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 It costs too much to change content, it takes too long to do so, and the appearance is often inconsistent or outdated.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.

Implementing SharePoint - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A centralized store of lists, directories, and databases

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

A centralized calendar of events for the school

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

A discussion board, forum, or online meeting place

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

A Wiki

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

A school wide issue resolution & tracking system

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

An image library

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

A video library

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

A social media system

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

A Learning Management System

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

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

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

Implementing SharePoint at Your School

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.       Browser based access

2.       Mapped Folders on your computer

3.       Apps or program that automate SharePoint Access

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

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

See you next week...

Online Marketing - Part 3 of 3

Which social media platforms are you or someone on behalf of your school using?

The question is becoming more important as the communities we serve get more connected – socially. Equally important is an evaluation of how well your social media strategy and your marketing strategy align, and the extent to which they are used consistent with your school’s current and future policies.

For me personally, just figuring out how to use social media has been a challenge – one that in large measure still eludes me. But I understand it well enough to observe some less than desirable outcomes of what started as good intentions. The purpose of this article is to view social media in its entirety and discuss an overall social media strategy. It seems that there are three common challenges that exist with respect to social media.

Priorities, Processes, and Control

I addressed these issues in an article written over a year ago. And while the popularity and adaptation of the different social media platforms have changed. I believe these principals still apply to all of the variants of social media.

Priorities

It is still my opinion that your first priority, when evaluating online venues, is your school’s website. A properly constructed and managed website becomes a virtual community unto itself and the consolidation point for all of your social media channels. As hard as it is to imagine, there are still plenty of folks – especially parents – who simply don’t get the Facebook phenomena and probably never will. For them a tweet is something they long to hear after a long, cold winter, 1+ is decent Golf score for a tough hole on par 5, and Pinterest is just bad spelling.

So it seems that placing significant content on your main school website ought to be your highest priority. It might be a better strategy to liken your main website to the hub of a bicycle wheel, with all of the spokes leading to/from the hub to your various social venues. From a marketing standpoint, your online strategy, including all of your social channels ought to be designed with the purpose of driving traffic to your school website and gathering leads for prospective students.  Here are some other reasons why your main website ought to be your highest priority:

1. Social platforms, while here to stay are a bit unpredictable and your community will probably move in and out of various social channels on a regular basis. Placing a greater emphasis on social channels at the expense of meaningful content on your website could end up diluting your message over time and eliminating much of your intended audience.
2. Content is king! While social channels are buzzing and brimming with activity, it is still a social channel. Real content, including legally required notices and documents should not to be delivered in a social setting. While announcements, opinions, and chatter can drive awareness of policy and administrative processes, the clear and authorized information should still be on your main website after proper review and publishing guidelines are followed.  
3. The social media landscape is changing very rapidly, and the apparent winners today may not be the winners long-term. Your ability to move in and out of the social channels of choice will be enhanced by a clear website strategy. That strategy should not rely on the success or failure of a particular social media.

Process

Social media as a business (or school) is different than social media for personal use. Understand the difference and avoid mixing the two. If you are into social media, you have undoubtedly experienced cases of extreme over posting. And you certainly don’t want to be like that as an institution. It is not uncommon for companies to employ social media experts, whose sole focus is on developing and delivering social content. While it is unlikely that will have the luxury of such expenditure, there should be a clear strategy in your school about this process
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The last thing your principal wants is another assignment, but someone at that level ought to be the champion of the school and the school’s social media advocate. But principals and other staff members are not perpetual, so be sure that your social media account is.

It is also important to be consistent in your policymaking with respect to social media. Do you attempt to build a Facebook community, but ban the use of Facebook within your school? Are you trying to build a twitter following, but restrict use of mobile devices in your organization?

One idea is to develop your own internal social media platform. This is done automatically for you if you are using the Office 365 for Education platform. See my article about Live@EDU services.

Control

One common challenge is well-intentioned individuals, associated with your school, who create social media accounts using their own personal information and your legal name. This is a very precarious situation that should be handled sooner, rather than later. Having control over your messaging is essential, even when those individuals are key stakeholders in your organization. Much like the nightmares we have seen with domain names, ownership of Facebook pages with your official name by unauthorized individuals can be embarrassing at the least and potentially a legal nightmare in the worst case scenario.

Want to see how big of a problem this is? Just do a Facebook search using the name of your school. If you see more than one entry, you have a problem. More importantly, your users have a problem because they don’t know who to follow.

Social Media can be of great benefit to your school. Set clear priorities, designate specific individuals to manage it, and maintain control of this important piece of intellectual property. And remember, that from a marketing perspective, social media exists to obtain prospective students. So make sure there is a consistent and easy way to gather and track leads for followup.

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
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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!

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.                          

 

Managing Website Content - good, better, best

Managing public website content in the dynamic environment of a charter school is enormously time consuming. If you think otherwise, then your school’s website is most likely out of date and in need of an overhaul. A quick poll of your site’s users will likely confirm this, and probably tell you more than you care to know. Even the best and most popular websites face constant scrutiny from one set of stakeholders or another—who each inevitably have website suggestions but often little understanding of the costs attached to those suggestions.

Because charter schools have so many requests for content updates, accompanied by all the usual interruptions and stretched staff assignments, this task can quickly get overwhelming.

The purpose of this article is to explore three methods that we have used to manage website content, each with varying degrees of success. Pros and cons exist with each method, but no solution at all will ultimately cost you much more in wasted administrative resources. In fact, your public facing website can actually reduce the amount of administrative effort required to run your school, but only if done thoughtfully and consistently.

Before we address the methods, let’s quickly review the basic categories, and samples of content, that you ought to be familiar with, as explained below:

• Contact and directory information that bypass admin resources to every extent practical. This category includes phone, fax, email (forms-based), maps, organizational charts, and department information.
• Notifications that are legally required in order to comply with board and other necessary public notices. These can include board minutes, policy manuals, student handbooks, and health notifications.
• News and activity information to inform the community about all school related activities, including academics, events, calendars, community engagement, fundraisers, school plays, projects, and field trips.
• Social media and buzz to generate excitement, awareness, and sense of community. This involves using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other media associated with the school’s hub of activity.

This list is intentionally given in order from the least to the most frequently updated category, and roughly parallels with semi-annual, monthly, weekly, or daily updates. And correspondingly, this list is given from most to the least restrictive category, with respect to content review and approval. Keep this in mind as we outline the methods of managing content, because different kinds of content require different publishing processes, and have different shelf lives.

One last thing before we discuss methods—all content should take the shortest path possible from the time of its creation to its publication. For example, if a calendar of events has three separate approval processes to go through, and faces any delays that sometimes happen in life, then you may as well forget about it. By the time the event is posted and published, it could long since be over. Another example is homework assignments or study guides submitted by teachers for the website. Systems need to be in place for allowing and training staff to easily save a document in a format they understand (Word, Excel, PDF, etc.) and then quickly publish the document to the website, without a lengthy approval process or any difficult technical steps.

Easier said than done? Perhaps. But with even modest training, any of these three methods below will provide this functionality. I’ve labeled them as Good, Better, and Best.

Good Use whatever they are comfortable with.

With so many web publishing options available, it is quite possible that members of your staff already have a blog, a personal home page, a Facebook page, or a website devoted to their work. These are often personalized very well, and reflect the passion and interest of the individual authors. Allowing this kind of content management comes at a very low initial cost, a reasonably high participation rate, and can be quite effective. We’ve seen some that are excellent, both artistically and functionally.

However, it’s important to understand the risks associated with this model. The primary risk is content control, lack of oversight, and possible legal issues. These kinds of resources are universally owned by the individuals creating them. Inappropriate use could be embarrassing to the school, provide misinformation, and potentially create liabilities that you feel are unacceptable. And without the cooperation of any of your particular staff members, an offensive website cannot easily be taken down, especially if you have adopted a precedent of allowing this kind of online creativity over a long period of time.

Artistically speaking, your website may end up looking like a virtual flea market. But the good thing is that there will be accurate content readily available.

Better Use a centralized content management system.

Most schools use this model to manage website content, and for good reason. Using a content management system is an efficient way to build a website that contains most of the features you need, with some type of password protected area that allows a management interface to add, remove, or modify content. Because most content management systems are built with a template framework, information on new pages gets formatted in a similar fashion as other pages, giving the site a more uniform feel. While this can make creating content easier, it can also create limitations in the design elements and artistic expressions you may wish to use.

With a modest amount of training, users can add, remove, and edit content in areas of the website where they have responsibility to do so. And some content management systems have thousands of appliciations or utilities that you can easily set up to do a wide range of tasks, like updating your Facebook page, sending out newsletters, or creating extensive directories.

Many charter schools have used such a method, normally powered by Joomla, an open source content management system. But while many of our schools use this model, we’ve experienced only modest success in those cases where there is not a single website content manger on site.

Simple means different things to different individuals, and some CMS interfaces can be difficult to use or require in-depth training for staff and faculty. As you have likely experienced, often any kind of barrier or perceived difficulty may pretty much stop users from updating content on the school website, simply because they are not motivated to do so. Functionally, you will have a uniform looking website, but the amount of fresh content will depend upon how motivated and reasonably trained users are. Note: This takes more than one individual to work successfully, unless that individual devotes significant time to content management.

BestMicrosoft Sharepoint: a public website that is connected to your internal documents.

Sharepoint is a very popular Microsoft technology that manages website content through a simple Internet Explorer interface. It’s based upon the permissions you as a user are granted on the site. It bridges the gap between whichever document is sitting on your desktop waiting to be shared and the ability to upload that document to your public facing website. In the simplest of terms, any staff member with permission to do so can create a document, save it to a specific folder on their desktop, and then synchronize it to the school’s public website.

Sharepoint provides a uniform and artistically appealing framework that easily synchronizes documents from desktops with the public facing website. By allowing the creators of your most frequently changed content to publish their materials directly to the website, you will ensure that your content is always up to date.

Admittedly, there are some underlying assumptions in this model, namely the required server and software infrastructure. But this infrastructure is not terribly expensive, especially when bundled with your annual school agreement license for Microsoft technologies. It is interesting to note that the Live@edu services I recently wrote about (which provides free email, document storage, and web pages for students) utilizes Sharepoint as a usable framework. Schools adopting the Live@edu services could more easily transition to the Sharepoint services for managing website content because of the initial familiarity with the technology and interface.

Summary

Managing content on your school website is a very large undertaking, and a process best accomplished by a method that delegates content creation to the responsible authors and where strict oversight is not required. Schools that can reduce the number of steps from content creation to online publication will have greater success in creating a dynamic public website.

And remember that content on the Internet is King! Even an imperfect looking website that has great resources—meaning fresh, accurate, relevant, and accessible content—will give you high marks when users to go answer the question, “How’s our school’s website?”

Finally, it is possible to use all three of the above models simultaneously to manage your website. You don't just have to use one model. Keeping all content resources within the framework of your site will give it a more uniform look.

Good, better, best,
Never let it rest;
Until your good is better,
And your better is your best.

Please let us know if you would like additional information about managing your website content more efficiently by using Sharepoint at your school.

It’s time to upgrade to Windows 7… really it is.

Have you stopped for a moment, between fiddling with your Windows XP desktops, to consider the practical ramifications of running this outdated and no longer supported Operating System? You may be surprised at how much support time and resources are spent retaining it in your organization.

Sure, it still works and runs your existing programs. And yes, it will still work on those 10 year old computers, but at what cost?

The consumerization of desktop/laptop computers continues to bring prices down and features up as manufacturers compete for more business primarily through price. The benefit to you, the consumer, is that a new PC can be purchased for the rough equivalent of about 5 hours of modestly priced technical support. And how many times have you spent more than 5 hours, either all at once or piecemeal in resolving a computer issue.

Economics aside, consider what it really means when Microsoft “sunsets” an operating system, or it plain language, stops supporting it.

It does not mean that the software all of a sudden fails, nor does it mean that it will stop functioning at all in a steady state. In simplest of terms it means that Microsoft no longer does regression testing on new product releases. In other words, all patches, fixit utilities, service packs, hot-fixes, and new version roll-outs are not tested for backwards compatibility.

Due to the near infinite number of hardware combinations, system configurations, and software customizations it is impractical, if not impossible to test for backwards compatibility. Even assuring programs run on current Operating Systems is difficult enough. Furthermore, most new software is written or programmed for the new operating system architecture. Bottom line is you are on your own with Windows XP technical support.
In the back of your mind you probably know the upgrade is coming. But large upfront costs of purchasing and installing new workstations may persuade you to put it off. While that seems a reasonable course of action, the old saying of “Penny wise, pound foolish” really does apply. What you will begin to experience is support cost creep, an incremental, almost unnoticed, but constantly increasing expense to maintain your desktop/laptops.

Sadly, if your support personnel are paid on an hourly (break-fix) basis, rather than a support contract, they may not be motivated to push for the upgrade either.

Do yourself a favor, and do the upgrade to Windows 7. You’ll save money in the long run, and probably even in the no-so-long run. Even if you don't purchase new computers, do the upgrade! Windows 7 performs well on a large variety of not-so-new PCs
Now for some great news! The upgrade to Windows is very inexpensive for education customers. When you enroll in a Microsoft OVS-ES agreement for your school, you get blanket coverage for all computers in your organization. Furthermore, you also get a license to run Windows Office Professional 2010 on all of your computers in the school. Finally, there are many other software benefits you enjoy, such as work at home versions of the same software.

The cost of an OVS-ES agreement is determined by counting your full time staff and multiplying that number by $55.00 (approx.). Do the math and you will find this to be an extraordinary value. Windows 7, Office Professional, Core Client Access, and other benefits for a few dollars per PC.

A model for your school website

Selecting the right web site technology for your school is an important undertaking. The expectation of being able to find things "on-line" is so pervasive now in our culture that not being able to do so is simply unacceptable. And with respect to a Charter School, it is essential to good governance and school administration.

Building a website is not that difficult anymore. There are many hosting companies that actually install website building software right into your hosting account. All you have to do is fill in a few blanks, check a few boxes, add a couple of pictures, and you have a website…. well sort of. What you end up with is a few pictures, a paragraph or two about your school, a contact us page, and maybe directions to your location.

Sadly, there are still administrators that believe this is adequate. And while I respect their opinions, my opinion is that is wholly inadequate, for a number of reasons I will discuss in this article.

Putting up a website that will serve your Charter School is important because it can actually reduce the cost of administration when designed correctly. In order for this to happen, your school website needs to be more than just a few pictures, a paragraph, a map, and a telephone number. A successful website implementation can save countless hours of phone calls, emails, sticky notes, and personal interruptions. And if I were the teacher, I would make every administrator write that last statement on the chalk board 50 times!

However, the fundamental challenge in deploying a useful website boils down to one simple problem…. Managing content! In every case, the addition, modification, and removal (archiving) of content on your website is always more difficult and time consuming than publishing it in the original instance. I cannot overstate the importance of understanding this principal.

You can manage your School Website without spending thousands of dollars for its construction or administration. Once setup, this can be done using Open Source (meaning free) software, an internet browser, and literally thousands of plug-ins (optional features) that are also free.

If you can type, create a digital image, or produce media such as video and music, you can create an impressive website that will serve your school in a multitude of ways.

Here is a list of the important content that should be on your school website and a few ideas of how it might work for you:

• Academic Information: Curriculum, homework, student resources, and classroom management information are specific to not only a given grade, but often a specific teacher within that grade. Each teacher can easily logon to a content driven site and upload her lesson plans, homework, suggested study materials (links), and other relevant information to help students succeed.
• Contact Information: School, administrators, staff, and support organizations all have contact requirements. These are often static (not changing) but can change if individuals leave, go on vacation, change roles, etc. And why would you fail to have a robust map on your website? This simple tool will help you avoid hours spent giving directions. While you are at it, ensure your site is mobile phone friendly for the growing number of users that rely on PDA or mobile browsers; they can look at your map while they are enroute.
• Legal Information: Disclosures, public hearing notifications, meeting and legal notes are often required by law. If it takes days or weeks to get a page added to your existing website, instead of a few minutes, you are not providing adequate notification to you community.
• News Information: Events, clubs, PTO, recognitions, school closings, calendars, etc. This list is almost endless, and the requirements are diverse and very time sensitive. Giving each organization their own "page" on the website and the authority to update it as often as possible will greatly improve the process of being involved by your volunteers.
• Policy Information: Enrollment, attendance, discipline, rules, handbooks, dress codes, approved vendors, etc. should all be easily found on your website preferably by a site specific search engine. Typing a few "keywords" should be all the effort required of site visitors to find the information they need.

As you can see, some of this information is static and relatively unchanging, such as policy information and contact information. But the rest can be very dynamic with additions to content occurring almost every day. And without a full time technical person to add content to your website, it would quickly become out of date and your users will not remained engaged; that is unless you have a content management system as the underlying technology running your website. This is where "distributive authoring" comes into play. And this is a crucial concept that needs to be understood, especially at the leadership level of the organization.

Distributive authoring is giving the key stakeholders in your organization the authority, training, and vision of this key role and then giving them the needed tools to publish material relative to their area of responsibility. In other words it is allocating a large task to a group of individuals in order to keep the size of the task manageable. In order for this to occur, you must first designate a group of individuals to take the lead in this process. And based upon my experience, unless the Principal or other key administrator is leading this team it will not be an effective effort.

The technology of which I am most familiar is Joomla, another is Word Press. They are both Open Source solutions which have no licensing fees. There is also Microsoft Sharepoint Technology (not free). These programs are widely adopted, have a worldwide user base, and excellent reliability and stability. There are other programs as well. Do a simple Google search for "Content Management Systems" and see for yourself.

If you are a School Administrator and have failed to implement this sort of technology for your school, you are in my opinion lacking the leadership and vision needed to make fundamental improvements in your organization. Information is power. Empowering students, enabling teachers, and providing administrative efficiency is the responsibility of every Charter School Administrator. And improving your website technology may be the very most important step you take to accomplish this goal. Next week we will discuss social media and how to manage it in conjunction with your website.