Teamup provides a mix of customization and power that makes it a powerful tool for flexible sharing and access in academic environments.
Academic situations often require special consideration for tools and workflows. Events and schedules often need to be widely shared across the student population. Teachers, staff, students, and parents may all have input and need information from the calendar, but confidentiality is also important.
The UWC Robert Bosch College is a unique school in Freiburg, Germany. They’ve found Teamup to be a powerful solution for their needs.
Julien Tallec, Head of Information Systems, shared their story with us.
About UWC Robert Bosch College
UWC Robert Bosch College is home to 200 young adults from over 100 countries who spend two years living and learning on our campus in Freiburg.
Founded in 2014, UWC Robert Bosch College is one of the youngest UWC schools worldwide. Like our sister schools in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, our college is built on a foundation of deliberate diversity: we welcome students from a cross section of socioeconomic backgrounds, cultures, religions, nationalities and experiences.
During their two years at UWC, students are confronted with key issues facing humanity: intercultural understanding, peace and sustainability. By engaging in a diverse international community, they learn that positive change is possible — through open, honest dialogue and informed, courageous action.
The challenge
We have a definite need for publicly accessible calendars.
Very early on, in our College’s fresh history, the need for shared and public calendars manifested itself. Whether to promote a school-wide initiative around Campus, or communicate with parents and guardians all over the world, information needed to be shared within means that were, at the time, either not available to us, or, very bluntly, available in a non-satisfying fashion (be it for a lack of user friendliness, lack of functionality or for costs considerations).
We also need to display the current week schedule.
A couple of years after the birth of the college, we undertook the project of placing digital signage solution throughout campus, with the idea to make the sharing of information broader without the need to revert to the use of individual devices such as laptops or phones.
We need a tool for special days/conference organizing.
More recently, we tried to enable easier management in the organization of all the special days and conferences that take place within our community. Needs range from the communication of the program of a multi-day conference to the registration of guests attending workshops on “special focus days.”
The success factors
For each of the situations and examples addressed above, Teamup’s solution has been of great help. It is often our “go-to” tool to enable us to go further in structuring our communications and initiating better organization.
The following were probably the biggest “success factors” that Teamup provides for us:
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Accessibility
The fact that accessing Teamup is so easy from almost any platform or device, so long as you have access to the internet, is making matters of deployment much easier than alternative solutions. This, added to multi-language capabilities, made the choice of using Teamup an easy one for us: we were guaranteed an easy adoption without a steep learning curve ahead.
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Ease of administration
Often, in a limited organization whose core goal does not revolve around turning a profit, resources and personnel are limited. Our energy and time can easily be diminished because of everything required to make such structure “work.” This can also translate to being overly conscious of spending money wisely and justifying the use of every penny.
“Teamup illustrates perfectly the balance of limited granularity but unlimited possibilities.”
In this scenario, the ease of administration that Teamup offers is somewhat atypical and also unrivaled amongst our other products. It illustrates perfectly the balance of limited granularity but unlimited possibilities: whether it is to share a specific calendar or single event, or provide a daily agenda, straight in your mailbox, no parameter is more than a few clicks away, often without the need to remember a password or complete a registration.
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Pinnacle of flexibility
A calendar solution that we wish to adapt to all of our needs and scenarios ought to be flexible. A glance at Teamup already provides insight that the product was designed with this flexibility in mind from the start. The sheer number of ways to display calendars, but also the myriad of possibilities for one to share organizational information, is sure to please each and everyone while at the same time catering to the biggest number of scenarios possible. I would be remiss if I did not also mention the simple paying structure (starting with a generous free subscription model) and the nice feeling to see and have seen this calendar solution evolve while maintain its “core values.”
Teamup has proven to deliver a tool that quickly was adopted by all within our community. There isn’t any day that goes by without Teamup proving its usefulness. We look forward to continuing to use Teamup and find ways to benefit from it even more!
Many thanks to Julien Tallec for sharing your story with us!
