Planning for the new year

Last week we held our Annual Conference at King’s College London. In spite of a clash with the AMSU conference (which we also attended on the Monday), we had a good turnout with 60 delegates from around 80% of our partner Student Organisations. I must say a big ‘Thank you’ to Endsleigh Insurance http://www.endsleigh.co.uk for sponsoring the event and Carol Thompson Ellis from ELSA for helping us sort out the venue at the last minute.

Hopefully we got our vision of how we see the market developing across and how we will be evolving our software this year. Without going into too much detail here, we want to provide something which is different from the existing social media sites which our audience (students) are arriving at University with. We firmly believe that the whole web will continue to become more social and providing contextually relevant, niche networks to existing communities (in this case student organizations) will have a firm place alongside the current guerillas in the room like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo.

The trend for companies in this sector seems to be, to look at what the organization needs to ‘tick a box’ in terms of providing a web presence and not looking at what will get their students actually interacting with their Union or College each day. Student media is in real danger of being lost in the considerable noise around the web unless it starts to differentiate and offer a new experience to what students are getting from news and social media sites. Interaction and engagement is the key. So, that is what we will be focusing on alongside our ‘core’ publishing, e-commerce and membership management tools. For those of you who were at the conference, you will know what we mean when we say we are trying to build a purple cow! For those that weren’t there, please have a look at this video from Seth Godin – http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread.html

We will be working closely with our current partners over the coming weeks to ensure there is a smooth handover to the incoming student staff and we are all geared up for the new year.

We are very excited about the coming year and as part of our new communications strategy, we will be blogging here much more regularly. A different member of the team will be posting each week with an overview of what they have been working on…or maybe just to have a rant!

See you all soon.

Forums

We are now setting up forums on our sites if you would you like us to get you set up. We think this is great way for prospective students to talk about the union, the area and courses they may be interested in. It fits in with the design of your site and will provide a level of interactivity. If you would like to get set up then give us a call on 0845 260 2118 or email us at support@oncampus.net

Gallery Pages

You can now create gallery pages for your site. This is a great way of displaying photos in a clear and professional way. Once it has been set up, it takes about 2 minutes to update the pictures on the page, meaning you can keep them up to date with the minimum of effort. If you would like training on how to set this up, then log on to the support site, give us a call on 0845 260 2118 or send us a basecamp message to arrange a time.

We have also found a great free piece of software that lets us upload magazines and newspapers to websites, quickly and easily. All we need is for you to send over the PDFs of your publication.

Hope everyone is enjoying the little bit of sunshine we are getting at the moment.

The Oncampus Team

Bye Bye Confluence

Hello All

Confluence has finally now departed, leaving us to rule cyberspace with the easy Open CMS publishing platform.

There are still a few unions who have not had training for Open CMS (your public website) yet. You guys know who you are, and will be getting phone calls from the support team soon to set some training up. (If you are happy with your editing skills at the moments then don’t worry, we can just have a little natter).

E-circle is now available to everyone, allowing you to send emails (HTML and text) to all of your students who signed up to the registration form. Please log onto www.support.oncampus.net to request training and passwords to E-circle.

The third edition of the Oncampus newsletter will be sent out in then next couple of days, so please have a read to find out whats going on within the company and throughout the industry.

Wishing you all a happy week at work

The Oncampus Team

Free Bluetooth boxes

Our first fortnightly newsletter was sent around last week, and the figures coming back show that we had a great response. We hope you all enjoyed reading it and found the content useful and informative.

If you know of anyone else who would like to receive the newsletter, then please send us their names, job title and email address.

Would you like Bluetooth boxes installed in your Union? This would allow you to send Bluetooth messages to students who have enabled the device on their phones. Research shows that messages sent to mobiles can have an impulsive response from students. The boxes would be installed for free, and maintenance will also be free, although the company that provides them would require exclusive rights on Bluetooth marketing on the campuses.

Its now so easy to send us over your design brief, just log onto www.support.oncampus.net and click the link to request a redesign. Fill in the form and click submit and you are on your way to creating the website that is unique and special to your union.

As always you can get in contact with us by email at support@oncampus.net or drop us a line on 0845 260 2118

 

Forms for new design

Hello there and welcome back to the land of Oncampus Support. A form has now been created so you can easily send over design briefs for your new look websites.

 

You can find the form by clicking on this link http://support.oncampus.net/pages/request_a_redesign.html

 

Tomorrow, all of our partners will receive our first fortnightly newsletter. In it will contain, information regarding the company, support, new and current products and what is going on in the student market and around the web. We will also be conducting our own research in unions, to get the true view of the students.

 

As always you can get in contact with us by email at support@oncampus.net or drop us a line on 0845 260 2118

 

Kind Regard

 

The Oncampus Team

Happy New Year

 

Hello and a happy new year to everyone. We hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, and is ready for a huge 2008.

Here at Oncampus we have all had a nice break, battled against the “Winter bug” and given our typing fingers a rest. Revitalised, we are ready to continue our hard work to make our products and support even better.

As mentioned before the holidays, we are now accepting design briefs for changes to your websites. Please be as imaginative as you can. If you are in need of a little inspiration, why not take a look at our other partner unions websites. The links can all be found on www.oncampus.net.

It is also not too late for an online shop. If you think this would benefit you, or would like to know how an online shop could help your union, please email support@oncampus.net.

Please also remember that there is plenty of information and help on our support site, www.support.oncampus.net. Here you can find step by step guides to editing your website, and using the campus network.

Well once again we at Oncampus would like to wish you all the best for the coming year, and look forward to working together in close partnership for a successful 2008.

The Oncampus team

New Templates

Oncampus are happy to announce that as of the new year, Unions will be able to totally redesign their websites. We have been working very hard in designing new templates, so that each union can have their own look and feel for their site.

How would you design your site if it was totally up to you? We will be accepting design briefs soon, so get those creative juices flowing over Christmas. Remember you can be as creative as you want, and we will try and accommodate your ideas.

The final edited version of the Tuesday Night Total Comedy show is now up on the website. You can view it by logging onto www.oncampus.net/tnt. If you have any comments or suggestions about the show please email sam@oncampus.net

BUSA feeds are now all in place on the sports pages of the websites. Also granular permissions are up and running and proving to be a huge success. It has never been easier to palm work off onto colleagues and students, by giving them the responsibility of updating their pages themselves.

Lastly it is still not too late to get a shop for your website. An online shop can help expand the products you sell, whilst taking up less physical room in a shop. It also gives you the opportunity to let students pay for their club and society membership subscriptions online.

Well thats all for now. It has been an extremely busy first term for both Oncampus and our Unions. We would like to thank all of our unions for the all the hard work and dedication they have put in this term, and we look forward to more collective success in 2008.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2008

The Oncampus Team

Site Upgrades

We have started working on the next phase of the site builds, this is where we begin to make all of our different products interrelate. As I am sure you know we feed events and photos on to the homepage from the campus network, this is only the first step!

The sabbs can have a page which will be fed from the Campus Network, this will include any blogs of what they have been up to, pictures and their upcoming calendar. This is not all, we are also going to be doing the same with the sports pages we are working with BUSA to feed the upcoming fixtures, game results and the team sheets. If you want we could also stream the student radio through the site and publish any student magazines and papers online.

There are many more little improvements we are intending to make, if you have any ideas or questions send us a message or give us a call.

The Oncampus Team

Individual Access Rights

We have just introduced a new piece of functionality for OpenCMS – Individual Access Rights! What this allows you to do is set up your own website editors and restrict which areas or pages they can edit.

In practice what this allows you to do is add the football captain as an editor and restrict his access to just the football pages. This means you can be sure that they are taking ownership for their own section and only that section. Interested? If you want us to set this up for you give us a call on 0845 260 2118 or send us a message on basecamp and we can arrange this and some training.

 

The Oncampus Team