What was it like switching to Series25?

What was it like switching to Series25® Scheduling?

" So, what do I like most about Series 25? I would say the dependability. We've only had it go down maybe once or twice, 20 minutes. That was it. The college staff, CollegeNET staff are very supportive and very fast to get back to if we have any questions. It works with our SIS and also I do the event scheduling. So, for event scheduling, it's very easy for the customer to put in a request, see what rooms are available, fill out the forms without a lot of assistance and once they get it down, they're happy to see that they can see it on a calendar that is public once they've signed into our SIS so, or single sign on.

"So, I think that as far as reliability, ease of use, and for what information it holds and holds a tremendous amount of information, even past information on past events. So it, it's helpful to have all the information in one spot and have internal notes to be able to put that information if you have to go back a year or two to see what was done previously because a lot of times customers say, I know I did this last year, I don't know what I did. So they sometimes want some assistance. So it's, I'd say ease of use, dependability and the CollegeNET staff, that's the best part about it. So customer service, we go to our IT support, which is the admin over our whole product line of the CollegeNET product, and we go to them because we are five campuses under one 25Live experience. And so we find out if other campuses are having the same issue that maybe we had, if we had something come up. And Monica and Perry are wonderful, they get back with us right away. They deal with CollegeNET, we don't normally have to go to CollegeNET ourselves. And like I said, we've had really minor things. It hasn't been, you know, like one a month or something coming up. It's been probably three times in the maybe 10 years that I've been doing this and you know, 'cause I came from R25, so R25 to, 25Live is huge.

"I mean, 25Live is like a game saver for not only the customer, but for all of us that do scheduling. If the schools aren't using it, I think they should, and the only reason is, is because of dependability, accessibility to the web and the way it operates. So, you can create your own searches. Right now I have searches that send automatically reports to facilities, and facilities gets the report. The police department gets the report and our Cougar card service gets the report because they automate the door locks in five of our spaces. They have to go in and automate them for the week and they just review it. I send them a schedule for the whole semester and they review that it's the same during that time. It saves me a lot of time from talking to people about what's going on in what room and what space. Now they can look it up, no matter where they're at. You know, if you're in Seattle, you can look at my schedule if you log into 25Live.

"So, and I'm looking into investigating express scheduling, it's even gotten easier. I've had, I went to some of the training on express scheduling and express scheduling for people. It was wonderful. Claire did a great talk on having a QR code at the door that saves you from doing iPads at the door. It saves you from doing any other type of, sign at the door of saying what's going on in the room as there might be privacy issues. So, having a QR code for your room that sends you to the scheduling to show you when it's open that is a game changer. I think that's a wonderful, wonderful tool. CollegeNET staff, they came to campus, they set up our, our 20 our 25Live instance. They said put all the rooms in. All the rooms went in. All of it went seamlessly, but when I came to that group and I noticed that X25 information wasn't in there, I did go in and add all the X25 information, and I'm really glad I did because the day the boss said, we're gonna start using X25 and we bought X25 this product. We are gonna implement this. All the information was already there. And I've told people at this conference that one of the best things you can do is go in and put that information in now 'cause it doesn't hurt anything, and then if you ever do get X25, it's already there. And, one of the reasons we went to X25 for utilization and looking at rooms and sizes is because we're losing some buildings. So, a few older buildings are being torn down. We're gonna lose those spaces. How do we accommodate the students? And, then if we do build another building, what's the size we need? That was a big thing with X25, is estimating and showing a future of what size we need. And, now with maybe fewer professors, we might need a 300, 400 seat room to teach to a lecture, or we might need 10 seat rooms to teach you a smaller seminar group. And, so we're able to use 25Live and Series25 to say this room is a seminar room. This room is a lecture room. Now, I came from the video conference world where I look at some of the rooms as a receive room and an origination room.

"You know, what's the experience that the student gets? And, really the experience the student gets in the room is very important, uh, to me. I mean, how comfortable you are in the room. Do you not want your back to the door? How are the seats arranged? And, we can do that within 25Live. We could say what the room layout looks like and we do post the diagrams of the room in there. So, and how many seats? And, if somebody says, but I have to have 40 students in a 25 seat classroom, it's just not gonna happen. So, that helps the schedulers in the departments adjust their class size."