Webmail and Custom Software

Maximizing Educational IT Assets - An Integration Strategy for Educational Institutions
By Peter Binkley

PROBLEM: Among the unique challenges facing educational institutions in the early years of the twenty-first century is how best to serve a diverse user base with new technologies in a time of tight budgetary restrictions. While many businesses in the private sector can focus on the handful of software solutions that fit their particular needs, colleges, universities, and other institutions must attempt to integrate large-scale solutions for the entire campus community with a myriad of applications and business methodologies used at the individual department level.

To make this mandate even more challenging, many state-funded educational institutions are facing belt-tightening measures that put a cramp on their information technology budget and force them to focus on crucial services, often at the expense of innovation. Consolidating core software functions and getting existing and new applications to "play well together" makes perfect sense in such a climate.

While the current economic slowdown may have stalled some bold and exciting plans for the future, it also may provide a chance to clean up some of the sloppiness left behind after ten years of rapid, often directionless, growth.

SOLUTION: The needs of each department of an educational institution are so diverse that it would be foolhardy to try to develop one application to meet them all. However, there is no reason the basic functions common to all departments, the "business infrastructure," cannot be tapped by each department for its own purposes. The salient reasons for developing on a common framework include: