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.

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!

Is your data in Synch or in the sink (as in down the drain)?

When it works, it’s a marvelous thing. When it doesn’t it is painful.

That was my observation this week after losing several hours of creative work that originated on my iPad and was supposed to be synched to the cloud. Somewhere between my iPad and the cumulus digitus, my files got zapped. Perhaps it was a cruel joke Apple was playing on me for daring to use a Microsoft (One Note) application on an Apple device, the iPad.

The cause was more likely the result of not following my own advice. Attempting to create content on a consumer endpoint (iPad) rather than a robust workstation did not turn out well.  Although the same thing can happen on a workstation, automatic backups make recovery possible. Not so in my case.

Do you face challenges sharing your files between end different end points and end users? It can be challenging, but once you master the process, it is very useful. Here are a few things you might want to think about.

•  Decide how you will create original documents
• Settle on a file format that is platform independent
• Use infrastructure that is device neutral
• Synchronize your programs automatically (or semi-automatically)

Let’s consider a scenario to demonstrate how this works:

 

Suppose you have documents that you need to diagram, outline, or notate, then share. This is common in the classroom where a teacher creates a lesson plan document, marks it up during a lecture, then posts the document online for students to review.

 

This is not so simple to do on your laptop or desktop (PC or Mac) alone. However, with an iPad or tablet and the right application, it’s a cinch. The problem is that much of the resources, in the form of documents, photo stock, spreadsheets, etc. exist on your laptop/desktop during the creative process; where typing text, inserting tables, or adding photos is a snap. Yet presenting that document during a lecture often means using another medium, such as an overhead or smartboard, where it is not easy to capture the doodles, drawings, diagrams, or annotations on the original document.

 

So the challenge is moving your creative work through its various stages; from your PC, to your iPad or tablet, while retaining the ability to access it on both, plus a web browser for sharing.

 

If you are simply copying an existing document, this is pretty straightforward. But that may not provide you the personalized original document you need. And it really doesn’t matter, because it is the same process described below, with a few steps taken out.

 

So let’s apply the four principles above to our scenario and see how this works:

 

Decide how you will create original documents

 

I start with Microsoft One Note as my creative solution on the desktop. It is a very clever program included in Office Professional and now part of Office 365 Web Apps. Within One note, you can clip articles, snip website pages, insert photos and notate with text on the location of my choice on the page. You can also create tables on the fly if you need to do spreadsheet-like calculations. And while you are at it, embed your video, audio, or other links.

 

One Note is truly an amazing program for organizing stuff in an electronic document on a PC or Mac. You may have another favorite or a program more oriented to the subject matter you teach. But I have not found an equivalent for doing this creative work on the iPad. While great at displaying content, the iPad is very limited with respect to creating original content.

 

Settle on a file format that is platform independent

 

Next I save my document in Adobe’s Portable Document Format. A .pdf is so common now that many don’t realize it originated as the output of Adobe Acrobat, a very powerful program used to manage documents with advanced features to transport, distribute, secure, sign, certify and otherwise manage digital documents.

 

Most of the advanced features in a .pdf are not necessary in the classroom, but the ability to create .pdf’s (as opposed to just reading them) has always been a bit challenging, due to licensing issues with Adobe – the creators of the .pdf standard. You can find an unlimited number of free readers on the internet, but you almost always have to pay (in one way or another) for software to create a .pdf.

 

The benefit of using a .pdf is the ability to view it on virtually any platform and device. Desktop, laptop, PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle, etc. you name a digital device and it reads a .pdf. And all kinds of websites, ftp sites, sharing services, etc., also accommodate .pdf’s.

And backing up one step, the reason I use One Note is that along with its versatility, it (like all Microsoft Office Programs) contains a “Save As” option that includes an option to save the document in a .pdf file format.

 

Use infrastructure that is device neutral

 

Once you have successfully created your document and placed it into a .pdf format, you’ll need to decide where to store it. The variety of choices in this step are mind boggling due to the sheer number of options presented in various apps available for endpoint devices, so be careful. Storing the documents is only one aspect of this process. The capacity to share, download, tag and find, and manage lifecycle or archiving are also important considerations.

 

I am not writing this article oblivious to Drop Box and Evernote, I use both. And you may know of others, there are some very clever apps and programs out there, but my platform of choice is SharePoint. The reason is simple. It is an enterprise level program with deep integration into my organization as a whole and provides a number of other important benefits aside from our discussion here.

 

SharePoint’s adoption is evident in most programs designed to synchronize your data. Just look in the setup menu and you will almost always have an option to save to a SharePoint (or WebDAV) site.

Bottom line is that SharePoint is very compatible with the other steps outlined here. And for users that are not inclined to try every new gadget program out there or are a bit technically challenged, SharePoint is very easy to use. It looks just like another folder on My Computer and saving to it is very much like saving a document to the My Documents folder.

 

Synchronize your programs automatically (or semi-automatically)

 

The final step in this document creation and display journey may very well take you back to your iPad which is synched to the cloud through one of the many clever .pdf programs. Otherwise use your desktop or laptop or tablet or smart phone or kindle, or… you get the picture. Synch your data and share it with others in your world.

 

If you choose the iPad, you’ll need a good .pdf program. Take your pick, there are dozen’s. I Like PDF Expert (by Readdle)  where I can doodle, highlight, draw circles, boxes and arrows and do all sorts of hands on notation of the document while I am lecturing from it. And with the right app, I can connect my iPad to an overhead projector or share it on a smart board for all to enjoy.

 

When my presentation is done, my document is automatically synched to the SharePoint cloud and available to the groups and individuals with whom you have shared it. And if you make changes to the document, they are available on all the endpoints.

 

Summary

 

What happened to me turned out to be failing to follow my own advice, although in fairness it wasn’t really advice if I had not yet advised it as such.  No matter, the lessons I learned have helped me to more effective. I hope you will find the ideas useful.

 

Decide upon the program you will use to create your specific content and ensure that it will allow you to "Save As" or export to .pdf. Use a .pdf document as the medium of transporting and sharing. Manage the .pdf on Sharepoint, and take advantage of any automatic synchronization of the documents.

 

Don’t feel like a dummy if you can’t figure out how to make this work on the first go around. There are a number of steps involved. But if you routinely create, share, modify, and archive documents in the process of instruction. These ideas should work for you.

 

Let us know if you other useful ideas.

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.

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.

Office 365 & Google Docs Smackdown - And the winner is...

I was recently asked why we recommended Office 365 instead of Google and the collaboration tools called Google Docs, when most Google services are free.  My first thought was to wonder if having the constant interruption of unsolicited advertising is actually a significant hidden cost, but that’s a subject for another day. Thankfully, when you sign up as an organization using Google Docs the advertising stops.

Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365 are a set of web based productivity tools used by many individuals and organizations. From a product origination standpoint, Google Docs evolved out of features developed for individual Gmail users and Microsoft Office 365 was developed as an extension of the popular Microsoft Office suite of programs. The origin of these two systems is an important distinction and should not be overlooked.

Here is a summary of features in both:

Domain based email (you@yourdomain.org):  Google Mail vs.  Exchange Email
Word Processing:     Document vs. Word
Spreadsheets and Calculations:    Spreadsheet  vs. Excel
Presentation:       Presentation  vs. PowerPoint
Note taking/ Other     Form & Drawing vs. One Note
Document Storage, Sharing, and Collaboration:  Google Docs  vs. SharePoint
Instant Messaging & Voice over Internet Protocol: Google Voice  vs. Lync 2010

Microsoft Office has always been about providing advanced document creation and management, while Google and subsequently Google Docs have evolved from the monetization of your eyeballs looking at advertisements. How we got here might be an interesting academic exercise, but you are probably more interested in knowing which is best for your organization. For our purposes today, we will compare Google Docs with the Office 365 E-2 plan, which are roughly equivalent in features and both are free for education.

My purpose is not to do a feature by feature comparison and evaluate relative merits and/or weaknesses. That has been done many times by a number of objective authors. Rather, my purpose is to consider the two systems in their entirety and evaluate the way in which you might work in a more seamless and integrated fashion.

A comparison of features suggests a great deal of similarity in the two products, but there are important differences. The most important differentiator is the integration with your Microsoft technologies.

But wait you say, we are an Apple based organization. Well if that is the case, then you are really not asking the right question at all with respect to this article. But it does make a point.

Before you can decide upon which of the productivity suites, Google Docs or Office 365, is right for you; there needs to be a candid evaluation of your school computing environment. If you are primarily an Apple organization or an Open Source organization, then my opinion is that there is little difference between the two (unless you are using the Mac version of Office).  However, if you are operating primarily in a Microsoft environment, Office 365 is a clear winner. And the reason is the deep and feature rich integration between the Microsoft Desktop and the cloud (Office 365).

What do I mean about integration, well let’s consider the definition:

Integration (from the Latin integer, meaning whole or entire) generally means combining parts so that they work together or form a whole.

Integration in Office 365 takes many forms, perhaps the most important is the ability to move on and off your desktop, laptop, or other device and have your documents with you – even when you are offline (no internet). This takes the form of automatic synchronization of documents and emails once you reconnect. With Google Docs and email if you have no internet connection you are out of business.

Another deep integration feature is the management of complex documents on your desktop.
For most teachers, and certainly all but your most advanced students, the web based tools of either Google Docs or Office 365 web based services will be adequate. But your key administrators, school secretaries, and finance staff will be severely handicapped using only the web based version of Word (Document) or Excel (Spreadsheet). Accordingly, having the capacity to move seamlessly between the simple and the complex within the same interface is crucial. In other words, you can’t create documents with advanced formatting in either web based version, but you can create them on your desktop version of Office and save it to Office 365 without difficulty. Not the case with Google Docs.

I’ll mention one more deep integration feature, with respect to document management specifically. In Office 365, you can save your documents to a folder that appears to be on your computer, but actually resides in the cloud (Office 365). And you can use familiar drag and drop functions to move documents to the various folders in either environment. Furthermore, you can set up the automatic synchronization of those documents.

If you do a simple search on Office 365 vs. Google Docs and you find a wide variety of experts extolling the virtues of Office 365 or Google Docs, depending upon which they favor. And for the record, the reviews I saw tended to favor Office 365 overall, but only slightly.  Now that Google Docs no longer enjoys any kind of cost advantage, perhaps even more so.

However, almost all reviews pointed to the superior functionality of Office 365 when combined with the desktop version of Office Professional (desktop software).

In the world of commercial organizations this is a huge barrier to overcome, but in the world of academic licensing you get Office Professional plus as part of your Microsoft licensing agreement for schools. See my previous article about Open Value Subscription for Education Services (OVS-ES). This weighs the comparison heavily in favor of Office 365.

Let’s add one other significant factor to this system level comparison. The Live@EDU services, which provide cloud based email, document sharing, and social functions for students is now part of Office 365 and designed specifically for education, not business in general. Integrating Live@EDU into your school provides email, cloud based storage, collaboration tools for lesson material between students and teachers, and a controlled social platform for student creativity. These are enormously helpful tools, particularly for upper grade levels. In fact some have used the Live@EDU services as the foundation for a robust Learning Management System.

Finally, management and support is far, far superior in Office 365. For starters, you get unlimited technical support with a live human being – not a search engine. And the increased level of detail for administering the services is substantial. In fact, you’ll probably need to have some level of expertise on staff to help you manage this because you are actually controlling to a large extent the actual server environment hosting your services.

Oh, and one last thing.  A core element of your data management plan, which should have oversight policies with respect to your schools intellectual property, should address how you control data.  Google docs accounts normally evolve out of individual Gmail accounts and therefore (by definition) violate the most basic tenants of your data management plan.

If you have ever experienced a legal discovery, you will understand how difficult it can be to gain access to communication by staff members who are using primarily their personal email accounts or personally owned Google Docs accounts.  True, an enterprise wide version Google Doc’s can be setup, but trying to do that after a user has years of mostly personal stuff in the system may not be an easy task.

Summary

When you consider these two cloud based productivity suites as a complex communication tool, you have to consider more than just the list of features and the cost. You must consider your data management plan, the makeup of your users (and their computing preferences), the organizations computing environment, and how well the service will integrate into your infrastructure.

Most comparisons look at a list of features and do a side by side comparison, and while that is helpful, it seems that it ignores the one obvious question.  Here’s the question:  In which format do you create the significant documents used in your organization? Statistics still suggest a large majority of you use Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Power Point. And to a lesser extent you may use other products in the Office Professional Plus 2010 suite.

Do you honestly think that using Google docs to manage Microsoft originated documents would be a superior solution?
 
Admittedly, the individual Gmail account and related Google doc features for individuals are impressive and useful. But extending that organization wide is a fundamentally different matter.  Personal Gmail accounts are entirely inadequate for use in a public school setting (same goes for Hotmail or yahoo mail). Privacy issues alone should give you pause. But ultimately the administration of the school has no control over individual owned email accounts or Google Docs accounts.

If you ultimately decide to use Google Docs, please be sure to set it up properly with appropriate groups, permissions, and access control. Do it as an organization, not as a collection of individuals, and incorporate your schools domain name into the service.

And let’s end on a positive note – a shout out for Google docs. It is a far superior solution to using nothing, and it is a great solution for those using email accounts included with their website hosting service, drop box, ever note, or the other variety of sharing solutions.

It is however, a distance second class competitor to Microsoft Office 365 in my humble opinion. In all probability, the popularity of Google Docs is due to the features that users loved about Microsoft Office, but were unwilling to pay for. And frankly that used to be a good reason…. but no longer.

Advice for Tom Luna (that he never asked for)

As part of the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools annual conference, I enjoyed the thoughful remarks of Idaho Superintendant of Schools, Tom Luna. And in spite of a few not so complimentary observations of my family who live in the gem state (and are educators), I found his comments to be spot on, with one small exception...

To avoid being political, I will simply observe that the challenges he addresses are real, the solutions are a little painful and scary for those so tenured, and his vision of the future for our kids is genuine. But his push for the state to buy an endpoint (laptop, tablet, digital device, etc.) for each student is misguided on two fronts.

First of all it will dramatically increase the cost of providing an education without a commensurate return on education outcomes. Second it's not about endpoints, Mr. Kuna, its about the infrastructure connecting the endpoints.

Let's look at the cost side first. Just how long will a laptop, tablet, or digital device (hereinafter "endpoint") last in the hands of a typical student? I can envision all kinds of funny explanations of the endpoints demise... dropped it in the toilet, used it for my food tray, left it on the bus, forgot to bring it in from the pool during a rainstorm, let it slip out of my hands, let my kid brother use it, took it to the beach..... you get the picture.

If the student had to do 40 hours of community service to earn the endpoint, then I would be all in. But with no skin in the game these endpoints will have no perceived value and will treated accordingly. Then the administration of those endpoints will become an enormous burden for the IT staff who are tasked with managing them.

Is an entitlement program for computers fundamentally different than other government entitlement programs. I think not, enough already!

Besides, just how many kids do you know today that don't have an Internet based phone, a PC (or two) at home, a dozen computers available at any time in the school, or an endpoint already of their own. Require students to manage their own endpoints outside of the school, it will help them be responsible for their own stuff. And manage school owned endpoints inside the school, where it can be done efficiently and with reasonable oversight.

Now let's turn to the infrastructure connecting our endpoints, which I can tell you is a bigger problem in rural Idaho than most places. All the endpoints in the world are of little value in transmitting knowledge if there is no connectivity. And even where there is connectivity, that in and of itself does not create the infrastructure needed to store, share, and collaborate on creative work. And Facebook is probably not the solution!

You need a system to transport, store, share, and account for information that is managed by the institutions who are guiding students in the learning process. You need reliable, SPAM free, and compliant email. You need shared resources, with permission based access control. And you need communication tools that engage students and connect them with instructional resources.

Happily, for the entire state of Idaho and Utah as well, Microsoft just announced a free version of Office 365 for Academic institutions. This is an amazing solution and really needs serious consideration. For a typical charter school with 25 staff and 400 kids, it is the equivalent of a $15,000 technology grant, combined with an administrative benefit  of a similar amount.

With Office 365 deployed (at little cost) into each school, you would then have all the infrastructure needed to deliver a 21st Century education. And you can do it on pretty much any endpoint you can think of inside or outside of the school. Office 365 works on almost any device, at any internet connected location, and at any time of day or night.

Vote No - for free endpoints, and Yes for Office 365!

That, Mr. Kuna, in all due respect, is how to fix your ambitious plan.

Why you should ban USB drives at school

After spending hours restoring desktops recently, which a clever student had booted from a rogue USB flash drive loaded with Malware, it dawned on me that the convenience of these handy little gadgets might just be overrated. And when combined with the benefits of the cloud, specifically the free cloud available to students via the Office 365 (live@edu) service, the risks vs. benefit ratio has clearly tipped towards risk.

I know it seems like such a simple way to transport data like homework, projects, photos, etc, but it also just as easy to transport utilities that can destroy the hard drives on your computers, take direct control of the underlying computer hardware, or modify computer registry errors in a way that is nearly impossible to repair.

You may have the very best security practices in place, such as a perimeter Unified Threat Management (UTM) device, endpoint Anti-Virus protection, and separate VLans (network isolation), and yet be vulnerable to a meltdown caused by a free download from the Internet attached directly onto a PC in your school. It is nearly impossible to guarantee computer security if there is physical access to the device.

Banning USB devices is one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce the cost of network administration in your school.

But aside from the security aspects, there are also some real practical benefits of tossing those USB drives. Let’s take a look at the advantages to see if they don’t, in your specific circumstance, outweigh the benefits.

Here are the top 10 reasons why you should ban USB drives at your school, in favor of the cloud:

• 10) Eliminate the cost of purchasing the hardware. At $5.00 - $75.00 ea. (depending on capacity), you could save a bundle of money.
• 9) Reduce the cost of managing the devices – tracking these identical (presumably) looking devices and accounting for them can be burdensome.
• 8) Avoid the cost of replacing the devices – responsibility for replacing the drives when they are lost; placing identity (ownership) upon them is difficult.
• 7) Reduce plagiarism - unauthorized sharing of work is nearly impossible to detect and prevent while using a flash drive.
• 6) Improve collaboration – accountable sharing of work is possible in the cloud, impossible on a flash drive.
• 5) Reduce support costs – time spent unnecessarily managing infected or otherwise misconfigured hardware is a real cost.
• 4) Lower the cost of your infrastructure – spending money on student servers can in most cases be completely eliminated.
• 3) Improving teacher to student interaction – with cloud based services, teachers can simultaneously push information to an entire class of students.
• 2) Increase student access to teachers – individual work can be made available to teachers with no extra effort by the student other than saving the work to their private cloud space.
• 1) Eliminating the excuse of “I forgot my homework, it's on my flash drive!” Homework is always a device away (computer, tablet, phone, etc). Presuming it is done, of course!

There you have it, ten solid reasons to ban flash drives from your school.

Now if you are more gently persuaded, have plenty of resources, and don’t want to offend anyone’s sensitivities, you could adopt a more persuasive approach to the matter by making cloud services available to your students and making flash drives subject to inspection if used on school computers.

Given the chance, smart students will quickly realize the tremendous advantages of using their own private cloud and soon leave their flash drives at home.

What’s the big deal about Live@edu? It’s more than a free email account

Offering your students free email will get you about as much mileage as offering them free brussel sprouts for lunch. It's just not a big deal anymore to have an email account, with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and Facebook mail all competing for young minds as an advertising audience.

However, there may be very good reason for your school to offer Live@edu services for students. Here are a few advantages of doing so:

• Increased collaboration and communication among students and teachers
• Security and control of your email environment
• Brand and community building with customized logos, color schemes, and campaigns
• Real world training for your students to communicate in a 21st Century work environment
• Reduced infrastructure costs

So, it’s not really just free, it actually pays you significant dividends! Let’s dig a little deeper.

 

Increased collaboration and communication

 

By giving students the ability to email, instant message, video chat, share documents, and store homework assignments in the Live@edu system, you give them a powerful set of creative tools. They can collaborate on project documents using Microsoft Office Web apps, free online companions to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and One Note.

 

Security and Control

 

Because the Live@edu is centrally managed by your internal staff, you have complete control over access to the system. And with Microsoft’s advanced email security you significantly reduce the risk of phishing, virus, and malware attacks on your internal systems. And in the event of a disciplinary matter, you have access to email communication and message archives.

 

Brand and community building

 

Think about every email sent outside of your organization as a small advertising snippet. As your students communicate around the world and across the community, your institution becomes more visible, relevant, and cutting edge. Your Live@edu email and workspaces are branded with your logo and school name.

 

Real world training

 

Live@edu services are built upon the same technology as Microsoft Office 365, a powerful and widely used business communication and collaboration system. Your students will gain valuable experience in real world communication by using Live@edu. And they can plug into the Live@edu from anywhere and on any device.

 

Reduced costs

 

How much are you spending for student servers? Maintaining shared drives, keeping track of student documents, managing student access, securing other student’s work, and keeping ahead of student hacks is a significant IT management cost. With 25GB of storage per student and access control by Live@edu account, you can eliminate a great deal of administrative expense.

 

Summary

 

Building a communication platform for students to email, instant message, video chat, share documents, and store homework assignments seems like a lot of infrastructure – and it is. An equivalent cost to build and manage such a system internally would be thousands of dollars, not to mention the administrative time diverted from more strategic initiatives.

 

Showcasing your school as a leader in technology and forward thinking will generate interest and improve your recruiting efforts.

 

K-12 institutions have a very specific set of requirements for cloud-based messaging and collaboration solutions. No one brings a richer set of free hosted solutions to the K-12 space than Microsoft Live@edu. Not only are our enterprise-grade services cost effective and flexible, but they also prepare students for the next step with professional tools used in higher education institutions and businesses the world over.

 

Let us help you implement a Live@edu solution on your campus.