Case Study | Google Apps Education Edition

Saline Area Schools saves $400K with Google Apps Education Edition

At a Glance What they wanted to do: • Cut costs and replace an outdated, high maintenance email system • Eliminate the hassle of clearing out email inboxes • Find a solution that could work on any browser with any operating system What they did: • Migrated 700 faculty and staff email accounts in two months • Improved collaboration district-wide using Google Sites and Google Docs What they accomplished: • Saved $400K from non-renewal of the prior system and reduced email maintenance, hardware upgrades, and ongoing IT support

Organization Saline Area Schools is a suburban/rural public school district of 5,450 students K-12 located in southeast Michigan, about 50 miles west of Detroit. Saline Area Schools offers a challenging and comprehensive curriculum to prepare students for their future, as well as supporting lifelong learning for all. Challenge In June 2008, Ken Lupo, Director of Technology for Saline Area Schools, was leaving weekly – sometimes daily – voicemails asking his district’s 600 member school staff to empty their inboxes and free their email storage quota for the next round of incoming email. The Microsoft Exchange email system Saline Area Schools had relied on for years was not able to manage or store all the email for faculty and staff. “Just keeping mailboxes under quota was a full time job,” Lupo recalls. “Combined with the need to deal with upgrades, viruses, spam, and spyware, the IT team was spending up to three days each week to maintain our email services.” That’s when Lupo and Scot Graden (pictured), Saline Area Schools Superintendent, decided to find a better way. Lupo and Graden wanted a solution that would work not only the short term by providing more storage, but would also pay off over time, delivering ongoing value while keeping costs down. “We didn’t want to sign up for a product that would be outdated or require license updates that cost us time and money each year,” Graden says.

• Nearly eliminated email related help desk tickets • Gained better productivity and reliability with a single, free solution than with the various paid applications they’d previously deployed

“Google Apps has worked out better than I could have ever imagined. We expected a more reliable, stable, and virus-free email. But we got more – a suite of integrated collaborative applications that are being used by teachers and in our classrooms.” —Scot Graden, Superintendent

School faculty were also required to create and share building-level web pages supporting online collaboration. This meant that educators had to use website creation software which, according to Graden, came with annual licensing fees, needed ongoing upgrades, and was anything but intuitive to use. In addition, that software worked well with only one type of browser and in one operating system. “With the variety of technology used in our district, we couldn’t limit people to a specific browser or OS,” explains Graden. “We wanted a solution that worked the way our users worked.” Solution After looking into a variety of paid and open source options, Graden and Lupo decided to migrate staff and faculty accounts to Google Apps Education Edition – a free, no-ad implementation of Google Apps. Using the migration tools included in Google

About Google Apps Education Edition

Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. Google Apps includes Gmail (webmail services), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Docs (online document, spreadsheet, presentation, and form creation and sharing), Google Video (secure and private video sharing – 10GB free) and Google Sites (team website creation with videos, images, gadgets and documents integration), as well as administrative tools, customer support, and access to APIs to integrate Google Apps with existing IT systems. For more information visit: www.google.com/a/edu “With the variety of technology used in our district, we couldn’t limit people to a specific browser or OS. We wanted a solution that worked the way our users worked.” —Scot Graden, Superintendent

Apps, they easily deployed 700 accounts in just two months. They immediately felt the difference. Not only did Google Apps help the IT team reclaim two to three days of email maintenance each week, it also instantly lowered the levels of spam hitting users’ inboxes. “We have only five IT staff for our entire district,” Lupo shares. “To reduce our email issues was an absolute joy – a huge relief.” Many users within the district were already familiar with Google Apps and stepped in to help their fellow educators learn the ropes. This unsolicited peer support, combined with Google Apps intuitive, full-featured web interface, led to a nearly seamless, “organic” deployment – a breeze, compared to previous migrations. The IT team quickly noticed a drastic decrease in help tickets for email related issues, reducing their queue from 10 to 12 tickets a week to what Graden calls “rare or occasional” requests. Graden chose Google Apps for the email function, the cost savings, lack of maintenance, security, and device-independent, “anytime, anywhere” access. But, soon after implemenation, Google Apps’ additional features – including collaboration tools like Google Docs and Google Sites – started to take off. Heather Kellstrom, Director of Instructional Technology, set out to develop a formal plan to bring these collaborative tools into the classroom, creating a training guide outlining the use of Google Apps’ collaboration options, including integrated IM and voice or video chat, sharing a document, or creating and uploading a video. Benefits After switching to Google Apps, Graden calculates total savings of about $400K for the first year, including savings from non-renewal of the prior system and reduced email maintenance, hardware upgrades, and ongoing IT support. These savings have allowed Graden to maintain valued programs and student services that he otherwise would have had to cut. Encouraged by the success with faculty and staff, the Saline IT team will soon roll Google Apps out to their 3,200 students in grades 5-12. Now that building-level and grade-level collaboration is built on Google Sites, Graden and his team no longer have to worry about specifying browsers or operating systems - it just works. The simple interface has teachers up and running with a site within minutes, compared to extensive training sessions for the previous software. The integration across Google Apps products has made it easy for teachers to incorporate forms and videos into their class websites. An unexpected benefit for faculty and staff has been the widespread use of forms within Google Docs. As Kellstrom explains, “It’s easy to send quick surveys to collect information from parents or to get feedback on a training session. In the past, we’d have to print out survey forms and hand them out at the end of a session. Now we can send out surveys by email and get feedback by the end of the day. We are getting a lot more credible information and there’s no need to have an account, pay a fee, or go to some third party site.” Teachers also use forms within Google Docs to create administrative agendas that can be projected during meetings and then saved as a single, always-current rolling document for meeting notes. With Google Sites, they’ve all established a web presence. And, using Google Video, Saline district schools now share a “morning announcement” video that’s posted to their private domain. “Google Apps has worked out better than I could have ever imagined,” Graden concludes. “We expected a more reliable, stable, and virus-free email. But we got more – a suite of integrated collaborative applications that are being used by teachers and in our classrooms. Everywhere I look, everybody is using it and talking about it. Google Apps is taking off like wildfire.”

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