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Overview

Skokie/Morton Grove School District 69 is an Illinois-based school district with three schools that serve over 1,500 students. Several years ago, the district migrated from Microsoft Outlook to Novell GroupWise as their preferred email collaboration platform for students and staff.

In 2002, Skokie/Morton Grove School District 69 started using Omni's EMU solution to bulk manage their GroupWise accounts and CCUweb to publish a district-wide web calendar based on a GroupWise account.

With Omni's recently updated Common Calendar Update module, powered by Riva, they are now able to "push" GroupWise calendars out to their staff.

The Challenge

"Novell's standard set of administration tools does not let you 'push' GroupWise calendars to users," said Keith Shaffer, Director of Technology at Skokie/Morton Grove School District 69.

"It is critical for us to be able to push GroupWise appointments, reminders and calendar items to our staff accounts," continued Shaffer. "And, while having users 'pull' CSV information or run batch scripts to import items into their accounts is good, it's not great because you're still depending on the user to perform the task. Some users forget or do not want to be tasked with this."

The Solution

"That's why we are so thrilled with Riva's Common Calendar Update module. It does exactly what we were looking for," said Shaffer. "Now, we are able to create policies to push appointments and tasks out to our users' accounts. If we need to make a change, we simply update our Riva CCU policy and execute it again. The original item we pushed out gets updated and we avoid creating double entries."

"Currently, we execute our Riva CCU policies on an as-needed basis. We
are looking at using Windows Task Scheduler to automate the process even
further."

The Results

"Riva CCU works phenomenally well! Our principals are extremely happy. Our teachers are thanking us because their accounts are automatically populated without them having to do anything."

"And, I'm thrilled!" said Shaffer. "I've been waiting for the ability to push GroupWise content to my users for a long time. With Riva CCU, we're leveraging the power of GroupWise. Our user experience is enhanced and our administration and support costs have decreased."

More Information

• Omni Technology Solutions


• Riva Overview


• Riva
  Modules and Reports


• Evaluate
  Common Calendar Update


• Riva
  Price Information


• Riva Web
  Seminar

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.