Technology Outsourcing: In House or Out House….

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Only problem was, we were 1200 miles away!

 

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

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

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

 

Perception made short work of this very happy arrangement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to SharePoint – Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

It boils down to three things:

1. Cost
2. Timeliness
3. Appearance

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

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

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

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

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

Cost

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

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

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

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

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

Timeliness

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

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

Appearance

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

Introduction to SharePoint - Part 3

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

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

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

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

Applications from the App Store:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Office Professional Plus Program:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 SharePoint Workspace Synchronization Tool

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Bonus

 

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

 

Summary

 

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

 

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

Implementing SharePoint - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A centralized store of lists, directories, and databases

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

A centralized calendar of events for the school

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

A discussion board, forum, or online meeting place

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

A Wiki

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

A school wide issue resolution & tracking system

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

An image library

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

A video library

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

A social media system

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

A Learning Management System

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

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

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

Implementing SharePoint at Your School

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.       Browser based access

2.       Mapped Folders on your computer

3.       Apps or program that automate SharePoint Access

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

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

See you next week...

Migrating to Office 365

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

Now what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://portal.microsoftonline.com

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

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

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

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

Lync and SharePoint

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

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

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

Summary

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

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
.
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.

Online Marketing Part 2 of 3

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

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

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

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

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

• Permission
• Content
• Frequency

Permission

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

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

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

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

Content is King

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

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

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

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

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

Frequency

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

The Taming of the Inbox

I had a brief, yet celebrative moment yesterday; I zeroed out my inbox! Yes, for one fleeting and shining moment it was empty.

It’s a little disconcerting that by Monday morning, it will be regenerating, but such is life for the vast majority of us who are connected. Don’t lose hope, you can manage your inbox, but it takes a little effort. And there are huge benefits! Just that small, albeit temporary, victory is just one.

A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that the average knowledge worker spends 28 percent of the workweek either writing, reading, or responding to email.  While you may not be technically classified a “knowledge worker” there is likely a high correlation to being an “imparting knowledge worker”; as in a teacher or administrator at a Charter School.

My favorite Charter School Administrator recently confessed to having something like 4,000 messages in her inbox. That’s a lot! Can you beat that record?

There are hundreds of excellent articles about this subject, so let’s approach it from an Information Architecture perspective. Like my father always said, “If you start with the right set of tools, the job is much easier”. Consider a couple of tools that should assist you in taming your inbox.

Start with an enterprise class mail system

The single most important step you can take to tame your inbox is to start using a real email solution. My recommendation for education has not changed in 10 years – Microsoft Exchange based email is the gold standard of email systems. It is now available as a free service from Microsoft as a Cloud Based (hosted service) and is called Office 365 for Education.

Hosted Exchange Email is the infrastructure an organization’s email runs on, the manner in which you connect to a hosted Exchange system is entirely up to you. You can use an internet browser, a desktop or laptop client such as Outlook (Mac or PC), an iOS device such as an iPad or iPhone, or any smart phone, or tablet.

Aside from Google mail, the alternatives are not even a close second. And privacy issues alone make me shudder in using Google mail, yes even the enterprise version of Google mail. Just because you are not getting advertising, does not mean your email is not being crawled for content.

I am especially puzzled when I come across schools that are using the “free” email that is included in their webhosting account. What an oxymoron that is! There is nothing free about dealing with the SPAM, the loss of messaging control, and the wide variety of compliance issues that accompany this choice of email systems.

A hosted Exchange email system is reliable, secure, compliant, feature rich, and it’s free. What are you waiting for?

Use Instant Messaging more for short or transitory conversations

Text messaging is quickly overcoming email as the mode of communicating in the digital world, but using it in education presents unique challenges. It is a little difficult to enforce a “sterile” learning environment, free from the disruptions of personal electronic devices (PED) if the teacher is constantly checking her own text messages on a PED in the classroom. 

A much better classroom solution is Lync 2010, another free education solution from Microsoft that is far superior to text messaging than what you find on your PED. Lync 2010 provides Instant Messaging (IM) on the desktop, your laptop, and your smartphone and there is a presence indicator for all of your communication. Don’t underestimate the importance of knowing the presence or availability of your intended recipient.

In addition to IM, Lync allows you to turn your texting into a full on video conference with just a click of the mouse. And you can connect with multiple individuals at the same time. And on top of all of that, you can share documents, transfer files, and even show others what you are viewing on your desktop.

In summary, by using Lync more and email less, you will reduce the endless stream of one liner emails that land in your inbox.

Implement a connected eRM/CRM system

The best improvement I have personally implemented in my inbox taming is Microsoft Dynamics CRM; we call it Education Resource Management or eRM for Charter Schools. I can sum up my experience in four short words – “Feel Free to Delete!”

Using eRM/CRM, allows you to associate an email with a contact, a company, a support case, a contract, an order, a meeting, a telephone call, or a dozen other items, and then DELETE it. The email is retained in the eRM/CRM system and you can now refer to it in context of the information it is associated with.

The most likely reason you keep all of those silly emails in the first place is just in case you might need to refer to it later. Fair enough; but while the search function in your email program is powerful, the association of emails with the people, processes, and things in your world is much more useful.

Not ready for an eRM/CRM system? A well thought out system of folders in your email system will be very helpful.

Utilize SharePoint for document collaboration

Ever notice how many emails can be generated over just one document? You send a document for input from an associate; they make a few changes, and then send it back. Next you send it off for approval, there are a few more changes and the document comes back. And finally you send it off for publication or printing and there are the confirmations and drafts and … well, you get the picture.

One of the most inbox clogging activities we observe is using email as a document collaboration platform. As the complexity and the connectedness of your organization grow, the multiplication effect is an inbox assault. At some point you may just have to call a meeting and sit down with all of those documents and team members to sort it out.

SharePoint changes the dynamics associated with collaborative effort and it will bring great happiness to your inbox. And if you have looked at SharePoint and find it a bit clunky, then you really have not looked closely enough.

If you use the synchronization tools in SharePoint and the network mapping tools in Windows that support SharePoint, you will find that getting a document onto your SharePoint document library is a simple as dragging and dropping or saving to a designated folder on your computer.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention – it’s also free and included in Office 365 for Education.

Summary

There are countless articles, even entire websites devoted to the techniques of managing email. And some of them are excellent. However, designing an efficient Information system will have more overall impact on your inbox than techniques.

Start with an enterprise level (not a consumer grade) email system. Embrace an IM or text messaging system that is integrated in your organization. Connect your email with the people, processes, and things you deal with inside a business management system. And use SharePoint for document collaboration, sharing, and versioning.

Good luck mastering your inbox; it makes for a much more enjoyable weekend.

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.