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North Kansas City School District Uses CCUweb to Share 75 GroupWise Calendars Online

Overview

North Kansas City School District is located in Kansas City, Missouri, and provides educational services to approximately 17,400 students with a staff of more than 2,500. District goals include preparing learners of all ages for a diverse and global society as well as partnering with parents and communities. North Kansas City School District uses Novell solutions for their network and collaboration needs.

The Challenges

• Needed a web-based calendar publisher that was compatible with GroupWise.
• Needed a consistent, accurate and centralized method to deliver all GroupWise calendar information to district stakeholders – both internal and external audiences.
• The calendar publishing system needed to be easy to use and navigate for both the account owner and the end-user.
• Needed users, who were the source of the calendar information, to be responsible for updating and maintaining their particular GroupWise calendar. The objective was to then combine these individual calendars with other school and department calendars to create district-level, web-based calendars.
• Needed a consistent look to all calendars and calendar information with enough flexibility to customize them for each school or department.
• Needed a way to update multiple web calendars in a timely manner.
• Needed a faster and easier way for administrators to pull data information into their personal calendar and PDAs from calendars that were already being created in GroupWise, without having to re-key the same information.

The Solution

In December 2003, North Kansas City Schools was searching for a tool to publish existing GroupWise calendars to the web. A forum on Novell’s web site mentioned that Omni Technology Solutions had a GroupWise web-based calendar solution. We downloaded and tested Omni's CCUweb calendar software in our network environment and found its ease of use and GroupWise web calendars to be exactly what we were seeking. Not only was the software affordable, but it also required no additional hardware to be purchased. Most importantly, as our work with the software has evolved, CCUweb programmers have remained responsive to our needs by providing additional calendar enhancements.

Our Findings

“Before North Kansas City Schools purchased Omni's CCUweb software, staff had to key the same information multiple times into multiple systems – whether it be to reserve resources in GroupWise, post items to a web calendar, create printable calendars to send home to parents, or post information to personal calendars on computer desktops or handheld PDAs. This was an inefficient use of people and resources,” said Janet Herdman, executive director of Information & Technology Services for the district. “CCUweb allows us to enter information once, and then share it across multiple web calendars and media platforms. Information shared with our district stakeholders remains up-to-date and consistent, and yet is customized to the needs of staff, students, parents and patrons.”

The Impact

What does this mean for the North Kansas City School District?

CCUweb has allowed North Kansas City School District to restructure the way GroupWise calendar and meeting information is processed, shared and distributed across the district's many web sites. Invididual schools and departments enter their activities into their GroupWise accounts and CCUweb takes care of automatically publishing the calendars to the web site. CCUweb provides the flexibility that a district of more than 2,500 employees requires and the depth of information that the parents of 17,400 students demand. CCUweb allows the school district's internal and external stakeholders to be up to date with school and school district activities at all times.
Click here to view the school district calendars.

Click here to read more information about North Kansas City Schools.