OpenText Solutions for Primary & Secondary Education: Best Practices

At OpenText, we have a formal, repeatable, and proven methodology uniquely tailored for educational institutions rolling out the FirstClass suite of collaborative applications. This methodology has been successfully applied across a wide range of deployments to staff, teachers and students.

  • Planning and Design
    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Project team selection
    • Project team training
    • Collaborative suite identification
    • Collaborative plan delivery
  • Implementation: Installation, Configuration and Customization
    • Hardware, OS and storage subsystem installation
    • Software installation
    • Collaborative configuration
    • Customization
    • Initial content creation
    • Account creation
  • Deployment
    • Rollout plan development
    • Administrator, advocate and selected user rollout
    • Small-scale rollout
    • Large-scale rollout
  • Monitoring, Enhancement and Expansion
    • Adoption monitoring
    • Success modeling
    • Model application and proliferation
    • Best practice institutionalization

Adoption and expansion of collaborative tools within an educational environment occurs through methodical up-front planning and building on incremental successes. Before proceeding to the next level of adoption, goal achievement must be reached in the previous stage:

  • Stage 1: A need for collaborative tools to improve internal communication and/or the education process is identified. Senior sponsors are on board.
  • Stage 2: A planning team develops a detailed approach to introduction of the collaborative tool suite. Advocates and trial projects are identified and committed to the project.
  • Stage 3: Trial projects are conducted to validate the approach.
  • Stage 4: Lessons learned during the trial projects are used to enhance the initial stages of the broader rollout.
  • Stages 5+: Collaborative tools are rolled out to larger groups within the educational organization. Feedback is utilized to ensure that success is modeled and duplicated.

Close contact with customers following their deployments allows us to identify successful practices and build them into our introduction methodology. New customers benefit tremendously from the knowledge base developed through many educational deployments.