A few of your beloved OrgSync team members recently traveled to Lancaster, PA to attend the NACA Mid-Atlantic regional conference. There were almost 1,000 students and administrators in attendance representing over 100 schools. We had great conversations, both with campuses currently using OrgSync to manage and communicate with their students, as well as schools debating the best way to bring OrgSync to campus. Our friends from Lycoming College were running the conference, and we were lucky enough to have them at our booth to share their OrgSync experiences with other schools. It is extremely exciting to have such strong relationships with the schools we work with and to see that they love us as much as we love them.

We were also able to spend time with other exhibitors. Many of them have elaborate booths and they went to great lengths to impress the student activities boards. We saw everything from magicians to musical artists to snake and reptile handlers. I convinced the magician David Hall to teach me an amazing trick that I later used to impress everyone at the conference.

We always love spending time with current and future users of OrgSync. Conferences not only allow us to show new schools what OrgSync can do for them but also to train and teach our current clients more about OrgSync. NACA has always been one of our favorite conferences, and we can’t wait until we can attend one again.

OrgSync announces our plan to support Susan G. Komen For the Cure by participating in the Race for the Cure on November 2 in Austin, TX. OrgSync is committed and dedicated to enhancing the Austin community, as well as supporting the efforts of Susan G. Komen for the Cure in the fight against breast cancer. The OrgSync team will race in honor of Karen Andreas, the mother of an OrgSync founder who is a survivor and continues to battle breast cancer.

“We’re really excited to participate in the Race for the Cure to support the cause and one of our team members,” said OrgSync Founder and CEO, Eric Fortenberry. “We are always looking for opportunities to help give back to the Austin community.”

We ask for your support of the OrgSync for Susan G. Komen fundraising efforts by visiting the site to make a donation. All donations will go directly to the foundation. Additionally, if you are interested in participating on race day with OrgSync, you can sign up for Team Karen or contact Leanna Laskey at leanna@orgsync.com. We welcome all team members who are dedicated to making a difference in the community and in the fight against breast cancer.

California State University Bakersfield Chooses OrgSync to Provide Web-Based Solutions to Manage Student Organizations

CSU Bakersfield Signs On as the Fourth California State System Institution to Use OrgSync’s Interactive Organization and Communication Tools.

AUSTIN, Texas (Oct 22, 2008) — OrgSync, Inc (OrgSync.com) is excited to announce the newest member of the OrgSync Community, California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB). CSUB’s 7,800 students and 90 student organizations will be able to use OrgSync’s advanced organization management and communication tools, in addition to OrgSync’s new and improved co-curricular transcript and resume builder.  OrgSync is also proud to help campuses like CUSB achieve sustainability goals by giving campus administrators the ability to post online forms, conduct assessment, and manage organization rosters without using a single sheet of paper.

“OrgSync is excited to expand across the California State system,” said Eric Fortenberry Founder and CEO of OrgSync.  “We look forward to working with the remaining California State schools to provide organization and communications solutions for their campus.”

CSUB is the fourth school from the California State University system to bring OrgSync to their campus since last spring.  Other California State University schools currently using OrgSync include Sacramento, San Bernardino, and San Marcos. Other schools in California using OrgSync include Claremont McKenna College, University of San Francisco, and Victor Valley College.
About OrgSync

OrgSync is an organization management tool that helps college and universities communicate more effectively with their campus.  OrgSync offers a hosted service that provides the tools and applications needed by campuses to easily organize, assess, track, and manage students and student organizations.  OrgSync is currently helping over 60 campuses manage their organization and communication needs.  Headquartered in Austin they have satellite offices in Dallas, Miami, and Tucson.  For more information about OrgSync, visit OrgSync.com. To schedule an interview with CEO Eric Fortenberry, contact Jeff Jackson at (520) 299-2237 or jackson@orgsync.com.

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OrgSync recently visited the University of San Francisco to help train the students and to show the campus administration more of what OrgSync can do for them. It was exciting to see their gorgeous campus and the city itself. The night before the training started, we went to dinner with Darren and other administrators from campus. We watched a beautiful San Francisco sunset as we prepared for the following day.

We started the day by meeting with various departments on campus to talk about how they can use OrgSync to help improve their communication. The Student Leadership and Engagement office was already benefiting from OrgSync so we talked with Residence Life, Career Services, and New Student Programs to explore their possibilities for OrgSync. We were all excited to see how our one central platform can make it easier for them to communicate internally and with their students. We discovered that students benefit the most from OrgSync being implemented and used by several different areas of campus. They will have one centralized place to check for any news or calendar updates.

We had a meeting later in the day with campus IT. It was a great meeting and we found ways to benefit each other. Together we came up with a way to use OrgSync from within SunGard Luminis. Students will be able to log into their single sign on portal system and access OrgSync under the student life tab. We also talked about working together to build an emergency alert system for campus. We are going to partner with some of our strong clients to build the ideal solution and provide it to everyone.

We ended the day late with an exceptional meeting with the Council of Presidents. We had a great turnout and the OrgSync pens that we handed out  quickly became a collector’s item. Students were so excited about their new tool and the pens that we quickly ran out. The visit was a great success, and we are so excited to help USF continue to creatively implement OrgSync in various areas across their campus.

We can’t wait to visit our next client and help them launch OrgSync on campus!

Recently, OrgSync visited with the Student Activities office at Sacramento State University. We had a great time visiting their gorgeous campus. First we met with the administrators who have been working to launch OrgSync on campus and collaborated with other departments on campus that wanted to learn more about what OrgSync can do. After a few hours we discovered several ways that OrgSync can help benefit the entire campus.

Sac State has been rolling OrgSync out slowly starting with organization registration, which ended the week we were there.  We worked together with the campus administrators to plan their next phase of implementation. With over 250 organizations and 29,000 students, we really want to create a buzz on campus. We even got the school newspaper involved and asked them to write an editorial for all of the students to read.

We will return to Sacramento in late fall and again in the early spring and will hold on site training for the students. It is always exciting to show the students how much more they can do with OrgSync and that it will change how they can communicate with all of their members. By conducting repeat visits and training sessions we can help reinforce the presence and use of OrgSync on campus.

We look forward to taking them up on their offer to take us skiing and snowboarding next time we’re in town.

We wanted to thank everyone for attending our webinar yesterday with Dr Corey Seemiller from the University of Arizona.  We have decided to schedule another webinar sometime in November to accommodate more people.

If you would like more informaiton about the LINX program please check out their website.

Attend our upcoming webinar.

Our presenter will be Dr Corey Seemiller from the University of Arizona discussing the LINX Leadership Collaboration.
Dr Seemiller will be discussing the concept of a shared resources and collaboration between campuses. You can find more information from their website (leadership-linx.org ).

October 15
10:00 am (PST)
Please submit registration information below.
You will be sent an invitation that will let you link directly to the webinar.
If you have questions please contact Jeff at jackson@orgsync.com

https://orgsync.com/forms/show/11869

As many of you know, OrgSync has seen substantial growth this past spring and summer.  To prepare for the launch of over 50 new campuses, we spent the summer upgrading our hosting platform.  We believe scaling our applications and databases will be an ongoing effort and have made it part of a larger initiative to transition our development team from startup to enterprise mode.

Prior to this summer we hosted our platform at Joyent.  Joyent was an affordable third-party hosting solution that allowed us to stick to our bootstrap model.  However, as we continued to expand OrgSync’s functionality and user base, we began experiencing reliability and scalability issues.  As a result we discovered several technical constraints that hindered our ability to scale while maintaining acceptable uptime for our users.

Once it became evident that we would need a more robust hosting solution we began exploring our options in “cloud computing” through Amazon Web Services (www.amazonaws.com).  We were initially wary of such a bleeding edge solution because of the risk of getting lost in unfamiliar territory.  Thankfully, Rightscale (www.rightscale.com) allayed most of our concerns.  They’ve created an application that simplifies the process of working with Amazon’s virtual server instances and data persistence system, and they have a comprehensive support platform to get IT personnel up to speed.

The transition to our new hosting platform took about 8-10 weeks to complete, and the capabilities and controls we now have are phenomenal.  With our new partners we have developed an extremely scalable solution that allows us to respond quickly to load. Any component in the system can be swiftly replaced; our data is backed up every 10 minutes to an offsite location, and no single component can bring the application down for an extended period.  We also have the ability to specify the availability zones of our servers, giving us a large degree of disaster tolerance.

We are extremely excited (and relieved) to have fully completed this transition.  We can now rest assured that as our user base continues to grow we will be able to scale our applications and maintain a high level of uptime that all of our clients deserve.

This past week we attended the Texas Council of College Instructional Leaders conference in Austin, Texas. It was a great opportunity for us to learn more about community colleges around the state of Texas and their unique student needs. Community Colleges have a large commuter population, which has made it difficult to have an active student body outside the classroom in the past. They have been looking for a way to engage students in a manner that they are familiar with. It was exciting to share how OrgSync builds an online community that campuses can use to improve communication with their student body.

Our ability to provide co-curricular transcripts for students quickly became the talk of the conference. Schools are excited about how co-curricular transcripts can give their students a competitive advantage when transferring to a 4-year institution or beginning a career. Universities have been looking for a viable solution to offer their graduates co-curricular transcripts and the benefits they offer after graduation.

We look forward to working with more community colleges to provide their campuses with the right tools to help meet their unique needs.