Santa Clara University

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the first Communication & Collaboration town hall. We had an excellent representation of staff, and a smattering of faculty and students. Our agenda was simple: brief introductions, explanation of our planned process, questions, with the greatest focus being on examples of work that could be improved by changes to our communication and collaboration process and tools. 

After our next meeting, we will post an updated list of the scenarios we’d like vendors to consider. Here is one example -- this one was the “starting my day” example we mentioned at the town hall:

I sit down at my desk (home or on-campus) and log into the private network (even on a wired connection). A portal/homepage opens showing my email in-box, documents that have been recently edited, a dashboard showing project progress, the University news feed, and a snippet of my calendar. I see that our Task Force report is due and click into that workspace. From inside the workspace I see that several questions have been raised around one of the Task Force documents so I begin working on it  -- and pleasantly discover that my colleague is working on another section of the document at the same time.  We realize that we need a perspective from a student, ideally in the Engineering college -- I jump the University facebook and see a senior engineering student who is currently on-line. She answers our question and were done. At lunch I click on the Adobe Lodge menu and send an instant message to a friend asking them to meet me. My work is seamless and I don’t sign-in again for the rest of the day.

Task force members are building out scenarios like this to share with the vendors. We think this approach will keep them more focused on our needs and less on a list of features a particular tool might provide. 

Thanks to everyone who suggested new examples during the meeting and since (see comments to prior posts). Keep them coming here and/or comment on the ones already mentioned.