Request information     Related links     Take a test drive of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for education     Proven Results Dutch Schools Tap Expertise to Deploy Education Portals at Reduced Cost Schools Find Cost-Effective Portal Solution That Fosters Individualized Learning New Portal Technology Creates Fresh Opportunities for Extranet at St. Margaret's Anglican Girls School Analytics help YES Prep teachers work more effectively     Products Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Microsoft .NET Framework Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit   Webcasts Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 PerformancePoint Server 2007 — Insight at Your Fingertips The Power of Portals in your School District: SharePoint Learning Kit Introduction to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: A component of the 2007 Microsoft Office System Application Virtualization: A K12 IT Administrator's Dream Come True! K–12 portals

Education portal solutions

Education portals create a common gateway to the data and services that the people throughout your school district need to effectively share information and work together on projects. Education portals can be built on technologies you may already have—such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows Server—extending the value of your investment in Microsoft technologies.

You can accomplish many critical tasks with a Microsoft portal solution, including:

• Record and share grades electronically with students and parents.
• Create online communities to help teachers, administrators, and students collaborate.
• Facilitate sharing of best practices among teachers and administrators.
• Enable students, parents, faculty, and administrators to access your institution’s resources, anytime, from any connected device
• Post information, such as lesson plans, research content, and coursework, to online document libraries.
• Provide Web-based class registration, lunch ordering, and other services.
• Inform instruction and decisions with dashboards that show up-to-date student performance data.
• Share information with your district personnel, school board, parents, and community members.

Solving real-world challenges

A Web portal can help you address several key challenges, including:

• Teachers need to be able to share innovative and effective instructional resources and methods among themselves.
• Curriculum may have to be realigned to conform to district, state, or federal standards.
• Uninformed and uninvolved parents need help to get in the loop.
• Student should receive regular feedback on performance and progress.
• Multiple systems should not be required for access to student information, such as class schedules, health records, and grade transcripts.
• Teachers and administrators should have access to the information they need to make informed decisions.

Key benefits

Microsoft education portal solutions can help you:

• Increase student and parent engagement. Give students easy ways to connect with their teachers and their peers to get them more engaged in their classes. Bringing parents into that collaborative environment gives students the support they need to perform at their highest levels.
• Facilitate anytime, anywhere learning. Provide your students with single sign-on (SSO) access to learning materials and campus resources—from library content to complete online courses—at any time, from virtually anywhere, and from any type of connected device. You’ll create a virtual campus that never closes.
• Make better decisions. Inform routine decisions and long-range strategic planning across all organizational functions and disciplines with accurate, readily available data presented in intuitive and familiar formats.
• Let faculty focus on instruction. Make it easier for your faculty to find instructional resources, assess students, record and track grades, and communicate with their colleagues, students, and parents. They will have more time and energy to facilitate meaningful learning experiences that meet the unique needs of individual students. Use the Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit to quickly create assignments from any document in your online library.
• Streamline administrative tasks. Make it easy for students to register for classes, access financial aid information, pay their tuition, sign up for lunch programs, report absences, and accomplish many other tasks, from any computer with Internet access.
• Combine a flexible, familiar interface with a powerful business intelligence (BI) engine. When you deliver BI through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you have an integrated platform that can provide relevant information to every employee, in formats familiar to them, such as Microsoft Office Excel.
• Sign in once. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a default single sign-on service to store and map credentials for use in connecting with third-party or back-end systems.

Why choose Microsoft?

With Microsoft education portal solutions, you get:

• Reduced costs. Take advantage of your existing investments in Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server, the Microsoft Office system, and Windows Server.
• Flexible functionality and deployment. Microsoft education portals are simple enough for novice users, yet robust enough for power users. A scalable, standards-based platform means you can start small and then roll out new features and functionality as you are ready.
• Familiar and intuitive interfaces. It is easy to add and customize content on your portal, thanks to an intuitive interface and the ability to integrate with familiar Microsoft Office suites applications, such as Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office Excel.
• Personalized, role-based access. Providing single sign-on access to content on your portal based on role is simple, so you can help ensure that everyone finds what they need—and sees only what they are authorized to see. Setting up personalized dashboards that put key information (like class schedules) and applications (such as e-mail) in one place is a snap.
• Robust support community. Join a large group of other educators from around the world who are having success with portals and sharing their best practices.
• Strong partner ecosystem. Microsoft has a number of partners you can trust to help you build the right portal solution for your institution.
• World-class Microsoft national education services practice. A dedicated national Microsoft education services team assists partners and customers with their enterprise collaboration strategy and architectural designs, using best practices within K-12 and Higher Education settings.

Customer success case studies

Miami-Dade School District improves education by linking teachers, students, and parents online.
The fourth-largest public school district in the United States needed a consistent way to deliver information to more than 1 million students, parents, teachers, and administrators. Miami-Dade County Public Schools built a Web-based portal to give all these constituents a single point of access for relevant information, services, and applications. The district has improved learning potential for students, enhanced parents’ ability to participate in the education of their children, and improved the effectiveness and productivity of teachers and school administrators.

Florida Department of Education gives teachers secure online access to terabytes of student data.
Since the mid 1980s, the Florida Department of Education (DOE) has collected student, staff, and workforce data and used it to guide program development and funding. As data volumes grew, so did demand for the data—from teachers, administrators, legislators, and parents. To provide constituents with secure access to confidential student data, the DOE created a Web portal called Sunshine Connections using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It then worked with Microsoft Services to create a robust identity infrastructure using Active Directory Federation Services and Microsoft software for security and identity management. Easy, secure access to student data helps teachers improve their teaching and leads to improved administrative decisions. The simple logon process encourages teachers to explore the data, and the familiarity of the infrastructure makes the site easy to maintain.

Keller Independent School District Portal speeds communications and cuts prep time in half for paperless meetings.
Keller Independent School District, a fast-growing district in Texas, relied on e-mail for almost all communication and collaboration and its Linux-based GroupWise system couldn’t keep up. So, the district built an intranet portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Uptime has increased from 80 percent to 100 percent, sparking widespread portal use and earning immense popularity with students, faculty, administrators, and board members. As a result, meeting preparation time has been cut in half, printing costs have been reduced by 20 percent, and support calls are down by 90 percent, saving U.S.$300,000.

Next steps

• Find a Microsoft partner to help you plan out and create a portal solution for your school district.
• Contact us to learn more about portal solutions and how they could help you.
• Take a test drive of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for education.