Educational Institutions Embrace Novell Teaming Solutions to Solve Collaboration and Productivity Challenges

Novell today announced further success of its Teaming solution within the K-12 education market. Understanding the growing need for individual schools and districts to foster more efficient communication and knowledge sharing among the teaching and administrative staff, Novell is providing collaboration solutions that blend flexibility and customization to serve the education market and its specific productivity challenges and budget requirements.

Highlighting Novell's recent traction in this market are three school districts who each have distinct collaboration needs within the K-12 market. Beaver Dam Unified School District, Beech Grove City Schools and Tuscaloosa City Schools, are all using Novell's Teaming solution to unify operations across physical boundaries, reduce costly travel budgets and establish a professional learning environment that allows teachers and staff to collaborate in real time.

"Novell is committed to providing solutions that address the key collaboration challenges that all organizations with large groups of people and multiple locations face," said Wendy Steinle, director of Solution and Product Marketing, End-User Computing for Novell. "Our Teaming solution deployed at Tuscaloosa, Beech Grove and Beaver Dam, illustrates how primary and secondary education institutions can improve communications, save costs and streamline operations, freeing educators and staff to focus on the core mission — educating students."

Beaver Dam Unified School District
Seeking a more cost-effective and flexible collaboration platform, Beaver Dam Unified School District, located north of Madison, Wisconsin, selected Novell® Teaming to virtually change the whole thought process behind collaborative education and move it beyond the traditional classroom. The district created an online workspace for its faculty and staff to work together without leaving their buildings. Now, users share files and ideas, access the staff newsletter and participate in grading discussions. Departments can team-up to manage files and ensure that subjects are being taught consistently across all schools. Nearly 20 principals, assistant principals and administrative staff used to travel to meet with each other once a week for several hours; now they meet once a month and use Novell Teaming to collaborate online and participate in conference calls. This has not only reduced travel costs, but it has also increased efficiency and security by allowing administrators to remain in their schools while working directly with students and staff.

Beech Grove City Schools
With a limited budget and rising travel costs, Beech Grove City Schools of Indianapolis turned to Novell Teaming to provide teachers a virtual workspace to collaborate on projects on their own time, without the constraints of scheduled meetings. This allows teachers to remain in their classrooms, reduce time and travel expenses, and still work with teachers throughout the schools’ disparate locations. Bringing the benefits of social networking to an educational environment enables users already familiar with social networking to collaborate in teams and reduces the time teachers spend in meetings or traveling to other locations.

Tuscaloosa City School District
Using Novell Teaming, Tuscaloosa, Alabama City School District created online workspaces where 1,300 teachers and staff can share documents, coordinate tasks and discuss ideas via forums, wikis and blogs. Performing curriculum reviews or jointly editing documents, which previously could take months, has been reduced to a matter of days now that all team members can log-in at any time to review and approve materials. Additionally, the district was able to improve the sharing of information within its Academic Transfer System (ATS), which involves students that are placed in alternative education programs. Novell Teaming allowed the school district to set up secure team workspaces so that home school teachers can collaborate with alternative instructors quickly and easily, including the distributing and grading of assignments. With Novell Teaming in place, Tuscaloosa’s ATS program is operating more efficiently and productively and has already made a positive impact on student success rates. The inherent security features of Novell Teaming also help the program comply with FERPA privacy regulations ensuring that teachers, and soon students, can collaborate in a secure and safe social networking environment.

To learn more about Novell collaboration solutions, including Novell Teaming, visit: http://www.novell.com/solutions/collaboration/.