Norfolk State University Returns to 25Live® After a Difficult Detour and Finds Home Again

Chief among the failures was double-booking. The system could not properly handle partitioned spaces. Shared spaces are a fundamental need at NSU, where a student center ballroom can be divided into sections A, B, and C. When a department reserved both A and B, the system didn’t recognize that sections A or B alone were unavailable, resulting in conflicting reservations with confirmed approvals on all sides.

Meetings that had once wrapped up in 20 minutes stretched to 90 every week as staff manually untangled scheduling conflicts across multiple buildings. Dennison’s team had to artificially simplify their room configurations just to reduce the number of conflicts the system was generating.

The student organization workflow experienced similar breakdowns. Under 25Live, students could submit event requests on their phones, “And it’ll be in the calendar,” she said. “Bingo, bango.” With Coursedog, students were entering the same information into two separate systems. Advisors couldn’t see across platforms. Approvals stalled. By the spring semester, a backlog of pending events had been sitting unresolved.

A multi-step approval workflow that worked in 25Live now made things worse in Coursedog. Events had to pass through facilities management, OIT, campus police, and student activities before receiving final approval. If any step stalled, the event stayed frozen. Frustrated users began emailing individual staff departments directly, creating friction across the institution.

When NSU raised these concerns, Coursedog’s response was discouraging.

Unlike CollegeNET—where, as Dennison notes, user feedback routinely makes it to developers and appears as real feature updates—Coursedog’s team deferred.

NSU is now actively transitioning back to 25Live. Dennison’s plan is to bring the lower-volume summer groups back onto the platform first, use that window to clean up user data and refresh the team’s skills, and then fully relaunch for the fall semester.

The return has come with a renewed appreciation for what CollegeNET does well in Series25. The single-form event request model (one form, the right questions, all the information collected at once) stands in sharp contrast to the multi-form structure that still failed to capture what staff needed. Reporting, which was poor or practically “non-existent” in Coursedog, returns as a functional tool in Series25. And, the CollegeNET system’s ability to handle partitioned rooms, combined spaces, and complex scheduling hierarchies removes the manual conflict-resolution burden that had consumed the team over the year with Coursedog.

Dennison is also looking forward to reengaging with CollegeNET’s support ecosystem, particularly the CONNECT User Conference in July, to catch up on new features and get the administrative team refreshed and retrained.

Norfolk State’s journey away from and back to Series25 offers a clear-eyed look at what institutions stand to lose when they switch away from a platform built specifically for the complexities of higher education scheduling. The operational disruption of double bookings, broken workflows, stalled approvals, and demoralized staff can be substantial and sustained.

But the story Dennison tells isn’t just cautionary. It’s also one of rediscovery. Returning to Series25, the team now sees with fresh eyes what they had built over years of growing alongside the platform—and what they’re ready to build on for their future growth.