Discussions

Greetings all!  Today I am wearing my 'CTO at Good  Shepherd Episcopal School" hat in making this post/request.  I have been asked by my HOS to research Board Portal platform options. At my past schools I would have simply established a new  and private Haiku LMS page and do some training.  We know what happened to my beloved LMS. CURSE YOU POWERSCHOOL. So-  I am left to tap the brain trust here to better understand what others are using to serve this need. GSES is a full time all-in Veracross school (including portals for parents/students) and uses Finalsite for its eternal facing communications/website.

Anyone have some suggestions or recommendations.

Best to all,

Greetings all!  Today I am wearing my 'CTO at Good  Shepherd Episcopal School" hat in making this post/request.  I have been asked by my HOS to research Board Portal platform options. At my past schools I would have simply established a new  and private Haiku LMS page and do some training.  We know what happened to my beloved LMS. CURSE YOU POWERSCHOOL. So-  I am left to tap the brain trust here to better understand what others are using to serve this need. GSES is a full time all-in Veracross school (including portals for parents/students) and uses Finalsite for its eternal facing communications/website.

Anyone have some suggestions or recommendations.

Best to all,

Greetings all!  Today I am wearing my 'CTO at Good  Shepherd Episcopal School" hat in making this post/request.  I have been asked by my HOS to research Board Portal platform options. At my past schools I would have simply established a new  and private Haiku LMS page and do some training.  We know what happened to my beloved LMS. CURSE YOU POWERSCHOOL. So-  I am left to tap the brain trust here to better understand what others are using to serve this need. GSES is a full time all-in Veracross school (including portals for parents/students) and uses Finalsite for its eternal facing communications/website.

Anyone have some suggestions or recommendations.

Best to all,

Tony -

We are a Veracross/FinalSite school as well. In my opinion, you have three options:

1. Create a Veracross portal for this as suggested. Depending on how many portals that the school is using already, this may involve an additional charge as there are a set number of portals provided.
2. Create a FinalSite portal for the trustees. This is what we used to do.
3. Use a seperate board portal system. This may be the best solution, as I am concerned that within the Veracross and FinalSite options, that holes may be created which allow the contents of the board portal to be accessed. We had been using BoardEffect for this for our campus until we made the decision on June 30 to implement a new board portal system, OnBoard. The members of our board could not be happier and we have fully made the switch over to this system and are holding our first board meeting on Saturday. OnBoard is secure, safe, and compared to the previous system, a reasonable cost in my opinion for its functionality and security. The transition has been so successful that our board members, seeing the ease of accessing and working within the system, have asked us to create sub-groups for each of the board committees and workgroups to have everything within one platform. Training and support has been great. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

I am willing to connect with you for more details if you would like.

Greetings all!  Today I am wearing my 'CTO at Good  Shepherd Episcopal School" hat in making this post/request.  I have been asked by my HOS to research Board Portal platform options. At my past schools I would have simply established a new  and private Haiku LMS page and do some training.  We know what happened to my beloved LMS. CURSE YOU POWERSCHOOL. So-  I am left to tap the brain trust here to better understand what others are using to serve this need. GSES is a full time all-in Veracross school (including portals for parents/students) and uses Finalsite for its eternal facing communications/website.

Anyone have some suggestions or recommendations.

Best to all,

Greetings all!  Today I am wearing my 'CTO at Good  Shepherd Episcopal School" hat in making this post/request.  I have been asked by my HOS to research Board Portal platform options. At my past schools I would have simply established a new  and private Haiku LMS page and do some training.  We know what happened to my beloved LMS. CURSE YOU POWERSCHOOL. So-  I am left to tap the brain trust here to better understand what others are using to serve this need. GSES is a full time all-in Veracross school (including portals for parents/students) and uses Finalsite for its eternal facing communications/website.

Anyone have some suggestions or recommendations.

Best to all,

@Tony Perez - To piggyback off of @Denise Covington@Vinnie Vrotny, we (MKA) are a Veracross, Finalsite, and Google school. We recently launched a Board of Trustees (BoT) portal as part of our Veracross platform AND created Google Shared Drives for all the resources used by the various committees. Our rationale for this was:@Denise Covington

1. We no longer use our Finalsite portals in favor of our Veracorss portal. We made this switch as most of our Trustees are current parents, and they are already using the Veracorss portals to access their school-related materials.
2. The Veracross BoT portal allows us to control access by role; however, those with access to edit portals can also see the page. This is similar to the access issues with using any LMS tools to create portals. The confidential nature of the materials could be in question. We have gotten around this by using the portal as the starting point for the Board. They can see general information, but all committee-related materials are stored in Google Shared Drives.
3. The Google Shared Drives (Institutionally Owned) are set for each board committee, and access is controlled through the Google Sharing settings. We use the Shared Drives as those are institutionally owned drives managed by the Head of School's administrative assistant.  The only people outside the Board who can access the drives would be the Google Admins. There are only three Google admins accounts, AND they are role/admin-specific accounts, meaning not personal use accounts. Once the Shared Drives are created, the HoS Administrative Assistant is assigned as the owner, and the access is removed for the admin account that created the folder. While the admin-role account can reassign itself to the folder, it is not visible to the account, creating a more secure/private space for BoT material.
4. Veracross groups are created for each of the various committees. This allows us to have committee-specific mailing lists that can be tracked within Veracorss and use the groups to create buttons, where visibility is controlled by group membership, that link directly to the shared committee drives.  Trustees only see the committees for which they serve... if this is something that is desired.

NOTE: The Trustees will need a Google account, which most of ours have already.  However, you can create a Google account with your existing email address to avoid managing another email account. On the Google Sign-in Page Test - https://accounts.google.com/signin - you click "Create account." As you walk through the steps, you can enter your existing email address to use to create the account.

Hope this helps... happy to talk to you directly about this as well.

Greetings all!  Today I am wearing my 'CTO at Good  Shepherd Episcopal School" hat in making this post/request.  I have been asked by my HOS to research Board Portal platform options. At my past schools I would have simply established a new  and private Haiku LMS page and do some training.  We know what happened to my beloved LMS. CURSE YOU POWERSCHOOL. So-  I am left to tap the brain trust here to better understand what others are using to serve this need. GSES is a full time all-in Veracross school (including portals for parents/students) and uses Finalsite for its eternal facing communications/website.

Anyone have some suggestions or recommendations.

Best to all,

Hey Bill - thanks for the detailed response on how you use VC. It is a simple solution-  and I would like to not have  another platform to manage -that said - I also like the idea of keeping our Board out of VC - most are community members or former parents - and they are more used to Finalsite portals. I am showing options to our Head this week and will get this moving one way or another soon.

Cheers, TP

@Tony Perez - To piggyback off of @Denise Covington@Vinnie Vrotny, we (MKA) are a Veracross, Finalsite, and Google school. We recently launched a Board of Trustees (BoT) portal as part of our Veracross platform AND created Google Shared Drives for all the resources used by the various committees. Our rationale for this was:@Denise Covington

1. We no longer use our Finalsite portals in favor of our Veracorss portal. We made this switch as most of our Trustees are current parents, and they are already using the Veracorss portals to access their school-related materials.
2. The Veracross BoT portal allows us to control access by role; however, those with access to edit portals can also see the page. This is similar to the access issues with using any LMS tools to create portals. The confidential nature of the materials could be in question. We have gotten around this by using the portal as the starting point for the Board. They can see general information, but all committee-related materials are stored in Google Shared Drives.
3. The Google Shared Drives (Institutionally Owned) are set for each board committee, and access is controlled through the Google Sharing settings. We use the Shared Drives as those are institutionally owned drives managed by the Head of School's administrative assistant.  The only people outside the Board who can access the drives would be the Google Admins. There are only three Google admins accounts, AND they are role/admin-specific accounts, meaning not personal use accounts. Once the Shared Drives are created, the HoS Administrative Assistant is assigned as the owner, and the access is removed for the admin account that created the folder. While the admin-role account can reassign itself to the folder, it is not visible to the account, creating a more secure/private space for BoT material.
4. Veracross groups are created for each of the various committees. This allows us to have committee-specific mailing lists that can be tracked within Veracorss and use the groups to create buttons, where visibility is controlled by group membership, that link directly to the shared committee drives.  Trustees only see the committees for which they serve... if this is something that is desired.

NOTE: The Trustees will need a Google account, which most of ours have already.  However, you can create a Google account with your existing email address to avoid managing another email account. On the Google Sign-in Page Test - https://accounts.google.com/signin - you click "Create account." As you walk through the steps, you can enter your existing email address to use to create the account.

Hope this helps... happy to talk to you directly about this as well.

Greetings all!  Today I am wearing my 'CTO at Good  Shepherd Episcopal School" hat in making this post/request.  I have been asked by my HOS to research Board Portal platform options. At my past schools I would have simply established a new  and private Haiku LMS page and do some training.  We know what happened to my beloved LMS. CURSE YOU POWERSCHOOL. So-  I am left to tap the brain trust here to better understand what others are using to serve this need. GSES is a full time all-in Veracross school (including portals for parents/students) and uses Finalsite for its eternal facing communications/website.

Anyone have some suggestions or recommendations.

Best to all,