Technology and Delivery Model

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Choosing the technology for your Portal and how you will deliver and support it is a key decision. Here are two questions you need to talk about:

1. How does your district choose technology solutions? See the section Your District’s Approach to Technology to review your earlier findings.

   Do you choose free open tools? Do you choose solutions that you secure and manage yourself? Do you have a provider that delivers a suite of technology solutions?

   Your answer to this first question will lead you down a certain path. That is because you have made that choice already based on a set of criteria – cost, capacity to support, knowledge of the technology and future vision. You need a particular reason to veer off that path, and need to consider the costs and implications of so doing.

   Depending on your choice, your next steps will differ. But in all cases, the Purpose, Features and Functions, and Content information are needed for this next step. Collectively this information is your “requirements”.

   1. Free open tools.

      Your Project Team can choose a single tool or a combination of tools. For example, you might create a Ning to support the community functions and Google docs when you are working on a collaborative task such as creating a plan.

      The nature of these tools means you could try out several alone and in combination as you match the capabilities to your requirements.

   2. Technology Solution.

      The work of choosing a new technology solution is accomplished by asking the marketplace to respond to your requirements.

      Depending on our school or district this may be a formal or informal process. Check with your purchasing staff for information on your school’s or district’s process.

      Usually the process of a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Quote (RFQ) is used in the case of a technology solution. Additional information can be found at the Purchasing Management of Association of Canada or the American Purchasing Society.

      You will need to build six to eight weeks into your plan for the posting, response and evaluation process if this is your solution approach.

   3. Technology Provider.

      If you already have a provider that delivers a suite of tools including Parent Portal technologies, you may choose to work directly with the provider to customize the solution to your requirements. If you knew up front this would be your choice, you may have included the provider on your Project Team to bring information about the solution to your information gathering processes (see Part One).

      The risk of including your provider too early in the selection process is that your choices and ideas are framed around a pre-determined solution.

2. Will you run the solution on your own servers? Do you have servers that you currently operate? Will you operate the solution in a hosted environment, where another company runs the servers for you? Will someone else operate the solution and the servers for you?

   Your answer to the first question may limit your options here.

   Many free tools can only be operated by the site delivering the free tools, so you do not have the option of operating the solutions yourself. You control some aspects of the configuration and how your data is accessed (see the section on Security for a discussion of the implications here).

   With a provider solution or your own solution you may or may not have a choice of operating models. Here you will want to follow your district’s preferred operating model to simplify how the Portal interacts with other district software.