El reto
NC State previously used legacy email systems, Cyrus IMAP and GroupWise, that didn’t meet students’ and staff members’ needs. Students couldn’t do much with email because of the small storage quota, and faculty had scheduling problems because they used different calendar programs. “You couldn’t easily schedule a meeting with someone if they weren’t using the same calendar — you had to call them up and send email back and forth to check availability,” says Stan North Martin, director of Outreach, Communications and Consulting in the Office of Information Technology at NC State.
Students and staff also ran into barriers when trying to collaborate. For example, administrators struggled to efficiently take and share notes during staff meetings. “With Microsoft Word you never knew if the version you had was the latest version or not. It was a clunky process,” Martin says.