Summary
Kids Village is a private school in Lindon, Utah serving children from kindergarten through fourth grade. DirectPointe’s Small Office Solution is a combination of hardware, software and services that seamlessly integrate with Google Apps Premier Edition. It provides the essential network, user and domain management software a centralized or distributed office needs to implement Google Apps, as well as managed services that support and secure the IT environment.
Challenge
Kids Village needed an effective solution for staff members to collaborate with email, documents, spreadsheets, and calendars on the school network as well as their personal computers at home where the staff did not always have access to the software and files on school computers. Kids Villiage needed to either purchase standardized computers or software for their staff to use at home, or require that the staff spend more time at the school to get their work done.
Solution
DirectPointe worked with Kids Village to understand their needs and determined Google Apps was the right solution to their problem. DirectPointe provisioned Google Apps from DirectPointe’s Small Office Solution installed at the Kids Village campus. DirectPointe’s Small Office Solution is already integrated with Google Apps so it took less than a day to have it up and running for their entire staff. Although some staff members were hesitant at first to have their data stored on someone else’s servers, their concern was outweighed by the ability to lower their IT costs while increasing access to their files and related software from any place they have a computer and an Internet connection.
Result
The Kids Village staff can now seamlessly work and collaborate from the school or at home at any time and on any machine.
“My teachers and staff members now have more options when and where they do their work with the Google Apps suite of applications, including Gmail, Documents, Calendar, and others.” said Ann Whitaker, President and Founder of Kids Village. “Our Google Apps suite is personalized for Kids Village and costs us less than other more expensive and less flexible software suites.”Today, staff members are able to share documents and communicate with others regardless of platform or software. Google Apps also allows the staff members to encourage collaborative learning among their students which aids in the fostering of peer-to-peer review and the ability to observe in the creation and process of scholarly content.
