Singapore American School Provides Students with a Customized, Seamless Login Experience with Google Workspace

Customer

Established in 1956, the Singapore American School (SAS) is an independent, non-profit, co-educational day school offering an American based curriculum for preschool through grade 12 expatriate students. Located on thirty-seven acres in the Woodlands area of Singapore, the purpose built and newly expanded school includes state-of -the-art facilities for students at all grade levels. Over 50 different nationalities are represented among the 3800 students attending SAS. The vision of the Singapore American School is to inspire a passion for learning, encourage emotional and intellectual vitality, and empower students with the confidence and courage to contribute to the global community and to achieve their dreams.

Challenges

SADA’s previous experience working with Victoria Junior College in Singapore provided invaluable insight into working with Singaporean culture and infrastructure differences. Working with Singapore American Schools (SAS) required SADA to coordinate efforts between our engineering team located in our US and Indonesia-based offices with the school’s IT department in Singapore. While SAS had already deployed Google Workspace and provisioned its students and faculty, the school had authentication concerns and required a much more comprehensive group management system than Google Workspace initially provided. Custom development was required to bridge the gap between the cloud platform and the needs of SAS.

Solution

SADA Systems worked with Craig Reid, Educational Technology Team Leader at the Moline School District, to migrate approximately 925 faculty and staff users from Kerio to Google Workspace for Education.

The project began in April 2013, and was completed by June 2013, in less than three months total. SADA’s understanding of the migration paths of educational institutions and the necessity of maintaining strict and speedy timelines to avoid downtime during the school year aided in the Moline School District’s fast move to Google Workspace for Education. The transition went very smoothly, thanks to streamlined communication between both the Moline School District and SADA Systems.

“I was thoroughly impressed with the project and the response from the SADA team,” said Reid. “It was a great process with a great structure and team. There was constant communication the whole way – it was even a note during the closing call that everything went smoothly.”

– Reid

The District also engaged with SADA to implement a mobile strategy for Google Workspace for Education, Vault for both faculty and staff, as well as change management and training.

Results and Benefits

“One of the best and biggest comments we’re getting is around mobility,” said Reid. The District’s former solution didn’t allow for much mobility, but with Google Workspace for Education, mobility is utilized by faculty and staff across a range of devices from iPhones to Androids and Ipads. Now, Google Workspace for Education’s anywhere/anytime access allows for District employees to communicate and collaborate from any location on the device of their choice. The use of Google Docs and Drive has also been greatly beneficial for the District, with the ability to share and edit various policies and procedures between departments, District-wide. Students also benefit from using Drive – instead of having multiple documents on different servers, students are able to share out Docs based on teams. And with Google Vault, Reid is able to eliminate the 5-6 hours a week he spent managing their former email archiving solution (which sometimes took up to 6 hours a day to manage if there was an issue).

By switching to Google Workspace for Education, the faculty and staff of the Moline School District are able to more effectively use their time with easy-to-use solutions. Google Workspace for Education has also reduced operational costs by 10%, including travel expenses and office costs, such as printing and electricity. Additionally, the District has been able to reduce infrastructure costs, including server, storage, and backup and archiving costs. By moving to Google Workspace, the Moline School District saves $16,000 annually in IT expenditures and is looking to migrate the students of the District before the end of the summer.