North East Worcestershire College implemented cloud-based email and office tools from Google Apps to enable collaborative technologies and mobile working among staff and students. The college provided training resources like guides and videos on using Google Apps and held one-on-one sessions with leadership to demonstrate mobile access to content. While initial training covered all Google Apps features, the college learned to focus training on specific apps and deliver it over a longer period. Benefits included single sign-on to over 40 resources, cloud-based document storage and sharing, replacement of an aging intranet server, and reduced email backups through Google Vault. Future work includes developing the staff intranet to allow more user interaction and responsibility.

1. North East Worcestershire College – Cloud Based Email and Office
Tools
By utilising Cloud based applications North East Worcester College have enabled
collaborative technologies and mobile working options to help support the work of all
staff and students. The funding enabled the College to dedicate time and resources
to supporting staff and students to use these technologies and explore avenues for
reducing costs by working with partners to develop our cloud based systems.
Project Development
In terms of development internally the team worked to support the creation of a
number of resources to help staff adjust to the new document management tools,
this included handouts and online video guides showing the features and benefits of
the Google Apps suite.
As the offer was rolled out to College leadership team a good deal of time was spent
organising one to one training sessions to show how their mobile devices (primarily
ipads and iphones) could be used to access and create content on the move. This
has now been expanded across the College with departmental meetings being used
as informal training sessions to launch the new features within departments.
The one fundamental lesson learnt was to introduce new systems slowly; the initial
training given to senior managers covered all features of Google Apps and on
reflection proved to be slightly overwhelming. The step was then taken to focus
training on specific apps within the suite and deliver training around these. This led
to delivering training over a much longer period of time than was original planned for
but these costs for training were always planned to be met but the college once the
initial resources were created as part of the project. The training for using Google
Apps is now delivered alongside training to support the College VLE as the two go
hand in hand.
Benefits to the College

2.  Single sign on – Has allowed staff and students access to over 40 resources,
not just the cloud based storage and email. This has reduced the amount of
training required to access resources and removed some of the pressure of
LRC staff in helping users locate usernames and passwords for the various
tools.
 Cloud based document storage – Allows staff to upload, create and share
documents with 5GB storage. The real advantages here has been seen in
the ability to create and edit documents on mobile devices and the ability to
share documents with others including students allowing for paper less
assignment feedback and submission inside and out of our VLE
 Cloud based email storage – This allows the College to remove the exchange
server and reduce the amount of space and time taken up with email backups
as Google Vault will essentially replace our email backup procedure. This will
see an estimated reduction of 600GB and reduce the nightly backup time by
around 2 hours
 Replacement of ageing intranet server. By moving the internal intranet to a
cloud based solution, with document management features the College are
able to remove an ageing and power hungry server that has been used to
host this service prior to the move.
Future Work – Development of staff intranet
There is still some work to be done around the creation of the staff intranet though
this has been developed there are still some issues around ownership and who can
edit what. Unlike the previous intranet which was “static” by utilising the sites
functionality within Apps we now have the ability to allow users to interact and take
responsibility which is really helping drive improvements in the accuracy of the
information now shared.