Executive Summary
Charter Technology Solutions provides IT and technology consulting services to schools and education-focused organizations, as well as non-profits in the greater New York area. They enable these organizations to achieve greater operational efficiencies while keeping costs low. Faculty and staff required up-to-date Microsoft Office 365 shared calendars on their smartphones for school meetings and schedules.
Challenges
The challenge for Charter clients was not only calendar sync to smartphones, but also to Outlook which was even more important. Consequently meetings being updated or changed did not register for anyone and no reminders were being created because Outlook/Office 365 reminders don’t work on shared calendars. CiraSync resolved both needs.
Schools set teachers and faculty on a shared calendar at the beginning of the school year and frequently update the calendar with staff and faculty meetings and parent teacher conferences. Without the automated syncing of calendars to smartphones, it meant that when meetings were changed or added, the calendars would not update on smartphones. The school would call an all-hands meeting and one-third of the staff would not show up, or even know they were invited. Any time a new staff member came onboard at a school, they would update the calendars manually and that would send a meeting update to all people on the invitation creating meaningless updates and more manual work for the IT department.
Charter Technology Solutions needed to provide a syncing solution for shared calendars fast. They knew Microsoft did not provide this capability, and, initially found a syncing company called Did it Better. They spent more hours on maintenance and more money with their support team than was created with the initial syncing problem.
“We find CiraSync to be the best-in-breed solution for our client’s Office 365 Calendar syncing. We’ve tried other vendors and find this the most dependable fit for our needs.”
Ritaly Rapaport, Director, Client Management, Charter Technology Solutions
Solution
After being frustrated with their previous vendor, Charter Technology Solutions did a Google search for highly-rated syncing solutions for Office 365. They found CiraSync and had the new solution up in running on their internal servers immediately.
Charter Technology’s own Microsoft 365 calendars were syncing so reliably that they decided to roll out CiraSync out to their school district clients. Immediately, teachers, faculty, and all staff were able to get timely and up-to-date reminders about meetings including critical parent teacher conference schedules.
