Saturday 20 June 2009

More on contacts

Following on from my earlier post about managing contacts and business links as a school, I had a meeting last week with our "Work Related Learning Coordinator" who manages (amongst other things) work placements for students. We had a good discussion about both our requirements for a perfect system and the non-technical work flow problems involved in getting such a system to be widely and effectively used in school, since we felt that the key to it was getting staff to record when people come in and work with us so when we ring up we can say "I know you helped us out last Autumn with...." rather than a completely cold call. The best answer we came up with was for this to be managed at the reception desk, since all visitors pass through there and we couldn't really expect teaching staff to remember to update the details in Outlook.

We had a look at Sugar CRM, KeepM and Outlook, and the consensus was that a public folder in Outlook would be ideal. Since my last post, I'd found a great little article on customising Outlook contact forms (in this case, for estate agents, but it's applicable to any area). It looks as though I'll be able to set up exactly the fields we need (industry sector, for example). The only fly in the ointment at present is that I can't make the custom fields searchable. More playing required...

As an addendum, we both agreed that we needed some business cards for when we're out and about, so I'm going to get something made up and printed over at moo.com (which looks fabulous!).

Saturday 6 June 2009

Managing contacts

We're a big school, with over 100 teaching staff and 1750 students. We're a specialist school, with the outreach work that goes with that, and we're heavily involved in the delivery of the new Diploma qualifications. Around 30% of our students in KS4 now follow an alternative to the traditional GCSE options curriculum. All this means that for a number of years now we've been forging links with other schools, colleges, businesses and other organisations.

We're not very good at it.

There are huge issues about schools working in partnership (and enormous benefits, of course) but today's post isn't going to look at those; we'll save that for a future edition. I've been doing quite a lot of work lately on building up our industry links and what I've noticed so far is:
  • there is a willingness on the part of companies to engage (especially small businesses) but they're not sure how;
  • it's difficult to build a genuinely 2-way ("win-win") relationship since the school actually has little to offer that the firms are interested in, short of a warm, fuzzy glow and a bit of positive PR;
  • I personally (and I suspect most teachers) find networking quite difficult - we're not used to it and don't understand the ground rules. (Should I have business cards or is that naff?);
  • This is an area you either do "right" and invest significant time and resources in building long term relationships, or not at all;
  • There's nothing that frustrates a company more that being contacted 4 times by 4 different people about the same thing. We have situations where something is promoted via our Work-Related Learning Coordinator, me, our Extended Schools Coordinator, through our newsletter to parents and any other staff who might know someone interested.
It's this last point I really want to focus on: surely there must be an IT solution to the problem of managing our contacts?

Use a shared Word file on the network

Dead simple. Easy for staff to use. Shared. Gets backed up. Searchable. Not exactly high profile...

Use a public folder in Outlook

We run Exchange 2003 so this is easy to set up (in fact we did it last week in 5 minutes to see how it would work). This is clearly better than Word in that contacts are stored in a proper database format where you can group them into folders, add category tags and search on any field you like. You can manage permissions easily so it doesn't get messed up and people can send email directly. My concerns at this stage are how easy most staff would find this (and whether they'd remember it) and the poor "Notes" feature. I'd really like to be able to maintain a record of the people who get in touch with each contact (including when, and about what) and a list of the events they've helped out with. It can be done, but it would soon become unwieldy.

Use a blog

I'm coming to the conclusion that we need to be publicising the contribution of our partners much more extensively on our website (maybe through a "Community Blog") - it would definitely drive traffic their way. I'm not saying we'd keep actual phone numbers on there (although we could) but it would seem a good way of keeping track of events that our contacts help us with. I could imagine the tags list on the side acting as a quick menu for finding a company.

Build a custom application

Not that hard, but we come back to all the maintenance and support issues I've gone on about in the past...

Use a web app

There are quite a few contact management solutions out there. Some are free, some not. Here's a quick list:
  • Highrise is a paid for app by the well known 37 Signals brand. It looks really good, but is business-focused (unsurprisingly) and probably overkill.
  • KeepM is free and simple. I like it a lot actually, especially the "History" feature, but the problem here is the fact it requires another username and password for everyone and who knows how long it will last (or remain free).
  • Google Mail has a contacts feature. It's a bit like Outlook really (though the search is better) and I can only imagine using it if we didn't have Exchange. We'd probably create a new account and share it, but I guess there could be problems there with security.

For now, I'm road testing the public folder approach. I'm going to meet some of the main people who would be using whatever system we end up choosing next week to see what they think, so that should be interesting. If any readers have suggestions for other solutions I'd be keen to hear them!

Monday 1 June 2009

Use an Ipod as a PDA

Having bought an Ipod Touch to keep me occupied on the long haul flight to Cuba at Easter, when I got back I decided to see if it could replace my PDA (a Dell Axim X50v) for diary functions. The answer is a resounding YES.

The pros:


  • Wifi on the Touch is way better than using Windows Mobile. It was always a pain on the Axim to even get connected, but the Touch just finds the network and logs in, no bother. It recognises whether I'm at home or at school, remembers the settings and just works.

  • The on screen keyboard is better than handwriting recognition, if not perfect.

  • Itunes is happy to sync with Outlook on my school PC whilst syncing music, podcasts, movies etc at home.

  • It's smaller, lighter, sexier and the battery lasts a lot longer.

  • I can do basic editing of documents with a free App.

The cons


  • I can't use my IR keyboard that worked really well with my Axim. This meant that I could have a device in each jacket pocket whcih, when unfoilded and combined, gave me a mini laptop. Come on Apple - give us Bluetooth!

  • Document editing isn't as capable (though it might be with the paid for version of the App I got - I don't know and don't need it).

And that's it. The Axim is off to Ebay.

If you're not sure how to go about synching an Ipod with two PCs, the key is to select "Manually manage music and videos" on the "Summary" tab for the device in Itunes on the work PC, then enable Outlook synchronisation on the "Info" tab. More detail on manual syncing here: Manually manage...