Tell us a little about you and your organization...?
City University of Seattle, is a not-for-profit, private university that services mostly working adults. We offer every course online and most courses have an in class option also. We have campuses conveniently located in business parks in the Washington state I-5 corridor. We also have campus locations in Canada, Slovakia, China, Mexico, Greece and new ones showing up in other countries. We have students taking classes, day and night, all around the world.
How is your organization using SharePoint, and more specifically the BDC ?
We are currently using SharePoint as an administrative intranet portal, but we have plans to replace our existing portal technology with SharePoint over the next two years. SharePoint is a more flexible, user friendly portal than what we currently have. We also have a separate Learning Management System and Student Information System. Currently students and faculty have to navigate several different interfaces to find information. Our plan is to give each faculty member a cohesive, one-stop shop for information through the SharePoint portal using My Sites, personalization pages, and the BDC to provide information from our LMS and SIS in easy to use formats. We plan to link the SharePoint pages with the BDC to back end SQLServer databases where the information resides. Our current use of the BDC includes providing our European partners with student information that we currently do not give them access to through our SIS.
Why did you choose a solution from Lightning Tools ?
We have a very small staff for the number of applications and locations that we support. We do not have the resources to provide the in depth training needed to create ADF's from scratch or even using the MS tool. We absolutely do need to use the BDC to accomplish our strategy of moving to SharePoint as our portal. The BDC Meta Man tool is easy to use, reliable and powerful. I have even learned to use it and I haven't written a line of code for years.
How has this solution worked for you ?
This solution has made the BDC feature of SharePoint accessible and easy to use. This tool allows having a single source of data instead of creating multiple copies and departmental data that is different than the "official" data.
How satisfied are you with Lightning Tools ?
Lightning Tools has a reliable, powerful product, and the support has been extremely responsive. I couldn't be happier.
Kevin Brown
Director of Information Technology
City University of Seattle