SEATTLE, WA – March 16, 2010 — Operating a college or university technology help desk is a challenge under the best of circumstances. Providing technical support seven days per week and late into the evening requires precise coordination, organization, and a solid team of analysts. In order to build the most skilled faculty, staff, and student populations, a well developed IT training strategy can yield productive results. When the responsibility for planning, developing, and delivering a focused IT training program falls on an already overburdened and understaffed technology help desk, productive online tools are an absolute necessity.
When Pia Roper, Manager of the Technology Help Desk at Philadelphia University, determines her training activities each semester, she has automated the process of announcing, scheduling, and confirming the details of each training session using the Trumba(R) Connect solution. Trumba provides Roper with a set of tools that allow her to manage and administer an array of training opportunities without additional staffing or a maze of paper-based communications and forms. “We use Trumba Connect to register faculty and staff participants for all Help Desk sponsored events and trainings. Training announcements are designed by our Public Relations group. An html link is embedded in the campus-wide announcement directing registrants to the training sessions registration page in Trumba Connect.”
Some of the most useful features of Trumba(R) Connect are found in the event registration component. When a faculty member receives notification for an upcoming training session of interest, they click through the link, register for the session, receive a confirmation that they have successfully registered for the event, and the session is added to their personal calendar (MS Outlook, for example). If seating is limited, Trumba(R) Connect tracks the number of registered attendees and when the maximum number of attendees is reached, faculty can add themselves to a waiting list. Roper adds, “Trumba Connect also sends an electronic notification to the Help Desk when someone registers for a training session. As a Trumba Connect editor, I can connect to the online calendar and monitor the registrants for any IT training session.” Trumba Connect provides a set of powerful tools that allow a small staff or organization to structure, schedule, and administer training events in a sophisticate manner without complication or additional staff.
Jeff Cepull, Philadelphia University’s CIO, favors the Trumba Connect solution for several reasons. “Calendaring and event scheduling is not one of our core activities. The Trumba Connect hosted solution is an ideal fit for our campus. We have a small IT team, so a hosted approach allows us to provide expanded services to our campus community without ever considering additional staff. Internal development of a calendaring solution has never been an option—we simply do not have the capacity. Calendar management is de-centralized; allowing various departments to have an authoring license, again, without adversely impacting the central IT team. Philadelphia University has been a customer since 2007, using Trumba Connect to solve a wide range of calendaring and scheduling challenges throughout our campus. As demand for the Trumba Connect solution has grown, we have steadily increased our editor licenses. I strongly recommend the Trumba Connect product and the company’s customer support service—their product allows us to create solutions that we would otherwise be challenged to provide.”
Philadelphia University (www.philau.edu) is a small private institution of nearly 3,500 students with professional programs in architecture, business, engineering, science, and design. Philadelphia University is developing the model for professional university education in the 21st century.
About Trumba
Trumba Corporation is a Seattle-based developer of innovative online event presentation and content management technology that helps media companies build community around and generate revenue from “go-and-do” content. The company’s flagship product, Trumba Connect, allows organizations to embed highly interactive and customizable calendars within their websites. Trumba customers also benefit from an array of event-centric tools that include the ability to leverage user-generated content through event submission forms, create categories of calendars based on event types or geography, reverse publish online event information, drop events onto an array of personal calendaring solutions and much more. Trumba technology is used by a variety of media organizations, including The New York Times, Pocono Record, Chattanooga Times Free Press, SouthCoastToday.com, Cape Cod Times, and King 5 TV. Trumba Connect is a subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) solution. The company is privately held and backed by three of the industry’s leading venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital and Oak Investment Partners. To find out more about Trumba, visit www.trumba.com.