Walters State Community College in Tennessee is ranked 16th on Yahoo! Internet Life magazine's list of most wired community colleges. Approximately 900 faculty and staff members currently serve an estimated 6,000 students. The college was faced with the need to implement a new and improved Intranet to support its 70 departments, because the Intranet that they had been using posed several problems.

The old intranet was a copy from Walters State's internet site that resided on their website and branched out for faculty and staff use only. A major problem was that most of the content was duplicated on both the intranet and the internet sites, resulting in unnecessary pages and documents occupying space. Updating the content of both sites became problematic, because of the time-consuming and error-prone process. As a consequence, much of the intranet's content became outdated. Another problem stemmed from the fact that the intranet resided on the Internet, making it possible for students and general online visitors to access sensitive, faculty and staff-only information.

Bill Morefield, Walters State's Webmaster and Network Specialist, decided it was time to redesign the intranet from the bottom up. Instant Intranet Builder was the right solution to the college's needs because it divided content from the Internet and provided the security necessary to separate what the faculty and staff were seeing from the general audience.

Bill was responsible for implementing and deploying IIB, as well as training. He comments that users instantly preferred IIB' s ease of use over the old intranet, and adds, "IIB was well received. Our staff people are now getting used to updating the pages themselves." About fifteen to twenty people from different academic and administrative departments currently maintain approximately 300 pages on the intranet. Bill likes the fact that private groups can be set up so that only certain groups can access documents specifically assigned to them. One type of document is the students' grades, which should only be accessed by the faculty. Another is the students' evaluations, which is accessed by the budgetary department, not the faculty.

Another IIB feature used at Walters State is Form Builder. Bill states that the forms are practical for sending courier service requests, and remarks, "Requests used to be made through phone calls, but it was not very useful because we did not have a good way to keep track of the requests. With IIB, we are able to track them and are able to update them in our database."

Building an intranet can either be a painstaking or easy task, depending on the tools you choose. Instant Intranet Builder gave Walters State Community College the right tools build a new intranet that avoided obstacles that their old intranet could not resolve. Whether you want to improve your existing Intranet or are considering a new one, Instant Intranet Builder's ease of use makes it the right choice for communication and information delivery solutions!

For more information on how you can put Instant Intranet Builder to work for you, please call us at toll free @ 765.497.8848 or send an e-mail to IIB@passageways.com.