Communication and Collaboration

Look for Google Transition News on New Site

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:40:00 PST

There's a new blog in town: Going Google at Santa Clara University

"This site will always contain the most current information about the progress of the GAE project, and about the availability of resources to help you transition to GAE as easily as possible."

Google Apps for Education Coming to SCU Campus

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 17:41:00 PST

Faculty and staff received an email announcing that the President and Provost approved the recommendation to switch to Google Apps for Education. The transition will take place after two rounds of beta testing with the intention to go live either in the late Fall or early Winter quarter.

The Provost notes in the annoucement:

"This new suite of tools is a critical first step in enhancing the way students, faculty and staff communicate and collaborate with one another as well as with those outside the Santa Clara community. I understand that the transition to Google will require all users to learn a new system in place of GroupWise. I greatly appreciate your full cooperation adapting to the change."

I expect more news and planning material will be provided and I will provide updates here as they are available. For those interested in the process, please see earlier posts in this blog about the town hall meetings, surveys and their results, and task force membership. Thank you for you contributions throughout the process.

Video That Shows the Downside of Email for Decision Making

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 10:56:00 PST

Hi folks,

Apparently I can't embed the video directly, but here's the link (about 2min - worth it and great for sharing for people who wonder why emai isn't the best tool for collaboration):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIqA_YKeboc

Thinking About More Powerful Communication

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Sun, 20 May 2012 07:48:49 PST

We all make communication choices every day. We send emails, we make phone calls, we may use on-line chat or text messaging. But do we make the best choices when it comes to which content and goals we apply to which tool?

With more powerful communication systems like the ones the communication & collaboration task force had the pleasure of considering come greater flexibility in how we communicate. The "right" choice for how we choose to use this flexibility is likely based on your job, your organization's norms, and the needs of the particular task.

A while back I wrote a post about making choices across social media. Friends in the collaboration field have also recently written about communication choices. I'll link to these here, but hope you will add other posts or thoughts in the comments below.

Exciting News: Recommendation is in

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:51:09 PST

We have forwarded our recommendation to the Provost and will be on the agenda for the President's staff meeting next week.

Congratulations, Caitlin!

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:45:00 PST

Caitlin participated in the Microsoft/Google survey and won the new iPad. Thanks to Caitlin and all the other survey respondents.

(Photo credit: Ron Danielson)

We Hope to Have Recommendation to Provost Next Week

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:36:34 PST

This week we reviewed our experiences with the Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Apps "sandboxes." These were SCU specific sites that let us try the features from both vendors.

We are also progressing with the request from the Provost around cost/benefits/risks analysis across both vendors. The IT and Information Services people have had to shoulder most of this burden as we look at actual dollar costs, training hours, implementation strategies, and the like.

Thank you to all who have given us comments throughout this process. This is much more than a technology tool decision. It is a decision about our work environment and practices.

Many of you are already involved in work that takes place in the cloud rather than on a desktop. I hope you see yourself as part of the transition team and will help us provide demonstrations as we discover new ways of collaborating.

Pricing Announcement from Microsoft

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:19:42 PST

Office 365 for Education (available Summer 2012) will free as the price point for basic faculty, student, & staff accounts. Click for details here.

Communication/Collaboration and the Future of Email

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:34:41 PST

How do the Google/Microsoft tools match up around email lists/search etc?

This is a quesiton we've heard at the town hall meetings and in the open ended parts of the survey. My response is generally that they both have strong options, different from Group Wise though, and that Microsoft may have more power in managing lists etc. (Recall from the town hall the description of Microsoft as powerful/complex, Google as less powerful/intuitive.)

My friend Maria Ogneva works for the social media company Yammer and has a new blog post that touches on some of the issues around these questions:

"Social Media vs. Email — Are We Asking The Right Questions?"

Is your message task oriented?
Who is the audience?
Do you know the audience specifically?
Do you want people to find it and iterate on it later?
Is it public or private?

These questions -- and Maria builds them out very thoughtfully -- sometimes suggest that alternatives to email (discussions on a project page or a blog like this one) may be a better way to communicate in some situations.

So, rather than asking about the email feature sets, be thinking about the tasks we have and if other forms of communication and collaboration might be more effective. According to Maria, Capgemini reports a 40% reduction in email when they added other collaboration options.

Having new tools is a step, but what will it take for us to change some of our work habits? For those of you who are already using some social media alternative -- what have you found to be a productive change? Are you using less email?

Where we are - and winner of the iPad!

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:22:36 PST

Ron Danielson and I presented to the Planning Action Council on Tuesday. Wednesday the we had a Task Force meeting where we'd hoped to come to a decision between Google and Microsoft. We decided to postpone action given the hope for more information about how Office365 will work for collaboration -- we are building a "sandbox" and hope to get hands-on with it soon.

In the interim, IT will be working on the cost comparisons and a evaluation table of costs/benefits/risks. Our training and implementation experts will work on similar comparisons related to change management.

Time pressure is significant in the tenor of our discussions given when school starts for the various programs on campus.

Stay tuned -- and congratulations to Caitlin who answered the March survey and won an iPad!

Results from the Microsoft/Google Survey

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:29:37 PST

Thank you to the over 1100 people who responded. Here is a quick rundown of the results. Please note that these results are one part of the decision process. Security, privacy, workflow, and cost are all part of the final recommendation the Communication and Collaboration Task Force will be providing to the President, Provost, & University Coordinating Committee.

http://cms.scu.edu/survey/results.cfm?v=53

iPad results to be annouced soon.

Thank you to Brian Washburn for managing the survey.

Top 10 Issues from Email survey

cfussell@scu.edu (Carl Fussell) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:41:00 PST

Last year a survey was sent out to the community asking what features were important and frequently used in collaboration tools, particularly email and calendaring. Each question/feature had to parts.

How frequently did people use that feature.
How important did they feel that it be available

The results were organized by various communities including

Global - combining of communities
Faculty/Staff - both groups combined
Student - u/g and grad responses
Faculty Only - just faculty responses
Staff Only - just staff responses

For each constituency we extracted the top 10-12 questions for that group, or combined group, in the hope of seeing what the "most important" and the "most used" features were. For example, a question with an "x" by it for a particular group means that question was one of the top 10 in importance, or top 10 in usage. A question with an "x" in all columns means it made to top 10 list for all the groups.

it.scu.edu/projects/collaboration/Top GW Survey Questions.pdf

Next Steps and Town Hall Recap 2/22 11:30-12:30

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:51:00 PST

What do we do now?

The rubric created from prior town halls is available here. We appreciate any comments you have on the blog -- or join us one more time - next Wed 2/22 11:30 to 12:30 in LC 205. Please come to provide comments about how you see the offerings matching to the rubric. The Task Force will then be meeting from 1pm-3pm to begin organizing our suggestions to the Provost and President.

We are at the stage where we have gathered a huge amount of information and need to move to making a decision. Thank you for all your help.

Packed House for Microsoft Town Hall

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:47:00 PST

Another great turn out for the Microsoft Town Hall. Thank you for taking the time to participating in this important process.

Some useful links if you would like to follow up:

Training materials

Basics of Office365

Packed House for Google Town Hall

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:00:00 PST

Wonderful turnout for the first town hall. Great set of questions. Feel free to look at the rubric we created based on earlier town hall conversations. Your comments are welcomed at the bottom of that post.

We also linked to the material Google mentioned about training and a sample Google Site.

The Microsoft Town Hall is this Thursday, LC 205, 1:30pm to 3:00pm. We'd appreciate your RSVP via this link.

Photo credit: Pedro Hernandez-Ramos

Some Training/Info on Google Apps for Ed

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:02:19 PST

Here is a compilation of background on "going Google"

Sample Google Site for a Team Project

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:56:18 PST

I wrote this post and created the below Google Site as an example for my students:

https://sites.google.com/site/primoprojectsite/

TODAY: Open Forum with Google

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:32:00 PST

We are hosting Google from 1:30 to 3pm in Lab 205 in the Learning Commons (Microsoft, same time/same place Thur).

Come when you can. Ask all the questions you want.

This session follows a 3.5 deep-dive demo with the Task Force. We have asked the vendors to walk through the scenarios listed in this rubric.

Rubric for Vendor Evaluations

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:14:53 PST

Many thanks to UC Berkeley for making their rubric public. Most of the technical issues (bottom section) are from their work. http://technology.berkeley.edu/productivity-suite/google/matrix.html

The Scenarios were built from the Town Hall meeting and task force discussions. Thank you for your help.

A. Offline Editing

Ease of Use

Usefulness

B. Faculty—for research, teaching, and service—, administrators, staff, and students need to work in distributed groups on a regular basis. Collaborations involving people with different roles (e.g., faculty and students, faculty and administrators, administrators with external constituents like Trustees) require any SCU-provided system to allow for flexibility while remaining secure and confidential (when needed).

Ease of Use

Usefulness

C. A faculty member involved in research with students needs to be able to track multiple projects simultaneously, each involving different groups of students (though some students may be in more than project) and at times also external partners/collaborators with whom all group documents and functionality needs to be shared on an equal basis. The same situation applies to an administrator tasked with setting up a search committee requiring participation from faculty from multiple departments, administrators, students, and external participants. Students working on a group project in a course face similar challenges.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

D. All groups will need access to a common project space that has a user-customizable “dashboard”/portal to share files (some of them very large, gigabytes), be able to set up audio and video conferences with multiple participants within that project space, have access to all individual as well as to a group calendar, have an online group whiteboard for brainstorming, be able to see who’s online at any given time, and have access to project management resources such as timelines, activity checks, and workflow (particularly for manager’s approvals). All documents can be edited by the group, and the system has version control to both keep copies of previous versions and allow visibility of each participant’s contributions. The latter case applies, for example, to faculty who need to evaluate each team member’s contributions to a group class or research project, to the administrator who needs to demonstrate due process, and so on.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

E. The system allows a faculty member, team leader, or “group owner” to easily assemble a mailing list of all group members, and emails can also be accessed within the workspace created (e.g., though an applet or widget). Group members have ways to manage how they receive emails and can set up rules for short-term filing and for archiving.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

F. 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 various 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 school -- I jump to the University Facebook and see a senior engineering student who is currently on-line. She answers our question and we’re done. At lunch I click on the Adobe Lodge menu and send an IM 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

Ease of Use

Usefulness

G. Create a systematic way of dealing with the retention of permanent borne digital content in the systems we now have (except to print them up?). I don’t mean “archiving” or backing up to disk; I mean storing and filing in an intentional, retrievable and organized fashion. Need to cover historically permanent digital records; records such as the records of this task force, calendars and email of key administrators, shared institutional or departmental documents that may never find their way to paper, etc. This will have implications particularly as we migrate content to new systems. May involved “projects” as entities and the ability to move to a searchable, but archived (non-editable) form. What are the best practices?

Ease of Use

Usefulness

H. Distribution List Mail: I’m on quite a few lists so a rule examines all incoming mail and routes various list messages to various folders that I can review at my convenience.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

I. Personalized email to a listserve/group: I need to send a nicely formatted (html) email to individuals who are part of a group. The list of individuals already exists, so I do not need to retype them. Members of the group could be affiliates, non-affiliates, or both. The emails should have a personalized salutation: Dear “Bob”, and data: your final grade in the class is an “A”.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

J. Project Group: Monitor all email from members of an active project and route to a folder where that can all be aggregated.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

K. Auto forwarding: watch for messages on a particular topic, from a particular source or domain, and forward them on to another email account I use. Modify the subject line with an additional keyword so when received by the other system, it can categorize that accordingly.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

L. Highlighting: More than a few times I’ve overlooked the messages reminding me about timesheet approvals. Create a rule to watch for those messages and when they arrive, highlight the subject in red so it stands out in my inbox.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

M. Manage existing box: At times I need to manage my store of messages. I will create a rule to identify some class of messages, perhaps by date, perhaps by subject, perhaps by source (or some combination of these) and apply the rule to all or some portion of my messages in my inbox, or perhaps even across existing folders. They rule identifies messages meeting the criteria, and applies some sort of disposition to them.

Ease of Use

Usefulness

N. Email/Calendar

Integration w Collaboration Tools

Ease of Tools Development

User Familiarity

On Premise Integration

Administration

Authentication

Mobile Integration

Acceptance

Security & Privacy

Choice of Access

Functionality & Features

Interoperability

O. Secruity & Privacy

Acceptable Use Policy

Non-consensual Access to End-User Data

Authentication

e-Discovery

Location of Data

Encryption of Email at Rest

P. Contractual

Data Transfer upon Termination

Data Management & Transfer

Accessibility

HIPAA/BAA

Account Suspension

Notification on Access

Limitation of Liability

Defaults

Service Level Agreements

Open Forums w Google & Microsoft

tgriffith@scu.edu (Terri Griffith) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:52:00 PST

The task force is preparing for the deep demos with Google and Microsoft on the mornings of Feb 13 and Feb 16. The demos are built on the scenarios you helped us with in the earlier Town Hall. We are taping these demos (thank you to all involved!) and will have video segments available on-line ASAP.

Open Forums with Vendors

The afternoons of Feb 13 & 16 are open forums with the vendors -- Lab 205 in the Learning Commons:

-Feb 13 from 1:30-3pm Google
-Feb 16 from 1:30-3pm Microsoft

Come when you can. Ask all the questions you want.

Migration

I know many people are interested in the actual migration process that will transition us from our current system to the next. We have been assured that for both vendors there are a variety of options -- but SCU will have to make the decision about how to proceed. We'll need to evaluate whether a third-party does it or we do it in-house.

Looking forward to seeing you at the Open Forums.