Canterbury Christ Church University Ramps Up Support for Students and Staff
Leading Kent higher education establishment turns to Sunrise to manage student service requests.
Chessington, UK (PRWEB) January 20, 2009
Canterbury Christ Church University is reconfiguring the support services it offers to students and staff in a major new initiative that brings together seven separate support functions across its campus network. The Kent higher education establishment, the largest in the county for public services education, has gone live with the Sostenuto IT service management (http://www. sunrisesoftware. co. uk) system from Sunrise Software to provide a new first point of contact for 15,000 students, and, ultimately, 1,500 staff.
The new support function, dubbed the i-Zone, will be managed by the University's Integrated Support Services team, with technical assistance from Corporate Information Services, and will bring together second line support functions including Registry, Student Accommodation, Student Finance, Library Services, Computer Services, the International Office and Student Support and Guidance. The first three services have just gone live and will be closely followed by the others, including internal IT support in the New Year. Further down the line, the system will be integrated with the University's intranet so students and academic staff can log their own queries online.
Sostenuto was chosen because of its powerful support for complex business rules, providing the ability to determine how queries are dealt with and what data different sets of users are given access to. Previous call logging systems (http://www. sunrisesoftware. co. uk) were not designed to keep track of the complex process flows that the University now needs to deal with for the different types of broad ranging queries. "We wanted the new system to help us ensure we could take ownership of a student query from when the initial call is taken to when the query is resolved in each of the different areas, in line with our policy of putting the needs of our students first," said Elaine Hopkins, Information Systems Development Manager at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Tom Weston, Executive Chairman of Sunrise Software, said: "Large universities are like major corporates in the range and complexity of service queries their support staff have to deal with. To handle this complexity they require systems that are easily configurable to support the full range of services they offer. One of the great strengths of Sostenuto is that it can be easily adapted to the way you want to deliver support services."
About Sunrise Software
Sunrise was founded in 1994 and is a leading independent provider of IT Service Management solutions.
Its customer base includes over 1,000 blue chip and public sector organisations, including names such as Anglian Water, Mothercare, the NHS, QVC, Harper Collins, Rugby Football Union and Landesbank Baden Wurttemberg.
Sunrise is widely recognised for excellent service, and product innovation is key to its long-term vision. This is the strategy behind the launch, in 2003, of Sostenuto ITSM, a process driven, entirely browser based solution to complement Enterprise, its well-established client-server offering.
2007 saw the launch of Sostenuto Foundation, a browser-based solution that offers the core ITIL processes out of the box. Foundation allows customers to take a step-by-step approach to ITIL, an alternative to the 'ITIL all-in' approach available with Sostenuto ITSM. For further information, please visit www. sunrisesoftware. co. uk.
About Canterbury Christ Church University
Canterbury Christ Church University is the largest centre of higher education in Kent for public services - notably teacher training, policing and health and social care. The University is also a significant provider of programmes in a wide range of academic areas within its Faculties of Arts and Humanities, Business and Management, and Sciences.
From a small independent College of less than five hundred students - all training to be school teachers - in the 1960s, we have grown to be a fully fledged university with almost 15,000 students and 1,500 staff members with campuses in Canterbury, Tunbridge Wells, Broadstairs, Chatham and Folkestone. Our teaching and learning facility for health, education and policing students at Chatham is part of the Universities At Medway Project in partnership with the Universities of Greenwich and Kent with Mid-Kent College.
Inspired by the University's Church of England Foundation and the aspirations of its students and staff, our mission is to pursue excellence in academic and professional higher education thereby enriching both individuals and society.
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