HyperOffice Online Business Productivity Suite

YMCA

The YMCA of the USA is the national resource office for the nation's YMCAs. Located in Chicago, with satellite offices across the country, the YMCA of the USA exists to serve YMCAs. It is staffed by about 350 employees. Because all communities have different needs, all YMCAs are different; they are autonomous and separate from the YMCA of the USA.

The Sallie Mae Fund

The Sallie Mae Fund, a charitable organization sponsored by Sallie Mae, achieves its mission to increase access to higher education for America's students by supporting programs and initiatives that help open doors to higher education, prepare families for their college investment, and bridge the gap when no one else can. In addition, The Fund supports employee volunteerism and community service in the communities where Sallie Mae employees live and work.

A Unique Program Structure

In the spring of 2008, The Sallie Mae Fund launched the Kids2College (K2C) program. Through The Fund's partnership with private and government organizations across the country, the K2C program is aimed at developing and implementing a college awareness program for sixth-grade students across the country. The Kids2College program includes a six-session curriculum that exposes students to the value and availability of higher education. To facilitate this process, The Fund provides the full curriculum and related tools such as training and an online resource to support a qualifying organization's effort.

Multiple Levels of Interaction The Sallie Mae Fund's Kids2College program uses a partnership model between the school district, local colleges, universities and a program coordinator. This structure requires each of the Sallie Mae Fund's hundreds of partners to have unique access permissions to scheduled events and meetings, shared documents, shared tasks and shared links specific to their engagement while concurrently limiting access to no-associated neighboring region's groups, all while maintaining a common area where different regions can discuss their unique ideas and approaches.

The Journey

In managing a full-scale, regionally dispersed program with multiple levels of partnerships and events, an organization would typically require regional offices or an accelerated travel schedule to coordinate in organizing projects and events.

Low Overhead and Limited Resources

As a non-profit organization with limited overhead, The Sallie Mae Fund had only two courses open to it: they could either delay the program long enough to raise additional funds allocated towards managing the program at a full scale in a traditional manner, or the program could be temporarily approached as a limited engagement in one of the selected regions. This was true until they discovered the power of online collaboration through HyperOffice.

With HyperOffice, The Sallie Mae Fund is able to organize their users in groups separated by region and affiliation. For instance, a group for each of the 50 states in which the program was active would be built, as well as a common group for partners. In addition, multiple subgroups detailed by internal departments for internal Sallie Mae Fund employees were envisioned. Within each self-contained group there was to exist a fully customized homepage, calendar, project management tool, and complete document repository. Based on their individual role and profile within the program, the HyperOffice experience would be differentiated and unique for each user.

With No Mention of HyperOffice: A Fully Branded Solution

A fundamental requirement in building trust within a member-based organization is the need to maintain a look and feel consistent with the organization's existing image and culture across all mediums. One of the factors in The Sallie Mae fund's hesitation to move towards an outside solution was that most solutions did not offer the ability to customize the product to appear as if it was seamlessly a part of the existing Sallie Mae Fund website, but instead had the jarring appearance of a third party solution. With HyperOffice, The Sallie Mae Fund was able to maintain the format of their existing site, with no mention of HyperOffice in their implementation. In fact, the login fields to the collaboration solution were embedded directly on The Sallie Mae Fund's existing website.

A Seamless Integration

Through the use of the fully integrated HyperOffice page designer, Publisher, a member of the Sallie Mae Fund team with no web design experience whatsoever was able to design and build their collaboration portal. It consisted of an extranet for the client groups and an intranet for the internal groups. This structure allows each group to function independently within the intranet on their own unique intranet workspace, a dedicated area within the intranet based on specific group needs. For instance, a New York group would highlight upcoming events associated with College grants or informational events in the NY State, or even statistics associated with the region. The ability to customize the portal's homepage allowed the Sallie Mae Fund to create direct links to the curriculum and highlight applicable documents on the homepage itself. When used in conjunction with the ability to customize the user experience based on profiles, they are able to completely influence the navigation of a group and the way it is presented, thus customizing the experience for each user on the individual level. In short, the Sallie Mae Fund HyperOffice collaboration portal existed as a seamless, yet secure component of their existing site.

Action without Borders

Action without Borders makes it possible for people and organizations interested in making a difference can communicate and share resources. Being multi-national, AWB was looking for a way to streamline project management across borders. HyperOffice\'s project management tools allowed project collaboration to elevate from simple email attachments to a powerful collaborative system.

Rock of Ages Ministries

Rock of Ages Ministries (ROA) is a faith-based organization determined to influence and assist correctional and education facilities all over the world. ROA originally started over 30 years ago at the home of a Christian minister. The organization consists of over 175 missionaries in all 50 states and in 5 different countries. Rock of Ages Ministries has worked with prisons, detention centers, and awareness programs at public schools, among many other programs and facilities.

Though the organization has been running smoothly for a few decades now, president of ROA, Dr. Terry Ellis, recently realized the existing means of communication in his expanding organization were not substantial. Over the past few decades, the ministry has grown from one man distributing recorded tapes of sermons to organizing hundreds of families to provide social and spiritual services throughout the world. The process of keeping each individual family or unit informed and updated requires more than standard communication, it requires total collaboration. Circulating a monthly calendar proved inadequate with the current pace of 21st century communication.

Currently, 175 families work with the ministry across the globe, from southern Asia to eastern and western Europe. Rock of Ages Ministry puts forth a significant effort in reaching out to prisons, juvenile detention centers and school-sponsored prison prevention programs. The primary focus of this program is to assist participants in making the most of their time and enhance their personal and spiritual rehabilitation process.

The task of maintaining fluid communication with the regionally dispersed units, both between external groups as well as internally, means that a fully integrated system including task management, shared documents, and a robust scheduling system is necessary.

The Journey

Rick Simpson, Executive Director, and Dr. Terry Ellis, Executive VP, originally began a search for a collaborative platform to maintain a central means of communication. The initial concentration was in making sure all the members in the organization were informed and up to date with developing programs. Additionally, the missionaries sought the ability to set up conferences and programs to ensure everybody remained on the same page.

The Discovery

After completing thorough research and evaluating different solutions, ultimately, the decision came between two collaboration solutions, WebOffice and HyperOffice. Unlike WebOffice, where each group had to be individually purchased, HyperOffice provided an unlimited number of groups. With an organization that has 175 missionaries, it would be extremely costly to maintain their current structure in this pricing model. To top it off, HyperOffice provided double the amount of storage for the same price as WebOffice. It became clear that the complete collaborative suite of HyperOffice offered the structure, features and pricing model required to maintain their growing ministry.

The implementation

After pitching the HyperOffice collaboration suite to directors and the executives of the organization, they presented HyperOffice to a beta group of just 2 people. After positive feedback, they graduated to an audience of 10, and then finally with overwhelmingly rave reviews, decided to present to the congregation as a whole.

The process of implementation was facilitated by custom training sessions developed by HyperOffice with the rock of ages needs in mind. Through these sessions, Rock of Ages was able to determine the best approach for their organization within HyperOffice, as well as improve upon existing processes. However, convincing the missionaries to adopt HyperOffice took some additional work. As noted, the previous system for collaboration was build upon contact via email- the missionaries were not accustomed to such an advanced system for total collaboration as HyperOffice provides. Not being the most tech-savvy users, the idea of a web-based collaborative system for the Rock of Ages missionaries was a potentially daunting experience. Thankfully, the HyperOffice system was built with the non-technical user in mind. To facilitate usability, the portal was scaled down so only the information applicable to each user was visible. Not only did this influence the navigation of the portal to enhance the user experience, but it also decreased confusion and made the portal more accessible for the basic user.

Not only is HyperOffice now fully adopted within Rock of Ages, but they have grown to now include their entire ministry of over 100 users.

An Evolution

At the present time, Rock of Ages uses HyperOffice to not only communicate with their missionaries, but also keep up to date on the events which may affect them. The document repository has provided a means to maintain several versions of a single document as well as set permissions based on the group of user associated with it. The scheduling function has eliminated the need for email announcements for meetings and allowed for a higher volume of information to be present for display. In addition, the contact section allows Rock of Ages to maintain a complete database of information on prisons, missionaries as well as associated universities and correctional facilities. The ability to interlink these aspects of the product creates a seamless and fluid structure for navigation and search.

Through the assistance of HyperOffice, Rock of Ages Ministries has matured from its days as a single person operation to a well-respected organization with over a hundred missionaries in multiple regions, both domestic and international.