Better communication through SharePoint for education sector

The challenge

We have worked with several higher education institutions such as Huntington Learning Center (HLC), The Phillips Exeter Academy (PEA), the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA) and the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC). In each case, the main concern was the difficulties faced by students, faculty and staff to effectively collaborate their work. Administrative tasks were also time consuming and costly. With the increased dependence on online communication, an academy’s success could be affected if their communication methods are not efficient.

The approach

It was important to design a solution that helped reduce administrative costs.

Students and personnel needed an effective way to communicate with each other and improve collaboration efforts.

Staying informed of latest updates on campus activities help save time and allowed for a flexible work load.

The solution

With a SharePoint solution, we designed an attractive user-facing website for professors, students and potential students. Everyone can benefit from the highly customized features. Certain key features were most effective in this setting: Search – Contact information for students, faculty and administrators was more easily available Wikis - Students can use this feature while collaborating on projects. It’s easy to edit information as well as track revisions made and track the person responsible for the changes. Blogs – Blogs allow the administrators to keep students and faculty informed. It is also an effective way to communicate and search for past information. MySites – This feature enables teachers or departments to have their own websites using the SharePoint solution, allowing for great flexibility and individual approach. With all of these features, satisfaction level of all the users increased and in turn improved the performance of the institute.