Chicago’s 5th Biggest Snow Fall

Sean in Chicago following one of the worst snowfall in years

Having just returned from Chicago I can draw comparisons with Webanywhere’s journey in America to my very own personal journey which started early last Sunday morning.

I left the house in darkness early on Sunday morning, the first day of a new month. Thankfully the snow was melting in the UK as I made my way across the Pennines. At Manchester Airport I met up with a colleague and we journeyed together across the Atlantic. Our flight was indirect so a short layover would be needed before our onward journey to Chicago. I thought this would be good as we could stretch our legs and perhaps grab something to eat.

Little did we know what was about to hit us! Winter Storm Linus arrived on the Sunday creating misery for hundreds of thousands of passengers and the cancellation of thousands of flights. Apparently naming snowstorms is a new thing in the US, and Linus was unforgiving.

With our flight cancelled we booked ourselves in the Doubletree by Hilton near the airport. The only bonus was the ability to watch the Super Bowl, and I must say the Americans certainly know how to put on a show. The game ended in controversy with Boston’s New England Patriots narrowly beating the Seattle Seahawks due to some mishandling of the ball. Our journey onwards to Chicago was about to get more controversial as we started to worry about the handling of our luggage.

Having had our original flights rescheduled we decided to switch airline from American to JetBlue. The high passenger demand meant we needed to fly via Boston to Chicago, adding to further delays, and now the cancellation of some business meetings too. Remaining upbeat, we boarded the plane and took off from a rainy and drizzly Philadelphia.

Just as we entered Boston airspace the pilot came on the tanoy, saying “I’m sorry to announce ladies and gentleman but I’m instructed snow storm Linus is making it unsafe to land. We have been asked to turn around and head to JFK.”

Legacy Christian Academy

We landed in New York thinking perhaps a short delay would prevail and we could set off again to Boston. This wasn’t to be the case. We then switched to another JetBlue aircraft with our bags still on the other plane. Again waiting on the tarmac, the snow continued to fall and once again the plane was cancelled.

A night in the Big Apple was inevitable so we rang around 10 hotels until luckily managing to find 2 rooms at the Best Western near the airport. The plastic plates for breakfast were not the best but on the upside we managed to get a direct flight to Chicago the following evening. Luckily we were reunited with our bags at JFK and arrived in Chicago under 19 inches of snow – the fifth largest recording of snowfall in it’s history. The greatest irony of all was that my brother had set off to San Francisco 2 days earlier had now beaten us to Chicago!

“Failing big” in America is embraced, whilst in the UK this is not widely accepted. Indeed, Webanywhere started it’s USA journey back in 2010, experiencing a similar stop-start scenario. Our USA expansion certainly hasn’t been a crash landing but nor has it been an easy passageway. As they say in business, it’s not the destination but the journey that matters.

Stop-Start Journey to Chicago

Equally, in online learning it’s easy to measure the outcomes of learning via the grade book, but what is more interesting is the journey and the learner journey. Measuring the progress and learning pathways of students online with big data is exciting. Mapping this big data to their final destinations will create a new industry for the acquisition of talent, and that’s a journey I find fascinating. Webanywhere might build great systems and radar for these student learner journeys, but organisations will always need great pilots – and that’s you, the educators.

Webanywhere is now taking off and is hitting new altitudes, spreading its wings across many States and corporations in America. We will continue to learn from our onward journeys as we meet new people and prepare for obstacles along the way.

Find out more about Webanywhere’s US division at www.webanywhere.us

BETT Show Excel London 2015 Moodle with Microsoft

Sean and the Webanywhere team at BETT 2015 Excel London

Webanywhere’s 5th BETT Show in London saw us launch a number of new products and services. Our two main product lines now have OneDrive integration which allows schools to quickly use their Office365 files in both our School Jotter and Moodle platforms. The Moodle functionality has been released to the open source community making it free for anyone to use. The key advantage of storing files on OneDrive is the ability to access your files at anytime and on any device. Office365 makes version control of your documents a breeze and avoids the pain of duplicate files causing confusion. You could start a word document on your mobile phone and then see it in your Moodle LMS with no extra work involved.

During the Moodle with Microsoft Better Together Seminar including Jason Cole, CEO of Remote Learner and Doug Mahugh, Senior Technical Evangelist of Microsoft Open Technologies a walk through of how Moodle can play with Office365, Azure, Active Directory, OneDrive and OneNote was demonstrated. This code has been released to the open source Moodle community and I was particularly impressed by how OneNote assignments could be submitted and then marked.

Webanywhere BETT 2015 Stand

Once the presentation had finished I asked what the plans for the future would be and whether Office Mix (PowerPoint with narration functionality, quizzes and analytics) and Yammer (a social network) would be on the development roadmap. Doug replies this was being investigated and future developments could also include Skype integration. Skype of course would be great for starting an online meeting straight from Moodle.

The lecture theatre was certainly packed for the Moodle with Microsoft talk and the new integrations look like they will improve productivity and easy of use for a great many teachers. After all teachers want to be teaching and coaching not conducting unnecessary administration which can be solved by new technologies! It makes sense to link Moodle the most popular open source learning management system in the world with Microsoft who have a strong reputation for their office productivity software.

Webanywhere WOW Customers

Steve Ding with customers at the BETT SHOW

If you over deliver in business customers keep coming back. This is something Webanywhere strives to provide through our “Stretch Beyond” mantra – we don’t just want to meet expectations, we want to exceed them by going the extra mile.

Having a “WOW” customer experience means delivering small acts of kindness and making everyone feel especially important. Webanywhere focuses on 4 main areas to ensure our customer experience is second to none.

We endeavour to deliver great service to our customers. All phone calls have to be answered within 20 seconds and we allow our staff to talk to customers for as long as is needed – however long the customer is comfortable with. As long as they’re happy we don’t care. We don’t use customer care scripts and instead trust our staff to deliver a personalised experience to each customer.

We surprise customers by including product features and extra services they just don’t expect. This might be as simple as a hand written thank-you note or perhaps free usage of one of our software apps – this is our way of saying thank-you.

Webanywhere Staff Christmas 2014

Having knowledgeable staff on the end of the phone is very important, and as a learning company we encourage our staff to become learning animals. Our own internal LMS (based on the same Totara packages we provide to clients) ensures that new staff are well-trained in our company policies, products and processes. We like to front-load the staff training so we don’t damage the customer experience further down the track. Every time a task is cleared in our CRM we ask customers to rate the task and give feedback. This data is then used for further training and process improvements. There is always room for improvement when it comes to the quality of our service.

Speed equals value and, in an increasing digital world and with the speed of the internet, people are becoming less and less patient. Our engineers understand this and create software and websites which load quickly, saving you time. We have strict service-level agreements that we measure and manage in order to address support tickets and customer change-requests in a timely fashion. When customers log issues we call them back straight away in order to guarantee that we understand their requirements and that progress updates are forthcoming.

Our philosophy is “WAW WOW Customers” – Webanywhere WOWs Customers – and we exemplify this in everything we do!

Future Decoded – Apps in the Cloud on any Device driving Big Data

Satya Nadella at Future Decoded round table

Visiting London Excel recently, I was lucky enough to meet the Global CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella at a business round table discussion. Much of the discussion centered around the cloud and how Microsoft want to be great at productivity software.

Three main product and services lines underpin Microsoft’s ambitions to be one of the mega vendors in the cloud computing space. Office 365, Azure and Dynamics are Microsoft’s big bets on the future where consumers can access their software and apps on multiple devices in anyplace and anywhere.

Satya believes the truth of the product and customer realities are important in the digital age. Microsoft allows some customers who are uncomfortable in moving entirely to the cloud a hybrid cloud alternative. However, with £5 billion spent on Microsoft Azure infrastructure and data centers in Dublin and The Netherlands, Microsoft is encouraging us all to move to the cloud.

Recent partnerships with Dropbox, Salesforce and others demonstrates that Microsoft accept customers will dual source their software. Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint are now available on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads for free. So it’s no real surprise to see Word’s rise to number 1 in app download charts.

This new ‘horizontalisation’ of software represents a big sea change from the past when vendors, developers and resellers were either in the Microsoft camp or outside that in the Open Source, Linux, Google or Apple camp. 20% of services now delivered on Azure and the Microsoft cloud are Linux, which demonstrates that Microsoft does indeed love Linux. What Microsoft wants is 1st class product excellence – irrespective of the software stack in use.

Satya Nadella went on to explain how a mobile first, cloud first approach means people’s devices will come and go but all their data will be available anywhere and anytime on cloud. The world is becoming more digital and people want more responsive software. Whilst the cloud is becoming generally more accepted, Microsoft demonstrated how management policies can be set up to avoid people sending sensitive information outside of the organisation alongside mobile device security management.

I asked Satya how Microsoft would influence the future of education. The reality of the cloud and management console will allow teachers to act as IT technicians in schools. A new version of PowerPoint is to be launched and will allow teachers to bring PowerPoint to life in the classroom, with the ability to create quizzes and much more. For network managers using Active Directory, this can be taken to the cloud with just 5 clicks, making migrating to the cloud less daunting. Schools still need to be educated in the benefits of cloud computing, but over time this transformation will take place allowing teachers to teach and worry less about whether the technology works. IT will become similar to turning your gas or electricity on and off.

Webanywhere are already in the cloud. We intend to continue to offer our customers Office 365 integration with School Jotter. Like Microsoft, we understand it is important to ensure our software plays with others. Collaboration is more important than competition. We should move our software to the cloud and not have our heads in the cloud!

Smart Creatives – How Google Works

Sean and Michal of Webanywhere

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg have recently published a book called “How Google Works”. In it, the former CEO of Google and now Chairman Eric and his product guru Jonathan describe what has made Google successful.

One of their ideas is to organise the business around the people with the biggest impact. The 2 pizza rule from Jeff Bezos is recommended when getting started with projects. A small team that can be fed by 2 pizzas can be highly effective. The 7 rule explains how each manager in a business should have at least 7 direct line reports, as this keeps the organisation flat and avoids micromanagement. Eric and Jonathan actually recommend that organisational reorganisation should be done in a day and the remaining issues left to the smart creatives in the business to sort out.

So what is and who are these smart creatives? Firstly, they are learning animals with lots of curiosity. Of course being smart creatives they are obviously smart people. They want to make the world a better place and are always thinking of a better way of doing things. Smart creatives have a growth mindset and can live with ambiguity.

If smart creatives are what’s needed how do you get them? Google take the whole hiring process very seriously – so much so that every candidate’s data sheet was vetted by Larry Page until recently. Hiring is not just the job of management – it’s the job of everyone in the business. Google only hires great candidates. Great candidates are smart, ethical people who will challenge the organisation. These smart creatives want to make the product much better and get stuff done. They are passionate and believe in collaboration over competition.

Google believes in relationships, not hierarchies, and a culture of ‘Yes’. We all need to hire smart creatives who have an upward career trajectory. We must expand the field of potential candidates and not just recruit for now, but for the future. If we are to become smart creatives ourselves we must become learning animals.

The New School Jotter

School Jotter on the iPad

Technology is moving fast and with that Webanywhere has to keep spending significant time and money on research and development to stay ahead of the curve. Listening to our customers, we have created an all in one education app solution hosted on the cloud.

The New School Jotter education app platform not only allows our customers the flexibility of controlling their website, but a multitude of options for online learning and keeping children safe online.

We have spent over 2 years developing our latest version of School Jotter, which is used by thousands of educational establishments. What our customers say is the software must improve learning outcomes. Our easy to use, tablet friendly software not only makes engaging with learners and parents fun, but we hope the experience is flexible for all involved.

Your can pick and mix apps appropriate to your school’s needs. Online rewards can be managed by the ‘Merits’ app, which included the ability to create a fully fledged online shop. Teachers can create compelling learning sites using the ‘Learn’ app and students can do the same creating their sites using the ‘Portfolio’ application. Gathering feedback from all stakeholders at school can be done with ‘Surveys’ and ‘Forums’ can be used for internal discussions. ‘Messages’ allows pupils to communicate in a safe and secure manner, avoiding the need for email addresses and the risks this can bring. Our ‘Assess’ app – just launched – allows for lesson observations to be captured on Smart phones and instantaneously be posted to School Jotter for reporting.

School Jotter also plays with other software – be it your student management system, such as Capita SIMS, or with popular office productivity tools, including Office 365 and Google Apps. You can have a play with School Jotter for free via our newly launched website and clicking on free trial here:

http://www.schooljotter.com

If you have ideas for new apps on the School Jotter platform, do please get in touch – I’d be interested in talking to you!

No pain no gain