The Cleveland Institute of Art Communicates Effectively with Students with Custom Google API Tool

Customer

For 125 years, The Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) has had a reputation for being one of the premier professional arts and design colleges in the United States. A small institution with about 600 students, many of CIA’s students go on to become gallery artists, product and transportation designers, graphic designers, photographers, contemporary craftsmen, and educators.

Challenges

Gmail administrators can create mailing lists of users in order to allow a user to easily send messages to frequently contacted groups of people. However, in order to add users under a domain to a mail list, an administrator has to manually type the name of each user in the “create email lists” section, located under the user accounts tab of the Gmail control panel. Obviously this could be a very time consuming process for an administrator who wishes to create large and multiple lists. As CIA maintained numerous, large mailing lists that were mission critical to internal communication, this process presented a significant administrative challenge.

Solution

SADA used the Google API to develop a tool that easily allows an administrator to create “on-the-fly” Gmail distribution lists, and then add users to the list by means of a check box next to the user’s name. Additionally, CIA could use the tool to create large lists by simply uploading a CSV file which contained the list of names. SADA’s tool makes it easy and fast to create and manage email distribution lists on G Suite.

Results

The Cleveland Institute of Art can now create the lists it needs using SADA’s tool and save significant time. This solution has allowed CIA’s administrators to complete the task of creating necessary lists, so they can then dedicate more time to critical IT needs.

“When we contacted SADA Systems we were looking for a way to streamline the creation of email lists for our students. SADA’s initial vision was basically just that, but when the betas were shown to us we found that SADA had exceeded our expectations by not only incorporating Google Gears for better synchronization, but also giving us the ability to make changes via batch file to further streamline the group creation and modification process. We could not be happier with SADA’s product, and are looking forward to Phase 2 of the project that will give us the Active Directory synchronization that we need to tie everything together.”

– Michael Kimmel, Director of Information Technology, The Cleveland Institute of Art