Microsoft Office 365 and Education
Microsoft Office 365 offers unique opportunities for Education. Sometimes Microsoft makes a contract with a college or university to take advantage of licensing fees already paid and have Microsoft cloud services offer unified services to faculty, staff, and students. Sometimes individual departments are able to do the same thing. This is only possible because Microsoft cloud products have now been adopted by some major players in higher education, and the utility and suitability of these products in higher education has now become accepted. In the past, I. T. departments of universities have had grounds for objection, making implementation difficult when security concerns were cited. Now however central I.T. departments at colleges and universities everywhere are allowing individual departments to take advantage of this newer, cheaper technology. One of the great powers of Microsoft Office and their existing relationship with higher education is that all departments of higher education in the United States already have Microsoft licenses. Because of this, colleges, universities, and individual departments can enter into discussion with Microsoft to exchange existing volume licenses for the cheaper cloud services. The cloud services save a significant amount of money in higher education and also help prevent risk. Microsoft has had to work hard to prove to the education and government sectors that cloud server products are secure and reliable enough for confidential, mission-critical data and services. As well as in higher education, US Federal agencies can also use Microsoft Office 365 instead of on site servers. This means that the highest possible level of redundancy and reliability is guaranteed by the full power of Microsoft with a financially backed SLA (Service Level Agreement). In higher education, SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are poised to allow for seamless administration and the ability to more successfully compete for grant and donor funding. The problems with the traditional servers and their use in higher education has been three-fold. The first is the expense of security and accessibility considerations to be seen to and the second is in having disaster recovery plans. All institutions of higher education receiving federal funding are required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities act. This means that systems must accommodate readers for the blind used on computers to access applications and websites. The other issue is unexpected cost from server malfunctions and breakdowns. These considerations are handled by the rock-solid offerings of the Microsoft Cloud, which guarantees 99.99% uptime. In the world of higher education, Microsoft offers student and faculty access to servers with a lower cost and constant uptime. Compliance issues are a thing of the past, as Microsoft is required to continually reassess and improve reliability and security at no additional costs to your institution.
Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint is a great place to bring electronic documents together in a framework that allows for the controlled addition of metadata and extreme control in search parameters. The best way to have access to the newest and most reliable edition without ever losing data or having breakdowns is through Office 365. Institutions who do not wish to go directly through Microsoft sometimes work through Intermedia, another well-respected provider of cloud services. The Web and I has dealt with Microsoft and Intermedia implementations as well as on-site servers. Of all these solutions, the Web and I has produced the best result with Microsoft Office 365. In systems implementation on a campus, stakeholders often want to be assured of the use of commercial off-the-shelf software exclusively rather than custom software where risk is more difficult to manage. The Sarbanes Oxley Act has affected higher education by bringing about a requirement for separate technical and functional workers in software that handles any accounting data. Universities and colleges are generally requiring this for all shared software. With the Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft is the technical team. Your computer staff and consultants like the Web and I work for functional implementation. This provides incredible reliability as well as an extreme reduction in cost for technical staff for server maintenance and constant capacity testing. We have clients that have their systems customized and go years without need for a single expensive service call. This makes Microsoft Cloud products a new way of doing business for higher education.
Microsoft SharePoint has easy to use metadata features that are very suitable for libraries and archives. It is easy to create lists of your electronic files that provide bibliographic citations in any format, while standardizing collections to avoid duplication and maintain a transparent, cohesive structure. A consultation with your archivist and our team can result in an excellent library system complete with controlled vocabularies and easy citation exports.
Microsoft SharePoint also has the potential to be used as contact management software. For departments with a very constrained budget, the use of SharePoint is a great idea. Synchronization to Access databases on desktops are the best way to manage mailing lists in these scenarios. However an extensive amount of consultation is required since SharePoint is designed more for document collaboration.However for most departments, the best choice for contact management is to add Microsoft Dynamics CRM for administrative staff.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
For contact management, the best Microsoft cloud product is a part of Office 365 known as Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Designed for businesses, it is very customizable and easily merges to and handles E-Mail, scheduling, donors, grants, budgeting, scheduling, and the maintenance of intellectual inventories to assist in bringing together talent from disparate departments to collaborate in well-funded interdisciplinary projects. Development personnel benefit from the marketing modules, which the Web and I can customize to work more like Raiser’s Edge and other fund-raising software. Our background in higher education makes us uniquely suited to help higher education departments with this transition. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is underutilized by higher education, but our business experience tells us it can be vital. A single list of all internal and external contacts and institutions can be maintained, and most business processes of the department can be centralized in the software resulting in better transparency and compliance as well as ERP efficiency improvements. Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP is a tool that higher education has started to adopt from the business world because it is so useful and suitable. With ERP, we help higher education departments analyze and map out their existing business processes including points of collaboration. Redundant data entry is eliminated, and data entered is available for analysis. With the elimination of redundant data sets, the opportunity for reducing error is greatly reduced. Employees are also not wasting time recreating the work of others. To add to the efficiency when managing lists of people, products like Broadlook for CRM can help departments keep lists standardized and accurate. Word Merge can be used against any data, and the word merge forms are easy to set up. This is great for mass mailings, creating labels, and merging to E-Mail though Outlook. Reports that are printable are also easily generated. Functions such as competing for grants, managing journal approval processes, scheduling of facilities and equipment, and scheduling of employees can take place in this centralized environment. All of this data can be accessible to development personnel, who can best manage giving with this powerful tool. The sophisticated management of communications and campaigns make for a unified voice for promoting donations. Best practices for donor management can be easily controlled.
Award management for grants is handled by many different types of specialized software at great cost from companies like InfoEd. These software products are excellent and effective in helping departments compete for excellence by maximizing funding and efficiency at every level. However all of these functions can be built into the framework of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at far lower cost. Managing funding opportunities and campaigns as well as transparency in donor approach can help departments reach their full potential. Post award management often deals with the same people but with a different business process and goals. Budgetary compliance and management of deliverables should be managed perfectly by departments. Federal and non-federal funders like to award grants and contracts to higher education departments that are excellent at complying and delivering everything promised. Post-award management can be simplified and will flow naturally from the pre-award stage. The data collected can be used after a two-year period for projections of funding, helping departments manage research and service strategies that maximize growth. Without excellent data and a methodology for trend analysis, departments are in danger of flying blind in an increasingly competitive world. Great consultants are needed to manage this change for Higher Education. Martin Low, our chief Systems Engineer, Founder, and President has been involved in higher education technology projects since informally helping in 1979 with testing new systems for E-Mail, library cataloging by computer, and more. After work in the fields of insurance, finance, and law, Mr. Low developed an understanding of both compliance and techniques for financial competition for organizations. He brought this experience to Thompson, the publishing giant, where he was mentored by some of the best people in the world of marketing of publications, data, and periodicals. These fields have strong ties to academia. Mr. Low worked hard in fundraising and grant writing on a volunteer basis, and eventually made the transition to academic grants joining New York University School of Medicine in 1999, tasked with modernizing the grant competition system and encouraging the best research strategy practices. While at NYU, Mr. Low wrote a lot about intellectual inventories, and their use in libraries. He connected Grants data to library data so that grant funders would have accurate access to the wonderful publications of the School, helping to attract more funding. These intellectual inventories also helped to identify talent in disparate departments without much of an existing relationship. Research and service departments could be found that had the talent, when combined, to compete for larger interdisciplinary projects. This has allowed for a great increase in funding and institutional effectiveness. These ideas were brought by Martin and the rest of the new grants team at Columbia University. Columbia University implemented these ideas on a grander scale with Mr. Low as systems administrator, and they use the same system that we launched at the beginning of 2007 today. Columbia had to spend $1,000,000 for InfoEd and $3,000,000 more for implementation. This great expense was an excellent investment at the time because it went far beyond the development of a system. The system was tested thoroughly, internally and externally. A bullet-proof disaster management and recovery plan was put into place. Testing to make sure that the system could operate under load and with full security was a testing effort led by former top IBM software engineers famous for the reliability of their products. The logistics of testing and quality analysis and improvement, compliance, and risk management involves many people. Experts including myself ran automated load testing of systems designed to break the software and then remove the vulnerabilities, trying every possible form of system interaction possible. Rather than just trusting machines, every procedure that was tested automatically under load was also subject to manual load testing. This means that hundreds of users are simultaneously performing the tasks at terminals throughout the University, simulating real peak conditions. This, along with independent auditing of best practices by private IT consultancies, guaranteed the reliability of the system. Microsoft makes a far larger effort. Their software testing is beyond the scope of this article, but it is worth mention that it is free with cloud software. Microsoft tests everything independently and keeps the data centers running. Redundancy in the data centers across four continents assures perpetual security of your data. Users have been enjoying up-time since June of 2011 with few interruptions. There has never been a loss of data, and backups can be made.
Project Management Online.
Microsoft Project Management Online can help to manage complex projects over a long time requiring the coordination of multiple parties. Microsoft Project Online can serve to collect the data to produce all of the deliverables on a grant or contract and handle the day-to-day management. It is more suitable to day-to-day operations while CRM is suited to coordinating the communication of a department. Grant and Contract Principals can make use of Project Management Online for the detailed internal collaboration and data collection. Many if not all of these features can be created in Dynamics CRM. They can be programmed in by the Web and I, and for features like Gantt analysis, there are other projects that have sophisticated project management features for Dynamics CRM Online. The decision on which equally valid strategy to use depends upon the individual needs of your department or institution. The Web and I will consult with institutes for higher education for free to the extend of advising in all manner of investigation and IT strategy before implementation.
Windows Intune: Windows Licensing and Software and Security Control
Windows Intune has Windows Enterprise edition for the latest stable release of Windows as well as previous but still supported versions of Windows. Windows Updates and Microsoft Office updates can be managed centrally. Sophisticated hacking protection and proactive virus and malware protection detect and stop threats in their tracks, then inform administrators.
Licensing
SharePoint basic user licenses are $3.00 per month and full-featured licensing for administrative employees is available for $7.00 per month. No full-licenses need to be purchased by the user. The Educational Version of Microsoft Office 365 offers free services but with less reliability and no access to Dynamics CRM. The business licensing offers a-la-carte choices to maximize your budget. Business licensing also has met the ISO 9000 standard of 99.99% guaranteed uptime while the less expensive educational licenses meet a lower standard and have deprecated features. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is suitable for department administrators, schedulers, HR, development staff, journal editors, and all external relations staff. Some licenses can be combined per function rather than per person but this is not ideal for implementation because responsible security best practices include having one account per employee for accountability. Project Management is available at a savings when it is paid in advance annually. The normal price is $34 per user per month, but institutions using an annual pre-payment pay only $25.00 per month. Only senior administrators and principals for grants and contracts should have project management. The day-to-day operations are tracked in one place, and the generation of project document deliverables becomes automated, collaborative, transparent, and secure. People can work from any location, and as with all of Microsoft Office 365, it works just as well on both PC and Mac platforms. Although Microsoft competes with Apple in certain markets, Microsoft is also a significant Apple shareholder, and Microsoft is increasing consumer choice through offering full support for those who work with a MAC Platform. Departments that have users with the MAC platform have traditionally had barriers to collaborating with software. Microsoft is a strong visionary with interoperability and offering full choices to consumers. This means that Microsoft Cloud products have the key to forming a bridge between PC and MAC users. This I.T. policy, we feel, helps to encourage academic freedom of expression. To increase system reliability and to standardize the application of Windows Updates and Microsoft Software updates, as well as track all licensing and pro-actively prevent viruses and malware, can manage their windows licensing through Windows Intune. Along with a Windows license for that machine, there is central administration for fixing viruses, preventing hackers, and tracking licensing. The people with the most talent will often choose their own technology platform, and an IT policy should never be exclusionary. Institutions and departments can sometimes trade in previous ownership of volume licenses for credit towards cloud based services. This ensures compliance and speeds roll-out of Microsoft Office to all users and machines. Each license for user includes up to five machines for software installation. Library access for students and visiting scholar can be by seat instead of per user, making software costs predictable and minimizing them to only what is needed. Windows Intune pricing is available upon request for it varies according to needs and institutional usage. Microsoft has been known to be very generous and flexible to departments and institutions of higher education who wish to implement cloud services. Pricing will vary, and it is a good idea to negotiate directly with Microsoft to get the best possible deal. The Web and I can provide quotes for the standard licensing, but most education institutes and departments will have a lower price determined by an offer by Microsoft. The Web and I is very good at assisting organizations in the management of this process. Microsoft Exchange is generally handled in higher education by centralized IT at the institution level. This means that departments do not need to pay for that part of Microsoft Office 365. Institutional Exchange works very well with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. This allows the flexibility for Microsoft Cloud Services to maintain the lowest total cost of ownership, security, compliance, and reliability.
Assessing Needs
The process of assessing institutional needs and determining the best cloud strategy can be improved with free pre-sales consultation by the Web and I. We will help you manage the process of navigating change with Microsoft. We will listen to your needs and provide you with the information you need to make the best decision. Pre-sales consultation for higher education is free of charge. This thorough understanding of your needs that we will gain through this process will help us make your project efficient and properly planned. Call us today at 646-853-0573.
Future Addition:
Microsoft Cloud Planning Guide for Higher Education, expected the Week Ending October 25, 2013. This content welcomes the input of any experts who feel that they have something to contribute intellectually. New engineers are encouraged to submit commentary for approval. Publication credit will be provided. A full 500-1000 word synopsis of every position will be published with you the author receiving publication credit and all rights provided we can re-use your material, giving you credit each time. All ideas will be subject to peer review from a board of previous contributors and consultants who collaborate with the Web and I.
Compliance Notification
All methodologies, custom programs, reports, and features have multiple points of compliance to satisfy the most stringent institutional needs. All systems, whether they handle accounting systems or not, comply with the Sarbanes Oxley act. This act requires a division of functional and technical work on systems in a formalized manner as well as risk management requirements. Technical and functional users can not be the same employee, and each phase and task have functional and technical aspects. The institutional or department staff with project stakeholders act as project participants on the functional side along with the Web and I, the functional customiser and implementor. Our management has worked on quality implementations with consultants from IBM Black Hat Team, Microsoft Engineers for every project we support, We have numerous experts on-call to deal with simple issues requiring their expertise. The Web and I maintains these resources as a best practices standard, and we do not pass on the expenses of these consultations. Our policy is to find out the proven methods to handle your needs. We examine case studies paralell to your situation, and we find out from them as well as industry analysts what worked and didn’t work for them. Along with these best practices, Microsoft guarantees 99.99% uptime, industry standard government quality encryption for sensitive data, compliance of all software with university policies, compliance with the Americans with Disabilities act, and more. Microsoft has copies of your enterprise data on four continents in multiple locations on those continents. Multiple redundant copies of your environment minimize downtime and eliminate data loss, even in severe nation-level disaster. In the event customers have experienced a data warehouse shutdown of their primary access location, service has been generally restored within the hour. Since this happens on average once in 3 years, most customers that we have polled extensively since the launch of Office 365 experience no more than eight minutes per year on average. There have been no cases, in the years that Microsoft Cloud Services were offered, of a permanent functional breakdown of any feature. We have been able to ascertain no reports worldwide of any client experiencing a permanent loss of data since the original launch of Microsoft Online Services years before Office 365, a refined second-generation offering, can boast.
If Cloud Services require less hours of systems engineering, therefore less money per client for the Web and I, Why does the Web and I Focus on Cloud Services.
The Web and I has a policy that has been formed by working with clients in law, government, politics, non-profit fund raising, real estate, human resources, accounting specialists, financing and loans, collecting and factoring, global publishing, ivy league school administration and implementation, city university administration and implementation, state university administration and implementation, internal and external communication automation including automatic data cleansing and robotic contact research framework which collects most of the data from any pre-existing source you have available. Deliverables, grant application forms, internal project management deliverables and project reports and notes can be managed from one place. Post award management can be automated, perfected, and compliant. A new transparency into accuracy as well as automatic corrections to standardize data reduce staffing needs for cleaning data and have proved more reliable that human data cleansing. All custom data cleansing is performed with custom algorithms to suit best practices. Again where the Web and I lacks expertise, we have a policy of consulting with outside consultants for decisions and advice outside of our expertise. We develop these resources to improve our value, and we do not pass on the cost for this wealth of experience to our clients. When we send our engineers into the field, they can be comfortable in sticking to their area of strictly tested and proven competence. We can charge for the minute or by the task for any experts of great renown, and most of the time we can negotiate this for free. Stakeholders who are in charge of budgeting can have nothing but admiration for departments who are properly documenting every effort to verify project strategies with the best experts who specialize in the problem at hand. This unloads the responsibility of ensuring project success in a best practices methodology with a proven track record in Higher Education offered by the Web and I. Both Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine are using my customized implementations since I have left there, and they have developed the right choices from the beginning, so they are likely to continue using these systems.
Savings Analysis: Complete Cost and Risk Comparison for On-Site Versus Trusted Microsoft Cloud Services.
Cost Analysis: Credit for Licenses Owned by the Project Personnel and Facilities
Many institutions who are considering transitioning to Microsoft Office 365 in a smooth and efficient manner where more of the improvements and less of the problems caused by implementation techniques that stray from best practices. The Web and I has leadership in Mr. Low that has learned and collected all of the best practices for smooth and compliant project management through years of experience in many channels, organizational structures, software needs, compliance landscapes, and numerous required innovations. A proper implementation from the Web and I for cloud services including complete business process analysis and re-engineering starts at $25,000. We have special prices for state and government bodies far below retail. We offer reduced service fees for non-profits who come to use for help, and often we secure free Microsoft licenses which we trade to them in exchange for their feedback which can be collected as Microsoft desires as data for product improvement. With an experienced project leadership like the team at the Web and I, we can make a project that is on=time, on budget, audit safe, using proven best practices, consulting the most qualified people for the least money, and the benefit of years of amazing innovation and a 100% satisfied client base. All of our clients are happy to speak with you. We encourage them to tell them what they like and what they feel needs improvement. We address these issues weekly by processing and implementing all feasible improvement suggestions. We have a list of highly experienced collaborators with advanced degrees working on our ideas and features world-wide. They are there to point out and assist us with flaws in our strategy which can be fixed with their specialty expertise. Instead of passing on many expensive consultation costs from experts used to $500 an hour, we give them in trade for their advice the documentation that they have full rights to proceeds from their idea and we help them market it. We feel that this is an important part of making sure that we have ideas that are solidly grounded and have proper academic peer review. Wherever possible standards are sent to the staff of ISO (International Standards Organization), IEEE, and any other applicable specialty academic standards organization in fields that provide the best academic peer review sections for the strategies of individual plan functional deliverables. Another way in which our implementation of Custom Microsoft Cloud software that is tailored for your business is that our methods, combine with the reliability and security of the Cloud, The reason that our planning is so good is that it reflects on the critical changes we make in organizations. Systems Engineering talent alone will lead to disastrous implementations. All of our implementations are managed by an interdisciplinary team with different goals and varying expertise. We have a graphic designer, who likes to add minimalism, clarity, ease of use, and elegance to software where tasks progress in a process that is recognizable to the user and maintains the philosophy of their business process, Mr. Low, who is an expert at forensically collecting and categorizing groups of business information and files in ways that make sense. We can even create more walking space in offices where institutional real estate is limited and ensure that no document or communication is lost or shuffled under. Departments working on data-sets with overlapping values will each find reduced steps of data entry as a single data steward is responsible for coordinating specific teams in entering specific data. People enjoy and thrive in making and improving systems. During the process, stakeholders from multiple departments decide who from which project is responsible for which data. Significance and rules for data maintenance and collection are discussed and agreed upon between departments using proven organizational psychology and education techniques proven by experts to increase acceptance with, innovation with, and the most important step: winning the hearts and minds for your employees. If you tell people that the project will allow them to help come up with a more efficient re-design, if we can accommodate data collection in a way that serves the collector of the data, we have made a project ally who will help improve the implementation at every turn by submitting change request tickets until the employee has the best system of their own design. This allows them to use a system that is in line with their expertise. It is proven that providing employees with a sense of legitimate accomplishment and honorable recognition is a far higher incentive than higher salaries. Helping employees showcase and eventually meet their best potential is more effective in motivation as well as in dispelling project resistance. Project resistance blocks communication of ideas necessary to make for a cohesive implementation with functionality and savings and transparency for all. Companies like InfoEd will charge $250,000 for a department and your organization will have an additional three times that in implementation costs including servers, security for servers, technical staff not needed in cloud implementations, for a total of $1,000,000 as of 2005 (Cite installation of InfoEd ERP at Columbia University). With cloud installation and implementation there are several reasons why the end result is better at all levels. Licensing costs for servers are almost non-existent in the Cloud. You pay per user, and it is possible to work out substantially discounted and well-considered deals. All compliance is taken care of with best practices methodology. With the technical system always and immediately working, the Web and I engineers can work with your staff to implement the business process integration, cleanse, optimize, and index data, add fields with strict rules for library archive so that any manner of library cataloging and controlled vocabulary is included if ever needed. These can be rolled out as needed or hidden if not optimum for your purposes. Because there are no technical problems and because we have by this time learned so much about your needs and business processes, we are able to concentrate on listening and implementing customization and linking all data. Stewardship rules will make data collection more efficient. Having to cleanse data is not a common skill and it detracts from the mental acuity that your employees need to apply to doing their best work in a controlled environment that is easiest for the natural progression of the data collection process. From wizards that ask questions and control answers which are designed to enforce correct data collection by staff with only clerical expertise, the person hours for this task can be replaced by low-cost utilities from Broadlook. Developing an initial contact list from any organization with which you do business is easier, faster, and more accurate when an administrative assistant can point the organization to the Website of the organization within CRM. With most websites, the intelligent work saving routines extract names, positions, related articles, personal information, and contact information of everyone the organization has chosen to mention on their site. All the data from employee directories that is public is created. These show up as temporary contacts which can be categorized and promoted to your list of contacts at the organization, others in the organization that you are not dealing with at the time are available in the system already because the research has been done. Minor enrichment of details can be done based on personal experience on people and their custom settings in the systems to link them to the right functionality and modules for their organization or contact type helps organizational communication become completely accurate. The procedure for preparing a report or a mailing has to only be created once. The form can be provided in Word or Acrobat to the Engineer. A word merge document for a single page, like a certificate or an expense account or a paystub can be created by the person who is the steward of the data and the process. The individual or team should collaborate and come up with the best way that the process should work. The great flexibility of the system allows for every manner of work style and preference. This is a vital tool in increasing user acceptance. In a proper implementation, an entire educational and consensus driven process is put together in the most friendly and congenial manner, but with an organized format for collaboration that ensures peer review, risk management, and individual stakeholder control. Each significant user has their part of the software related to their duties put together in a manner that meets the needs of the position but reflects the favored method for data collection and validation. In addition, Broadlook Tools operates behind the scenes, working for a few dollars a month and doing the job of a hundred data cleansing and quality experts with automatic auditing and cleansing. Once this is fine-tuned staffing requirements for these tasks are lessened. Studies show that consensus and overall employee mood and enthusiasm suffers with extra clerical work that is not creative or worthy of the skill and intellect of the employee. A proper implementation gives every end-user a part of the system that they feel they designed for themselves. They get the credit for. They are now honor-bound to do more high quality work at a higher volume with greater creativity. This is why algorithmic work tools like Broadlook are not just for data accuracy, better sorted by a machine than a human by rules set by the stewards of the data. Areas will also be set up for formal collaboration, exchange of ideas, and sign-offs by all stakeholders involved in a particular issue. If a procedure is changed that affects two departments, a poorly executed project will create malfunction, inefficiency, varied standards for using the program to provide all the deliverables output and tasks, while the design of the system pushes the users through the most efficient manners for dealing with situations. The flexibility and speed of development of features in under half an hour allows users to see their input come to life immediately. Empowering the workers you do have will bring more excellence to your already excellent academic institution or department. The global community of specialists in all areas are growing. No longer is simply good science, good intellectual works, great art created to fully help reach your potential. There are methods that the best ivy league universities, the best community colleges, who are masters at finance in government controlled organizations, and people waste too much time and energy trying to decide the best ways of doing things without comfortable, collegial, and correct collaboration. The result is that everyone involved in the process can put their name on a special achievement suitable to be the pride of their resume. They will be naturally driven out of pride to succeed, even if they are traditional and resistant to change. The number of countries we work in, the number of industries we work in, and the years of trying so many new things out for people and making it work for them has taught us that the most important part of a project is how you justify the project. Think for a minute from the top administration in your organization and the great pressure and responsibility that comes to bear based on what projects they approve. Working with the most capable administrators of the most successful ivy league schools with the biggest endowments and grants success and publications comes from an entire strategy which is fair, efficient, and encourages the best effort from the people you need to keep. People who are unable to understand the concepts of helping to automate and improve their business process are replaced by someone who wants to have input and have control over their part of the project as well as recognition for their accomplishment. Meetings large and small are made to discuss general strategies, particularly with groups of people where the responsibilities overlap. To run things smoothly, all the users in the team need a pressure free forum with rules that encourage all viewpoints be considered, responded to, and defended fairly. We are used to working with sensitive people, and one of the biggest parts of the project success is our perfect track record for converting all project resisters to enthusiastic team players. Our consultations that we paid for with organizational psychologist in each organization type our clients are in tells us the proven methods of fostering collaboration. Not only does everyone contribute, but the enthusiasm, and the effort to do things right, is extremely vital to the original proposers of the project. The stakes are high in academia, and many intelligent people will weigh in with ideas that can cause contention. We have experience in enhancing team collaboration and respect. A better attitude and output and grants and funding will help your department or institution become the best in the field. The part that it will help you out with your career is something I experienced for myself. I went to Columbia to join their administration to run a three-year project that would have a $4,000,000 budget internally funded. Higher education avoids independent funding since it can take a great deal of money and put it into an administrative budget that could be slated for research activities, service activities, recruitment of new talent, grants strategy research, and compliance management. Our experience in taking the techniques of the largest businesses that give them their famous speed and reliability when dealing with large numbers of interactions, factions, processes, rules, and employee styles. Factionalism is removed due to peer pressure that drives friendly collaboration. Discussion and rewards like milestone celebrations increase project acceptance. The synergy of a team of one or more departments is vital to the reputation of the project in the school. Schools like Columbia and NYU attract the highest talent in the world by allowing people a chance to prove themselves. In administration, internally funded projects can impress rather than upset stakeholders at the top of institutional administration for people who think about budgeting and strategy at the top levels. We help generate costs savings and risk analysis and reduction as part of the planning process. We work with your insurance companies and find out what kind of process best practices will result in lower insurance premiums. We cite the rationale for our decision based on consultation with academically qualified individuals and organization to ensure maximum potential for peer review. We do everything to turn our technical team into a cohesive team who gets to be empowered by concentrating on creative improvement in their favorite fields in their favorite way. We find that the synergy of everyone working together brings out a lot of issues that were previously undefined. Sometimes these issues have not had procedures formalized with rules and procedures. Rules and procedures are comfortable for workers. Instead of encouraging laziness, however, studies in organizational society have shown that workers are more loyal and feel driven by personal pride to do their best. They are also rewarded with a feeling of control and influence that managers have. Giving people creative responsibility sometimes produces good ideas, and sometimes, in the appropriate forum, an expert will explain why the idea is good or bad. All stakeholders can agree to the best way of handling every situation. All of these strategies can be checked by project researchers who look for similar studies and project circumstances, analyzing what worked and didn’t work for them. The collection of this data along with our software that manages grants and helps brainstorm for research and donor strategies provide an extreme boost to organizational budgets. With these proven efforts, not only does institutional funding increase, but respectability of departments and institutions are increased. A happier administration that knows together puts in so much data about the work being done, resource allocation of funds and staff and expertise, and use of outside vendors. Our system automatically notifies all project and research managers as well as staff about every funding opportunity they should be competing with. The Web and I can add new funding opportunities from federal, non-federal funders, international NGO’s and more. The best funding involves interdisciplinary research. Before I arrived at NYU, they had three problems. Staff conflict originating in disagreements over methodology and taxonomy. Disagreements of who was responsible for that. Systems with bad interfaces and little automation. Much complicated clerical work was required to prepare a small set of documents that did not cover all of their needs. Data on investigators had no link to Human Resources, Space Management, Equipment, and the list of their citations and research and service accomplishments. With these programmed in using a database structure Mr. Low helped InfoEd designed, an easy way was reached to track everything in a single place and relate it. Conversations between different parties including different department and divisions who had tasks and procedures with unclear boundaries had a chance to document, discuss, and agree and sign off to their satisfaction of moving forward. Also each party is allowed to stick to a work flow that is as close to what they are used to as possible. Automation removes drudgery, automatically correcting zip codes, telephone number format, finding duplicates or anomalous records provides a virtual assistant for all employees jobs. Imagine you offered clerical assistance for a few hours a day to all your staff, especially non-management who often lack the optimum attitude because they are shown no evidence of the input of their ideas. The strategy, as we tell those who are deciding to implement the cloud, has one format which has been used successfully many times and was created along with the top academically accomplished specialists takes many of the annoyances and flaws with using the system easily, getting data in easily, getting it out easily, and nobody will have to reproduce the same form over and over again until it is automatically prepared at the touch of the button. Some forms require all of the data in the form to match rules. This is especially important in grant applications and deliverables. Staff without an automated system has to come up with a strategy for this repeatable process and report every time a need arises. With the Enterprise Resource Planning method, the original way is documented once, with all in agreement, changes are made by consensus when needed, and the rapid change and empowerment fosters project loyalty, creativity, and a proven increase in quality and results. A properly implemented project in an institution of higher education must show the utmost in respect to the internally funded project and the needs of the University. The educational institutions who do the best reward people who propose projects that reduce costs, are cheaper than other solutions, are more rigorously academically challenged with peer review with every feature, and ultimately result in measurable financial success, increase of intellectual output, publications and service projects, maximized grant and donor funding using data projection techniques invented by Mr. Low that are now providing the data for the research and endowment strategies of Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine. The beauty of the system is that the philosophy of a department re-engineering is that it improves attitude, happiness, educational quality, and fosters a collegial culture where the academics can produce their best work. The national recognition gained by having a research strategy incorporating well-funded interdisciplinary projects that the research and service portfolio brings two types of success: increased intellectual output increases university and scholar reputation. Endowments increase from contributions that touch the heart of the right philanthropists, who’s funding interests, contact preferences, and best methods for servicing maximize endowments and make these funders truly feel how they are helping humanity for posterity. The increased research output, grants portfolio, federal contracts, new talent, and sophisticated organization and teaching lead to more endowment and grant opportunities. The best grants require successful completion of other grants and contracts to increase viability. These increased activity involves expansion of staff and talent. Our patented intellectual inventory methods have previously been proposed to the National Science Foundation for funding, but the budget was cut and the interest in intellectual inventories was shelved in favor of disorganized big data approaches. Where all employees have their concerns addressed, and they have all been made to feel respected, important, and part of something larger of great scope and importance, can cause a synergy that makes departments more effective than ever. The new attitude and efficiency is not lost on your tenured faculty, chairs, principal investigators, and service project principals. Structure and clear procedures they helped create lead them to more creativity because of more time for creativity and the automatic handling of data cleansing through algorithmic rules. The new academic is brilliant, but often must waste much intellectual brainpower and creativity in the politics of navigating inefficient procedures and office politics that are created by unfulfilled employees. This synergy can bring out the best in maximizing your mission objectives as well as improving your career track record and everyone involved in the project. Projects that I did for banks, publishers, and law firms as well as NYU and Columbia created expert collaborations that have helped by not only giving project experience but a new set of contacts on the project who can serve as relevant references. Discussions where everyone can air their grievances and come up with solutions that are acceptable to all parties add to a great atmosphere for improvement. Early careers of scientists, researchers, and those who provide community projects receive a lot of negative energy, potential pitfalls, busy work, and uncomfortable change in university environments. Early career adjunct faculty have academics with true leadership potential that need to be given the tools and encouragement to get to a place of respect in their specialty that brings respect and honor to the university. My greatest privilege in working for NYU and Columbia is that they were two excellent and efficient ivy league universities with innovative but different approaches to achieve the same goals. Working in other industries has provided me more information about building a cohisive workplace. The infectious happiness and enthusiasm and pride given to staff during an implementation, as well as the formalized consensus buidling over non-optimal processes and policies builds true teamwork. A defined method for everyone to do his or her job with the software operation and data collection rules collects very structured and valuable data. This data is often not exposed and not timely when key decision makers have to make the right decision when the entire department or institution’s goals are at stake. Through my consultation and under differing academic institution styles, I took my techniques for refinement to some of the worlds best organizational psychologists, the worlds’ top project managers based on reputation and the intellectual inventors who help us see which way technology is going and help us to avoid all immature techology have given us a system that is completely transformational for departments. All of the potential you have for potential donors, all of your hiring and research and service focus areas can be optimize to maximize funding and innovation. Administrators and your top strategists will have projections they need to make decisions that are properly made, with the best availably decision making data. This attention to best practices and much peer review not only fosters teamwork, but it shows that a high quality standard is applied to everything. Mistakes and waste are prevented, and your organization can use this new projection information to confidently steer your department or institution towards its goals.
With the Web and I practicing these efficient installations, we are trying to provide the service with the best reputation that specializes in working properly with educational institutions, and the reputation of the project will make the project leaders respected and safer in their position and overall career. During badly made projects, many managers are terminated and replaced during the project because of failure to meet expectations. Besides having to come up with a system for smooth and compliant implementation, plans had to be made to maximize the benefit for all stakeholders. Nothing secures more funding and brings more accolades than a project well known to all to be a resounding success that transformed an organization and increased morale internally and reputation internally. The trouble is not to be blamed on software engineering consultants. They are all brilliant, but they are used to settings in the capitalist of business, with its own procedures, morals, manners, and politics. Our lifetime experience in academia as emplolyees and not just as independent consultants have taught us how to understand the needs and the pitfalls. We can ensure that the project reflects well on the career for the approvers, and brings impressive guaranteed financial increases. Administrators will have access to up-to-the second decision making data and status reports, including visual charts and dashboards, so they can continually monitor progress. Time and ineficiency or bad practices never last under such scrutiny, and administrative leadership will have ways to track and visualize progress that is un-manipulated pure and timely statistics and trends. Bad implementations can be career breakers. I have been involved in institutions that were not willing to meet and build consensus and test. These implementations were costsly. Visible strategy errors happened because stakeholders had poor or manipulated decision making data, often too old to have relevance. Excellent leaders in academia exist in many places. Sadly, they lack the tools to see everything that is going on in their organization at once. Their departments are not as productive, happy, or inovative as they should be. Leaders who promote and succeed in obtaining extensive internal project involving technology that is not immensely popular, that did not empower employees, improve efficiency and quality, lower costs, and increase organizational financial goal progress can ruin the career of the administrator proposing it. Because we have been both consultants and employees in higher education, we know how to make your department and all the people in it look better. Reach your goals with the immense toolkit and automation potentials of Microsoft Cloud Services. Finally, when others ask you, “why the cloud”, you can open up interest and a discussion that goals that you could not secure funding for previously, would be better and quicker funded if they are proven, based on academic rigor for every premise, inclusive of all stakeholders, and reducing costs by up to 80% can be a project that helps department chairs with the best leadership potential become deans. A well organized system helps determine talent and productivity quickly. When assessing employees, productivity will be boosted in most employees. In others, the process of formalizing the reeingineered business process will help find out deficiencies in workmanship from financial analysis and accounting to data collection methods in research. The smartest people who have the best innovative minds are free to thrive in such an atmosphere and produce their best possible work with fierce pride and drive. A system that fairly shows how good your work is, how compliant, how productive, and your successful track record of interations and publications will help identify problem areas wtih new faculty. Agreed-upon standards can help measure the best choices for tenure track. This in institutions with limited space and facilities and equipment, the equipment and productive space allocation analysis, when compared to available large grants and contracts by the NIH, the DoD, the Department of Education, and DHHS service projects, as well as the NEA, are trying to work on larger projects that are hard to staff and organize, but have better portential for measurable change in the body of human knowledge for concepts transcending departments, and allows for large and lucrative community service contracts, which bring prestiege and honor to institutions and departments, as well as the large budgets that they come with. Automatically matching facility and staffing and research interest skills and competency levels required for these grants provides tremendous new income opportunities. In both NYU and Columbia University, my intellectual inventory when compared and related to facilities, equipment, and resources, allowed me to put larger grant and contract opportunities with larger budgets, that help large areas of the institution, and pays for and attracts the best talent. Many times it is just the lack of information that can be analyzed without proper statistical and talent analysis with automatic comparison to ways for universities to make money, is causing institutions to lose the opportunies for game-changing high-budget, high-profile funding opportunites that not only bring in tremendous budgets but also result in innovative discovery, resulting in much publication, much innovation, and a maximization of the institution’s potential for academic excellence, fairness, and reputation. Seeing how wonderful institutions have progress slowed and lose money by not working together in a proven way makes us want to come and help again and again. Some institutions only want to automate a few things, and some institution can avoid hiring larger administration, instead having a better administration wtih a bigger budget that is liked by all. We have even helped to solve the postdoctoral problem of bureaucracy blocking essential deliverables they need in order to have a fair chance at proving their academic merit and having it judged accurately by leaders of the field, subjecting it to peer review. Young minds can have great ideas. Idea advancement where everyone gets credit helps to shed light on your best innovators early, so that resources can be allocated to your most promising faculty. Gaps in faculy expertise and service capacity as they are related to potential large center grants can be identified. The hiring monies will support the overall research strategy and provide the best chance of funding the salaries of all tenure track faculty. Again, everyone from administration to students benefit from the institutional change that can result from proper management of research and service opportunities making the best decisions for fast progress towards your institutional goals. Fostering the teamwork is soft and subtle and seems like fun. However the lasting result is a more effective administratoin, more willing and able to share ideas and work together as a team. Performance problems including weaknesses in compliance, accuracy, understanding the work, goals, and methodology, as well as personal and interpersonal problems that are lessening personal and departmental improvement can be identified and handled gently. In extreme incidents, employees who are not a fit due to their skills, methods, ethics, or ability to work as a team will show up in a manner that people can let go who were inefficient. Statistical determination of behavior, compliance, and accuracy also prevents intellectual property disputes and provides documentation of negative employment actions that are in compliance and will not expose your department or institution to lawsuits. This not only saves money, but it confers a noble status gained by running a department where everyone feels valued and helps each other out. The lasting effect of the gentle cultural changes for dealing with disagreements is the culmination of re-engineering your institutional business process in ways that are sure to be a career booster and do not risk being a career-destroyer, like so many unsuccessful projects are. Knowing the the techniques for change management along with the technology are tried and true is a great help and comfort to department chairs and deans. Their decisions have to be the best as they steer very important policy that affects the institution, the body of human knowledge, and human progress. As the methodology is proven and in place, the project sponsors are sure to show a well-thought out plan that will stand up to scrutiny. They can be sure that the level of experience will result in a program that will be thought of not as a technology project but a brilliant improvement. We do not claim to be professional academics. But all of us have I.T. expertise in the business world and in academia. We require this because nobody who has not worked in academic administration is qualified to make your project succeed. You are not proposing a computer project: You are taking the best course of action proven to maximize your institutional effectiveness and reputation. All of the questions and strategy decisions by major stakeholders and minor ones are also compiled into the best possible decision support documents that suit any need you have. With all of the data in one place, nobody ever fills out a form, because the perfect form is at the touch of a button. Systems like this have furher cost savings. As your department or institution grows, the collaborative data that flows up to leadership from workers is as easy to create by the same people as your funding, projects, and needs grow. Then your employees work harder with the pride in their part of the overall success. Non-payment employee incentives in academia are our specialty, we know how to make staff, administrators, clerical staff, managers, and people with specific functions to all feel better, have increased loyalty and institutional committment, and a drive to excellence and improvement at every level. If you are looking to implement changed procedures and use of technology, chose the consultants who guarantee that you will improve your institutional status rather than worry about not doing so. The fact that you are considering new technology in a complex academic environment at all shows daring and extreme leadership potential. Let us make your efforts the best they can be while leveraging your talents and reducing risk. You owe it to your profession and your department. You owe it to your career plans.
Our Implementation Method
Research including studying what has worked for many projects as well as analysis of factors leading to failed processes were compiled and analyzed. Experts were consulted in the fields of law, finance, education, organizational psychology, and a doctorate in business administration. Many ideas were deemed unsuitable, and others proved the testing and acceptance by experts in academia, and eventually techniques derived produced groundbreaking results with worldwide recognition. Dealing with so many different institutional philosophies, we have developed adaptations for different departments, work styles, and individuals, that take your people as little away from their jobs as possible, with immediate measurements in quality, enthusiasm and loyalty. Proper use of incentives available to academia which university workers value more than financial compensation are more effective than bonuses. We have tried these and the method and action is understood. Complex bureaucratic quagmires and inter-department disputes are gone forever: fixed through consensus building to the satisfaction of all stakeholders.
We are in the process of taking what we have learned and develop a compendium of technologies, methods, and techniques in academic departmental overhauls. None of our clients ever called what we did a software project. What they did call it was organizational tranformatoin for the benefit of all, done in an efficient but inclusive manner. After consulting with the top experts in university administration throughout the world, and after considering large datasets of projects of varied success for comparison, we are going to come out with revolutionary new ideas for educational administration which will be published in a book. This book will be $500 for businesses and consultants. This book will be provided free of charge to institutes of higher education to top administration and individual departments. Knowing how difficult it is to justify even time spent and no money, we will include a planning and consideration guide that will make the time you spent considering a cloud solution and office transformation project produce valuable insights into efficiency even if you do not implement a major project. That way, we will have provided valuable information to increase the effectiveness of your department just through the process of going through a single structures meeting, the plans for which we will provide free of charge soon on this Website.
How We Work with Institutions.
To explain our philosophy of assisting institutions in their goal, we have to differntiate our methods that stem from our philosophy. Business and academic experts agree that excellent communications, diplomacy, and teamwork are the atmosphere that can turn a software implementation process into a project that changes the organization an far exceeds the dollar value by improving reputation, funding, employee, student, and scholar happiness.
Our Commitment to the Best Staff
All staff are very well compensated monetarily and with recognition and career develoment to maximize their enthusiasm and committment to your project.
We have many specialists who are the best in their field. We only hire people to work on what they do best. All of our staff are trained to be diplomatic, differential, and professional. They are all trained to listen to client needs and implement them immediately. Any problems that our staff cannot handle without further help receives immediate escalation to the President. We will produce the appropriate expert immediately to work with your engineer to fix the problem. Consultatoins are free up to two hours. Beyond that time their consultation hours are highly discounted, and we bill to the minute, so that you never pay personnel hours for anything but required work tested for productivity, quality, and technical correctness.
Our specialists work quickly because they are highly trained to work efficiently and unobtrusively in their specialty. They work well as a team with each other and with your staff. All our consultants must be of the highest caliber in talent, reputation, morals, security clearance and bonding, and to work well with your clients. Allowing people to work only within their specialty, paying them well, and encouraging their creativity and career development means we have the most enthusiastic staff. Because of all of the politics, we only hire consultants who can meet the previous requirement but have proven leadership ability in communicating, building consensus, training, and making your people work together. They are not given a free reign in this, we have clear methods for fostering teamwork and communication that get the best results from your best employees. The new metrics in the software will let you truly analyze the effectiveness, productivity, compliance, and creativity of all of your employees. You can maintain the best employees, and a strict set of standards removes all criteria but completely logical ones concerning new hires, terminations, and inclusion in grants and pubications credit. The intense documentation required of all scientists and administrators is now streamlined, but it is also more thorough. Many indicators and metrics can be created with the help of your staff which can immediately help problem areas and help determine the best plans of action. Projections that can be accomplished when two years of data can be collected will provide leaders with insight that was prevously impossible. This insight, which is always to the minute, will produce the best academic leaders possible. People who have become chairs because of their genius and respect in their fields will suddenly have a framework to become master leaders as well, and your institution will thrive. Besides the Web and I, there is no other consultancy who can provide the organizational tranformation and cost savings that we can. Organizational reform, happy employees, and above all financial stakeholders at the highest levels will be completely satisfied.
To take advantage of consultants who are less expensive because we have off-loaded the technical work to Microsoft’s experts is a less expensive proposal than any other. No other consultancy offers a 100% track record. This track record comes from our employees deep respect for academia and the place of higher education as the design forums responsible for all human advancement. We encourage our highly educated academically qualified projects to handle each project with academic rigor and attitude. We cannot be the first to innovate, but we must be the first to do it right every time, with a proven procedure.
Sometimes it is hard to find decisions that you can make that will surely increase your position in the academic world. This proven implementation methodology will be one that brings your department, your career, and your reputation and future prospects to their greatest potential. Leaders will get a reputation not only for quality and effectiveness in their field and leadership, but the connections that people will develop through the better internal communication and problem solving fostered by project teamwork lessons will smooth university operations in many ways as well as open previously closed avenues of collaboration and growth.
Eventually the workings of higher education will be standardized by more best practices. These practices will make teamwork and creativity easier, as well as make institutions more fair, more successful, and they will foster an atmosphere of the best innovation. The promise of technology and training implemented correctly removes needless work, clarifies policy, forges new agreement and cooperation, encourages all employees with non-financial incentives to excellence, and increases the volume of publications, community service, courses taught, and overall effect of departments and institutions.
These ideas would have eventually be compiled, studies, and made into a discipline of the best ways for higher education to have the best possible administrative and academic success, but the unique talent at the Web and I has enough experts who are well versed in both business and academia. We also reward innovation. We make sure our engineers study for hours before every job, because their work and the results will be subject to peer review later, and we hire for intelligence and pride. Hiring those who have teaching expertise and diplomacy that matches their technical and academic prowess ensures that our people are always a good fit. Our comprehensive array of consultants of the highest caliber and reputation ensure that there is nothing done without maintaining best practices for the projects and tasks in question. Our strong ties to the legal world help us to analyze, mediate changes in, an optimize policies and procedures while putting in place every piece of compliance a university needs. Compliance is important, but sometimes a project done incorrectly puts nobody in charge of an important compliance requirement. At NYU Medical School, an independent auditor who was brilliant provided a compliance analysis. The analyst was brilliant and had a Ph.D. in business management, was published, and highly respected in business and academia. Having not dealt with the compliance requirements of hopitals with an understanding of NIH funded projects, this analyst missed a very important comliance point that exposed NYU School of Medicine to liability that costed millions of dollars in federal fines being paid back over five years. By making a single steward of each policy that is vital, these things are not left to chance. The previous projects assigned no administrator to have responsibility for billing compliance. Because of this, some minor paperwork errors where forms did not get used to prevent double-billing, there was a great setback to the hospital. Our compliance analysis may be exhaustive, but with all of the lawyers and academics at our disposal, we are able to find ways to assign responsibility for each compliance area to a distinct steward. This ensures that costly mistakes affecting institutional finance and reputation never happen. The best institutions who are making the most out of today’s financial landscape state that standards of excellence can help to avoid disasters such as the one experienced by NYU. When our team encountered this problem, we immediately worked with NIH, providing them a clear explanation of how the errors occurred, showing with all documentation that there was no intentional failure to comply, and negotiating favorable new policies and procedures acceptable to avoid the problem, a reduced plan to pay back monies that should not have been collected, and a plan to identify and name a responsible party for all compliance issues. When we do find compliance problems, we are very good at helping you immediately solve problems, avoid penalties, and change procedure with a minimalist solution that takes into account the concerns of all employees involved. This willingness at Columbia and New York University to push for excellence with humility and dedication is what makes these institutions great. We can help engineer not only your technical overhaul but also your organizational transformation. It will be a project where you, the administrator, becomes the principal investigator in a structured research project which results in best practices and procedures for what your institution or department does.
Our Approach of Academic Rigor to Helping Your Goals Come True
We start out with the best and the brightest, who undergo a thorough background check. We are interested not only in brilliance, but in strong communication and leadership skills. Our experts know how to work with everyone and have been trained to foster habits that lead to effective teamwork. They are trained to combine their work with suggestions for management improvement and any new ideas. They are sworn to work with every user on the system so that their use, their procedures, and their training is standardized, Flexibility in methods allow our consultants to achieve the results in the way most comfortable for every employee. We have specialists on call for every complicated problem we face.We always call on the best experts, so we do not make our specialists work on things that they are not exemplary in achieving. Call us at 646-853-0573 to discuss your IT strategy and institutional management practices. Gain control and visibility of all areas, perfect your organization’s efficiency and reputation, save up to 80% of other programs for implementation with guaranteed work.
New York Computer Consultants 