We’ve mentioned some of the software we use around here. Well, some of the software we use has mentioned us now. The good folks at 37signals put out a request the other week for stories about how people and companies use their products. We sent them a Writeboard sketching out how their Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire help us run Populi, and they put it up on their Product Blog today.
Neato.
This one’s interesting to us because Washington State University is only about ten miles away from the Populi office… and because the numbers are so huge. According to this story in WSU’s Daily Evergreen (the campus newspaper), the University is about to embark on a two-year, $15 million project to upgrade the “core information systems” to make things like the course catalog and student accounts accessible to students. One Michael Corwin, formerly of the University of Texas, will pull down $140,000 a year overseeing the project. Previously, the University had requested $1 million to “study their options”.
We looked at our pricing page and roughed out some numbers for the 25,000+ student University. Figuring they’d go for the “Large” pricing plan, WSU could have Populi for about $1.3 million a year, and in 11 years, they would have spent what they’re spending just to get their new system set up.
Now, we’re not exactly aiming Populi at the State University market, but we did want to share our “same-planet-different-worlds” moment with y’all… especially that request for a million bucks just to study the options. We’re sure Mr. Corwin’s gonna earn his salary, and we’re willing to admit that $15 million will get you some software… but 1,000,000 clams just to see what’s out there? Astonishing.
Here’s a video that gives you a quick overview of our new Payment Processing and Bookstore features.
Online Payment Processing and Bookstore from Populi on Vimeo.
This one didn’t quite make it in with our most recent release, but here it is now: we just released Attendance Reporting! Now you can view summaries of attendance stats for all your courses in a given term. Go to Academics, and under Term, click Attendance. Drawing on the attendance records taken in individual courses, the table shows you each student and how many presents, tardies, absents, etc. they’ve accumulated that term. Filter the table down to see students who fit particular criteria (over a certain number of absences, for instance), and export them to a spreadsheet or email them all with one click. We’ve found that a lot of schools needed this sort of tool, and we’re pleased to get it out there to them.
Here’s an article from Infoworld that outlines the top 5 reasons “Why businesses still hate enterprise software“. What are they? According to the Infoworld survey: High cost of ownership, difficult upgrades, poor cross-functional processes, unmet business requirements, and inflexibility. The article’s links are worth following… if only to see what a nightmare giant, jargon-choked ERP software deployments can be.
This article brings to our minds 37signals’ advice to software providers that want to do things differently—have an enemy. If we have an enemy here at Populi, it’s the academic version of the bloated ERP so castigated in the survey. Massive and labor-intensive—and way too expensive for small colleges—it gives us our raison d’etre. As we see it, our job is to keep our customers happy so you’ll have better things to say about us than the Infoworld respondents did about their ERP’s.
