Document ONE helps manage teaching resources

The Correspondence School of New Zealand is the nation’s largest school, with hundreds of teachers providing individualised teaching to thousands of students.

"The initial focus of the project is to make these individually created teaching resources more structured, organised and accessible, so all teachers and students can benefit from them.”

The School teaches students study at early childhood, primary and secondary levels, and caters for many students with special education needs.

The full-time roll includes students from isolated areas, students who travel around New Zealand and overseas, and students who can't attend their local school or early childhood centre.

The School also teaches over 10,000 primary and secondary students who attend their local school while they study one or more subjects by correspondence.

Teachers provide a great deal of one-on-one attention to students, in many cases adapting teaching resources to individual needs. Unfortunately, because much of this material is stored on individual teachers’ PCs, it is not easily searched or made available to other teachers who may find it valuable.

Making Resources Searchable, Accessible and Re-usable

The School has started rolling out Document ONE from Reliance Software to manage these resources and to make them easily searchable, accessible and re-usable.

“The initial focus of the project is to make these individually created teaching resources more structured, organised and accessible, so all teachers and students can benefit from them,” explains Infrastructure & Operations Manager Chris Jennings. “Later, we will look at some of the wider applications.”

Customised to Meet the School’s Needs

Reliance has also collaborated with the School to enhance Document ONE so that it can:

Support custom metadata in Document ONE libraries; and
Export document metadata in XML format into a relational database system so that it can be included in searches initiated by users from an external application.

“The School appreciated the willingness of Reliance to talk to us about those areas where Document ONE didn’t fit our requirements, and to enhance the standard Document ONE product to cater for those requirements,” says Jennings.

“Often vendors are unwilling to make any changes to their products”.

Repository for Policies Delivered Online

"We were also impressed with how quickly we were able to get the system up and running. Its ease of use has meant that our users have been able to start using it effectively with minimal training."

The School has already used Document ONE as part of a project to deliver policies on-line in a very tight timeframe. Jennings explains that the School has large amounts of policy covering everything from ‘sun-smart’ guidelines for school students to employee HR issues.

The policy documents were stored in different formats and in different locations, so the School wanted to make them readily accessible to all staff via the organisation’s intranet.

Document ONE provided an ideal environment to both store and manage the policy documents – making them easy for staff to find, change and update.

Good Fit with Existing Technology Environment and Budget

The School already had a Lotus Notes/Domino environment, so while it looked at a number of other document management solutions, Document ONE was an ideal fit.

“Document ONE fitted in with our existing technology environment and was affordable,” says Jennings. “We were also impressed with how quickly we were able to get the system up and running.

"Its ease of use has meant that our users have been able to start using it effectively with minimal training. Another important factor for us has been that it requires hardly any support – this is especially valuable when you are deploying applications to remote users.”