results you need. This may include paid search word advertising, Facebook Ads, and other venues. And don’t forget the ever growing audience of mobile users.

Next week we will address email and other forms of communication that will improve your marketing reach.

OneNote – The Swiss Army Knife of Collaborative Work

Being a good Boy Scout, I appreciate having a single piece of equipment that serves so many purposes. And growing up in the troop, I always admired the Swiss Army Knife with so many functions in one little package.
 
Enter OneNote, a versatile and clever piece of software that does many things on many platforms.

As you go about organizing your digital assets, there seems to always be something that doesn’t quite fit. Over the years I have attempted various ways to track snippets of information I knew would come in handy, but did not have a rational way of organizing it. And for about the same number of years, I have noticed this little program in the Microsoft Office suite – OneNote- that I really did not know what to do with.

Recently my need to organize and my curiosity, compelled by a couple of glowing reviews, caused me to take a more serious look at OneNote. Now I use it every day and it has become an indispensable tool.

One Note is a free form (this is not insignificant) program to collect, store, and share information of every imaginable type. It can do text, images, links, tables, video, and all the variants of digital content of which I am aware.  It can be designated public or private, and can be shared with as many or as few individuals as you like in a number of cloud based storage/sharing platforms.

Free form simply means that you can place your pointer on any location on a page an add content in the exact location you desire. Unlike Word, where you start at top left and work your way down the page adding words and images as you go.And once your information is upon the page, you can easily rearrange it without difficulty
.
OneNote is similar in function to an old fashioned Notebook, which has tabs or dividers, and pages. And it is useful to think about it in this manner. You can use it as a scrapbook to collect newspaper articles, photographs, handwritten notes, and drawings. You can use it as a small database to track all of your user names and passwords (and make it password protected). You can create tables which will actually calculate totals, much like a spreadsheet.  Then you can organize the various pages where this information resides in a hierarchical fashion with sub pages.

All this is good, but the most impressive feature of OneNote, for me, is the ability to synchronize my collection of information across all of my endpoints. It does little good to take notes on my iPhone, that are not synced to my laptop, my desktop, or iPad. And when I make changes to a notebook in OneNote while working at my desk, I want that information available on my mobile devices as well.

And now we arrive at the point where, with a little background, you can begin to see the potential of this program in the classroom. Imagine creating an instructional document that you wish to share with your students. You have a great teaching platform with OneNote, especially if you want to collaborate with your students on the document. And I don’t mean just share the document, I refer to real time collaboration, where notes and ideas from each individual in a group are simultaneously experienced by the rest of the group.

OneNote has deep integration into the Windows desktop, with special tools that allow you to take snippets of information from your screen and place them right into one of your OneNote pages. Just press the Windows logo key on your keyboard, followed by the letter “S”. Once you define the area you wish to save, the utility prompts you to select a OneNote location.

Another handy ‘built-in’ feature is the “Print To” function within windows, which allows you to redirect any print output into a OneNote page. This is very handy when you need to make a printed copy of something, but are without a printer.

And finally, the wide variety of “Save As” functions provides a way for you to save OneNote pages in a wide variety of formats, including .pdf.

Microsoft Word is great at composing and editing documents, Excel does a great job of organizing rows and columns of numbers, and PowerPoint does a superb job of creating slide shows. But sometimes you just need a place to organize a few paragraphs, a small group of numbers, a few pictures for clarity, and then add hand written notes. Then you need the ability to share your content with others and gain valuable feedback.

OneNote is the one program you can use to do a little bit of everything.  I ignored it for years, but now use it every day. And unlike the trusty Swiss Army Knife, you can actually get OneNote through security at the airport!

Give it a try, you'll be impressed!

How "Skype Me" is becoming "Lync Me"!

I do my fair share of international travel and am reminded, from time to time, that there are still countries where it costs an arm and both legs to make a long distance telephone call. In fact, it dawned on me the other day that I have enough grey in my hair to recall when making a long distance call in the good old US of A was quite expensive. My, how times have changed with the deregulation of telecom.

One of the most popular services evolving as a result of inexpensive computers and more widely available internet is Skype. Worldwide there are over 170 million users (2011). The reason is pretty simple, Skype provides the ability to communicate anywhere there was internet for free (to another Skype user) or for nearly free to a non Skype user/device.

So what does that have to do with your local charter school? You may be surprised!

Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 and while I don’t pretend to understand their strategic reasons in doing so, I do understand the Skype like solution they now offer as a core component of Office 365 for Education. It is called Lync 2010, soon to be Lync 2013, and is very cool!

The power of Lync is not the ability to use it as a phone system, although it is equal to or better than Skype in this regard. The real power of Lync is the clever array of additional communication capabilities it provides. And whether you are across campus, across town, or on the other side of the world, you will come to find these features indispensable.

There are four core features in Lync 2010. However, before you can fully appreciate these features, you must understand how “presence” dramatically enhances these features. Presence is the simple but powerful color coding next to your name (and photo if you desire) that designates your availability to engage in communication and guides your associates to the most appropriate form of communicating with you.

Think of presence as a virtual “Do Not Disturb” sign posted on your office door. One that changes to “Available” automatically, to “Away” if your keyboard is idle for predetermined amount of time, and it reads your Outlook Calendar, automatically setting your presence based upon meetings listed there.

We communicate in fundamentally different ways when we understand the availability of our intended audience. Presence in Lync will help your associates communicate with you more effectively.

Now let’s look at the four core features of Lync, one by one, to evaluate the potential to improve your communication capability. The features are:

1. Instant Messaging
2. Resource Sharing
3. Video Conferencing
4. Telephony

Instant Messaging

 

At first glance, Lync 2010 looks like another desktop application resembling Yahoo, MSN, or Gmail text messaging systems. Whoopee…

 

Not so fast…

 

Lync has way more capabilities just in the instant messaging department. First of all it has presence indicators that include more than a mere “online” or “offline”. Presence indications include, Available, Busy, Do Not Disturb, Be Right Back, Off Work, and Appear Away, all in context of “where I am today” displayed in your associates Lync window.

 

Instant messaging on your desktop is an indispensable tool for the classroom, especially when most schools declare classrooms as cell phone free zones, to avoid constant interruption. But by using Lync your staff can abide by the rules and IM their associates, family, and friends – all from their desktop.

 

Other Instant Messaging features include message transcripts for archiving, automatic message forwarding to email, and non-delivery notification. You can also record any Lync session for review later.

 

The new version of Lync 2013, will be integrated with all of the major social media platforms (if enabled) and in doing so can serve as the collection point for all of those important conversations.

 

Try doing all of that with Google or Yahoo messaging! 

 

Resource Sharing

 

Lync allows you to share resources with members of your team one at a time or many at a time. By resources, I mean documents, programs, or your entire desktop view. This provides a very useful teaching and collaboration platform.

 

Assume for a moment that you have a document on your desktop that you wish to show a team member. With link, you can send a document directly to anothers desktop, share a view of the document by extending your view to another, or you can share your entire desktop with another user or group of users. And you can give control of the remote user to manipulate that document, such as editing it, notating it, or working collectively on it.

 

The possibilities are endless and can extend outside of the school to students or parents as well. Indeed, the free Live@EDU services for students, is now powered by Office 365 for Education.

 

Video Conferencing

 

This feature blows my mind and if it was the sole capability of Lync 2010, it would be worth it. Oh, I keep forgetting it is free!

 

Full on video conferencing systems can be very expensive. But with a $20.00 web camera and a set of speakers, you can turn an ordinary PC into a video conferencing platform. And it requires no advance setup, notification, or subscription. Just click on a user from your list, and then click the video button and the rest is taken care of by Lync.

 

Those of you who spent $20,000 on HD video systems, don’t worry. Lync is engineered with most of the popular high definition video systems in mind, and for good reason. For professional quality video presentation, a $20.00 webcam simply won’t cut it, but Lync is very versatile and capable of handling that high definition system as well as simple webcam sessions. And the new version of Lync 2013 adds new features to video conferencing to accommodate the best possible video signal on each device.

 

On either end of the spectrum and all point in between, Lync is an excellent platform for video conferencing. Video conferencing brings a whole new level to interactions with team members and is an essential part of content delivery for the classroom.

 

Telephony

 

Although Lync can be configured as the complete public phone system for your school, that requires an on premise server and significant configuration. For schools with existing phone systems this may not be practical, but for new schools it can be a very good choice.

 

However, in a default installation, Lync is a VoIP (Voice Over Internet Phone) system that connects all of your team members (both in and out of the physical building). Call quality is very good (used Skype lately?) and again, it requires no advance setup or configuration, it works right out of the box.

The clever thing about telephony in Lync is that you don’t need to know a users phone number.

 

Simply use the search box to locate team members and click on the telephone icon. Lync rings your team member and notifies them of an inbound call. And feel free to add others to the call, it costs the same! (still free)

 

Summary

 

Lync, a component of Office 365 for Education, is a messaging and resource sharing system. It provides a connection between you and your team members allowing you to communicate real time, share documents, presentations, or complete desktops. It delivers video to your desktop either from a meeting or as a video call. It can make and receive telephone calls right to your device. And it is available on all endpoints with a browser or as an app for iOS and Android.

 

“Lync Me” certainly makes more sense in the school than “Skype Me”, give it some serious consideration.

Mind Your Manners - Use a distribution list!

One of my pet peeves is receiving an email message that contains dozens and dozens of email addresses  in the “CC”, or worse the “To” field. Sometimes the list of name is far longer than the actual message sent.  This has long been considered poor etiquette in the world of email communication, but continues to happen frequently.

The primary reason this is a no-no, aside from annoyance of format, is security. While everyone on your list is happy (presumably) to receive email from you, they may not wish to disclose their private email address to everyone else you are including. You should think twice about doing this.

So how do you send a single email message that is personally addressed, yet delivered simultaneously to a group of intended recipients, without recreating the message over and over for each recipient?  You do so through the use of a distribution list.

Distribution lists have been around for many years and found within most email systems. The idea is simple enough. You build a list of recipients in an administrative interface of some sort, you give that list a name, and create an email address associated with it. Unfortunately, there are many systems that only go this far, which is well short of the features you will need to use distribution lists successfully.

In order to fully enjoy the power of a distribution list, you need to have a few controls in place to manage it, otherwise your distribution list can become an annoyance unto itself.  Here are four things your distribution list should be capable of doing, to keep your recipients happy:

 

Private/Public access control.

 

The only thing a Spammer likes better than a valid email address, is an email that feeds a valid distribution list. Imagine their joy knowing that Viagra add gets replicated automatically through your distribution list. So be sure your distribution list has the capability of restricting email messages if the list becomes compromised. One way of doing this is a Public vs. Private setting, which restricts access to only  those individuals found on the list. I other words you should be able to make the list private, if necessary.

 

Blacklisting or White listing  

 

Occasionally your distribution list gets hijacked by one individual with an agenda. While shutting down the entire list (by making it private) is possible, you may not want to limit communication in this manner.  Be sure your distribution list capability includes the feature of adding senders to a black (disallowed) list. This will help ensure the integrity of your list, while keeping it accessible to the public at large.

 

On the other side of this scenario is a distribution list to which a user must subscribe. This is called white listing. By using an approved list of senders, such as parents in committees or volunteer capacity. You could create a large, but manageable directory of approved senders to your distribution list.

 

Moderating or Approving

 

As your distribution list grows in size or importance, you may want to ensure that each message is approved for distribution. This might be useful when conversing about sensitive subjects. This is different than white listing in that you approve specific message content as opposed to specific senders.

 

Ensure your distribution list has the capacity to require approval before messages are sent. Recognize that some view message approval as censorship - so be careful out there.

 

Message Addressing

 

One last requirement of your distribution list is message addressing. Although I have not seen this issue for some time, I have seen messages from distribution lists that displays the distribution list email address as the sender, such that your reply is automatically re-distributed. Don't go there!

 

If you want to create as self-induced  SPAM event in your organization, try using a distribution list with this deficiency. You will quickly overwhelm everyone’s inbox in a matter of a few replies. And it will be nearly impossible to follow the conversation.

 

A sophisticated distribution list system will display the original sender’s email address as the Sender, not the distribution list per se. And your reply to the original sender would not then be distributed to all on the distribution list. This is an important feature!

 

Summary

 

Distribution lists are great tools to expedite email communication to a predefined set of recipients.  This is particularly true if the messaging is primarily in one direction. Verify the email system you are using is capable of the above features. Ensure the capability to exercise administrative oversight of message traffic, then enjoy the few extra minutes each day gained from not having to select a dozen or more recipients from your contact list each time you wish to send an email to your favorite group.

Help Desk Perspectives

A recent experience over the use of a help desk caused me to revisit the subject, with a little more insight. It went something like this:

After completing a major upgrade at a small (25-30 users) organization, we were anxious to get feedback about improved performance and user experience. So I instructed the office manager to provide a list of issues which would help us to quickly identify individual PC’s that might be having problems.

And this was not a casual effort without communication infrastructure. The manager had direct access to me via Instant Messaging, with presence, using Lync 2010, email, and my cell phone. We conversed about other matters routinely, in fact on a frequent basis I asked about any upgrade issues specifically and the response was “thumbs up”.

Unaware to both of us was a collection of little slips of paper, post it notes, and torn off pieces of yellow note pad pages accumulating on the bulletin board next to the refrigerator in the break room. Neither I nor the office manager had the slightest idea that a major problem was causing a significant slowdown for a large number of users.

That experience did not end well, but reinforced an important lesson about how not to manage your help desk. For a review about the benefits of a help desk, please see my earlier post here.

How you identify, communicate, prioritize, assign, and account for technical support issues makes all the difference in the world with respect to how well technology works in your school. And there are a large number of help desk systems available for you to choose from. Here are the features that I would look for in a help desk system:

Universal Communication Medium

Help desk issues need an agreed upon standard communication protocol organization wide. The most practical is email, but only if you have a robust email system that provides you synchronized messaging anywhere on any device.

Email is accountable, easily distributed, actionable within automated ticketing systems, and universally used in most schools. Little post it notes (or big ones) probably won’t meet this standard, and have you no (eco-green) shame.

Filtering and Consolidation Mechanism

With the capacity to easily fire off an email to help@yourschool.com, any help desk solution will quickly be overcome with redundant and sometimes ridiculously simple support requests (computer unplugged, network cable disconnected, etc.). So there needs to be a way of collecting daily support requests in some sort of queue, in order to quickly evaluate and act upon requests.

If fifteen teachers report that a crucial website is being blocked by your content filter (for example), then it is entirely counterproductive to think about creating fifteen support requests, or even creating a single trouble ticket for that matter. In the span of time required to create a trouble ticket, you could easily log-in to the firewall and resolve the issue. Then happily delete all fifteen emails reporting the issue!

The most common mistake in designing a help-desk system is the requirement to create a support request (case, incident, ticket, or whatever you choose to call it) for each and every issue. Where a simple notification and action request exists, most ongoing support requests can be resolved as a matter of course.

This is especially true when you are fortunate to have daily onsite technical support resources.

Escalation Process

Any technical problem can be solved with sufficient resources, co-ordination of effort, documentation of actions taken and proposed, and feedback. But, complex or persistent issues may require escalation to a more experienced team member, or an outside vendor. This is not something you can do effectively with a post-it note, or even a three ring binder.

The capacity to resolve complex support requests requires documentation that is available to all parties involved. This includes desktop support technicians, network engineers, software vendors, and most importantly – the end user.

At a minimum, the documentation should include date and time stamps, priority, resolution status, technician assignment, and notes for those involved documenting steps taken and subsequent actions required. An enormously helpful feature would be automation and integration with your internal communication systems, this will facilitate status updates, expected resolution timeframes, and resource requests.

Knowledge Base and Performance Metrics

The accumulation of knowledge about your infrastructure is an important by-product of a well-designed help-desk. Issues that repeat infrequently can be more easily resolved by referring to case notes of a previous support request. Knowledge bases can also be made available to your end users and encourage more self-support in their daily activities.

Performance metrics really speak to the effectiveness of your technical support staff. The most equitable way to measure the effectiveness of your technical support team is through the reporting that comes from the very system they use to resolve your technical support issues. If one of your technicians routinely resolves a significantly larger number of support cases (or queues) in a specified period of time, you might want to consider giving him a promotion!

Summary

Getting frustrated about the difficulty in using a help desk is understandable if it is too cumbersome, complex, and available to only a few individuals. But don’t give up, the benefits of a rational help desk are significant and worth the investment of your time and resources. It can pay big dividends.

Find a simple and reliable communication method (we recommend email) that can be used by anyone having a support request.  Incorporate a practical filtering and issue consolidation process that helps you assess priorities, gauge relative impact (many or few users), and provides a working list for your support staff. Then develop a time or severity based escalation process that formalizes support requests and starts the documentation to resolve and account for more serious issues. And finally, look more long-term at the reports coming from your help desk to assess the effectiveness of your support staff and technical support organization.

And if you really just can’t give up your yellow post it notes, do your support team a favor. Place them in a prominent position and don’t scold them when they miss the support request posted to the bulletin board in the break room next to the refrigerator they never use!

Let us know if you would like to explore ideas about how you can improve your help desk experience.

Microsoft vs. Apple – Either, And, or Both?

I spent an interesting afternoon this week with an experienced teacher and department head of a small private school. I was amazed at how effectively he wielded his Apple iPad. And as we began to discuss the way in which he used the iPad in the classroom, I was even more impressed.

I have often opined that the iPad is a great way of consuming content, but you need a PC with a real keyboard to create content. As is often the case, I was only partly correct in my thinking. True, if you are writing a lengthy article and mostly typing words into a computer, any desktop or laptop computer is far more effective that an iPad or tablet (without an attached keyboard).

But how much classroom content consists of pure text?

Today’s students are best engaged with words, images, and video – and all in an interactive fashion that allows an instructor to  emphasize, dissect, highlight, and notate. And once content is created, to quickly post it to a website where students can gain access.

For many teachers, this is an improbable task. And for many organizations this can be a difficult due to institutional policies and infrastructure limitation, but it should not be so.

While there are a number of solutions to this dilemma, it is important to realize a couple of important principles. And this is the answer to either, and, or both. You can easily create and share content with Windows based devices and Apple or iOS devices or Android devices. But any argument about which DEVICE is better is pointless and mostly a waste of time. The best device to create content on is the device YOU are comfortable creating content on.

Here are three things you should consider as you discover the best way to manage content creation and publication in your public or private web space:

1.       Does the platform, solution, or program you are proposing support all types of devices?

2.       Do you have editorial and access control and ownership of the process and the content?

3.       Does the storage facility or website provide access to all browser types?

One of the technologies we recommend is SharePoint. SharePoint is many things: a shared document repository, a public website, and a development platform. And while the core features of SharePoint are impressive, the real potential of SharePoint is its ability accommodate a very wide variety of devices.

“Accommodating a wide variety of devices” is a little vague.  By this I mean that apps built for the various devices have a specific SharePoint publishing feature built into them.

To check this out, open up one of the many apps you have on your device and see if there is not a SharePoint or WebDAV Server option for file storage. Many of the popular applications I use on my iPad and iPhone come with that functionality.

Remember that getting a document into the cloud or online is only half (or less) of the solution. You also  need to provide a link to the content you just published, provide access control, automate the placement of that content into your student’s workspace, and then provide a venue for feedback or grading in the case of a worksheet or assignment.   Oh and then there is the question of document retention, archiving, and lifespan.

Forgive me if I am overcomplicating a simple solution, but from an institutional point of vew there is a little more going on here than a simple Dropbox sharing. At least it seems to me that there should be a little more going on.

It is apparent that Microsoft has embraced quite thoroughly the consumerization of IT. This is the process by which computing becomes less and less device specific. Our infrastructure must embrace and accommodate solutions that are available to anyone at any time on pretty much any device that is internet capable, to be truly effective.

So when someone asks me whether I like Microsoft or Apple, my response is generally YES – Either, And, or Both! And that is a good place to start in having a conversation about content creation, sharing, and management.                          

 

OK, It’s time to get legal (names omitted to protect the guilty)

We recently met with a school director and their technology provider to discuss a solution that had Microsoft Licensing implications. When we asked about the schools software licensing, there was an uncomfortable shifting in the chair, a bit of hem and haw, followed by a very generic explanation regarding a previous IT provider a few years back and a school agreement. You get the picture….

What we heard was probably quite a bit different than what the administrator understood. And we left it at that. We are not the Microsoft Licensing police and frankly Microsoft Licensing is so ridiculously complicated that it takes a team of New York Lawyers to explain it, and a few CPA’s to calculate the costs. Alright, that is an exaggeration, but not much of one.

Having said that, I submit the time has come, in the world of Education that overlooking your Microsoft Licensing is really quite inexcusable. And frankly, unless you value your time at less than minimum wage, it really makes sense to just sign the agreement, pay the minimal licensing costs, and get on with life.

If you use the correct type of licensing, the process will literally save you time and money; not to mention that warm and fuzzy feeling you will have knowing you are playing by the rules.

Having seen firsthand the hoops that some go through to avoid legal licensing, it really makes no sense. You can now buy an umbrella Microsoft agreement that not only covers all computers in the school with Operating Systems, and core CALS, but it also provides a copy of Microsoft Office Professional Plus. Furthermore there are home use rights to boot.

And here is a little known secret. When you initiate a school agreement, there are a number of additional software licenses that magically appear in your Volume Licensing Center. Take for example the MultiPoint Server license and CAL’s for connecting to it. That’s right, they are included. Just try buying that software over the counter by itself.

Some school agreements also come with subscriptions to Microsoft educational titles, membership in the MSDN Academic Alliance, and Live@EDU services. Plus there are other Microsoft solutions such as the InTune Management software, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and others that are a fraction of the cost when associated with your Annual School Agreement.

And you can literally receive an entire truckload of donated computers, which as soon as they enter your building are also covered. And did I mention any Virtual Machines that you create using Microsoft Hyper-V technology – they are covered as well.

Like most of you, I have a real problem with paying $450.00 for a copy of Microsoft Office Professional Plus in the shrink wrapped box. And that is a challenge in the for-profit world. But educational titles are so incredibly cheap, it takes way more resources to find ways around licensing than it does to do it properly.

Enough already, while the odds of a Software Audit are very, very small; all it takes is the phone call of one disgruntled staff member,  former vendor, or competitor to the software alliance and things could get real ugly.

If you have a software licensing question or need guidance on selecting the right school agreement, please call us. As a freestanding charter school, you have options that are both sensible and affordable. And you might be surprised at all the freebies you get for being legal.

Do the right thing!

Oh, one last thing. You might consider making your school agreement align with the eRate fiscal year. Eligible expenses are more easily allocated and reimbursed when they line up with July 1 – Jun 30 timeframes of the eRate program.

Virtualization - Part 2: Which Virtualization Solution Should I Use

Wading through the vast array of virtualization solutions is a challenge and frankly it will mostly be a waste of your time, until you focus on a specific solution needed for your school. I emphasize “specific”, because sometimes the process associated with the high tech virtualization strategy is a very low-tech and practical need to just get something done without an army of Network Engineers and a couple of hours on the phone with technical support.

You can virtualize servers, if you have a need to either consolidate physical hardware or add another server for a specific application. You can virtualize desktops and launch them in thin client sessions to create a sterile computer lab environment (such as required for testing). Or, you might want to use virtualization as part of your backup strategy for mission critical applications, such as computers running your financial software.

Whatever your circumstances, be sure you have a solid business case for implementing a virtualization strategy. Don’t get sucked into the IT department’s love affair with virtualization without a compelling solution attached to it. The one certainty about virtualization is that it will virtually guarantee (another intended pun), that your IT team will be on the payroll for as long as you keep that virtualized environment in place. This is a pretty complex solution, even for those of us in the business.

Here are three very specific examples of where we have used virtualization to the benefit of our school partner:

VoIP Management Server: Due to growing pains, one of our schools needed to setup a remote administration office to accommodate temporary office space during new facility construction. They did not want to spend on infrastructure that would be replaced within a year, and space was very limited.

The VoIP system they setup for the temporary offices required a server for the call manager (PBX functionality).

Using Microsoft Hyper-V technology, we created a VM (Virtual Machine) which had the sole purpose of running the call manager software. There were specific system requirements that differed from the configuration of the host server, otherwise we would not have needed a VM in the first place.

It ran flawlessly for the period of about 24 months (ever heard of construction delays) and then we decommissioned that VM and moved to the new facilities. Mission accomplished.

The business case for this virtualization was temporary computing requirements with the least amount spent on hardware, software, and electricity.

Server Migration: A rather old and inefficient server at partner school needed replacing. Simple enough, right? Well yes, except the school financial system was installed on this server and the orders were to not to interrupt it. It also did after hours synchronizing with a district system, which required point in time coordination.

Quick is not something that can be guaranteed with a single network engineer managing an entire school on one day per week (our model). So we employed a virtualization strategy.

The solution was to configure a VM and work through all of the network connection issues, configuration, and testing. Then at a pre-appointed time we quickly took a snap-shot (image) of the operating server and virtualized it. This VM then ran for a period of several weeks giving us plenty of time to install and configure the new physical server, without pressue on our part or interruption on theirs.

Why did we not simply keep running the financial system as a virtual machine? Good question, although it could have in theory been easily done. There were ownership (as in the district’s property) and licensing issues that drove the decision.

The business case for this virtualization was a time critical server migration. Not just the length of time it took, but the point(s) in time requirement as well.

Computer Lab:  A thoroughly trashed computer lab at one of our partner schools needed replacing, but budgets were very tight. We needed to find a way to refurbish/replace the computer lab for well under $10, 000 with the specific requirement to make them easy to use for state mandated testing.

If you read between the lines, what the administrator was trying to avoid was that very stressful “day of testing” computer problem nightmare you have all experienced.

Our virtualization solution in this situation was Windows MultiPoint server connected by HP Zero Clients. Using MultiPoint server, we were able to reduce the cost of the lab by 75% (we set up in a conservative 5 – 1 ratio) and provide a sterile computing environment on testing day.

The setup was easy, because MultiPoint Server 2011 is designed specifically to recognize and configure the HP Zero Clients. And after downloading the states thin client setup utility, we were able to quickly boot into a “Sterile” testing environment. That is where all computer sessions are identical, locked down, ready for testing, and capable of being administered by a proctor.

The business case for this virtualization was not only cost, but in delivering a sterile computing environment, (as we defined above).

Summary

Virtualization is a mature and well adopted technology used worldwide in a variety of circumstances. It may indeed be appropriate for you to consider. Before doing so, identify a specific computing problem and desired outcomes and a budget before calling your IT provider.

Hopefully your IT provider is wise enough to guide you in selecting your virtualization strategy, software provider, and configuration to accommodate your business case. And if you have a requirements for a temporary, time critical, or specific computing environment; then virtualization is likely a good choice.

And that’s virtually all I have to say about it… until next week. We’ll look a little deeper at virtualizing your computer lab.