Campus Mission Control for Universities.

Campus I.T. teams are today meeting some very key challenges as the needs for students and faculties move into an area of mobility enablement. Whether it’s the use of Citrix Workspaces, or cloud services such as Office 365, the impact of new tech on student academics looks set to increase the pressure on campus I.T. teams. With these new powers, a great responsibility now dawns.

The ability to pro-actively communicate what’s happening to key systems used by students and faculty alike has raised the stakes. As campus’ adopt these new systems creating additional administrative overhead, often additional staff are not coming into play despite the value increase of I.T. to the service users.

With online services making deployment of services a heck of alot easier, it puts some of the administrative power out of reach of campus I.T. teams, and at the same time controlling outages is also out of reach. This places a burden on the I.T. teams to handle inbound calls in larger volumes when there are issues. Losing team resources to handling large influxes of calls is a reactive measure which in reality provides little to no value for end-users in the long run, and creates burn-out for those managing I.T. teams.

In the last year, we’ve been hugely excited to be working with Universities and education service providers around the world using statushub. We’ve spent a number of years working with Universities and businesses with the implementation of mobility solutions, for which we ourselves used statushub as a communications system around alerts management when delivering mobility and virtualized infrastructure solutions. Since our acquisition of statushub last year, we’ve been able to mold statushub closer to the needs of these challenges, and it’s showing in its adoption by universities during that time by universities such as Oklahoma, Michigan State, UNLV, California State University San Marcos in the U.S. and Gloucestershire, and Nottingham in the U.K. to name but a few.

statushub helps the University of Oklahoma. Many universities host internal status blogs for their status page solutions. The problem they experience very often is obsolescence for the systems they use to host the blog, and that blogs are very often not kept updated very well with this kind of information as updating it could sometimes take longer than the resolution of an incident. And self-hosting these blogs causes another issue; how is it reached when there is a problem that affects access?

Throw into the mix that many blogs aren’t configured to proactively notify people, or make sure people are subscribed to them, it’s a recipe for your frontline I.T. to get swamped, and lose time that could be spent adding value to I.T. services by turning them into receptionists.

statushub is a university campus status-blog-killer, and we’re extremely proud of that. We’re proud that we’re helping campus I.T. teams across the globe regain control of communicating availability and uptime to their campus users. We’ve seen Universities use statushub for publicly available details on uptime for all campus users, private pages for campus administration and faculty, even to it being used to keep track of resource availability such as teaching assistants, physical resources such as labs or equipment, even how many terminals are available in student computer labs.

Michigan State University campus I.T. empowered by statushub.

Originally published at blog.statushub.io.