Metropolitan Community College’s 2017 decision to begin moving key applications to the cloud not only resulted in a successful ECM migration to Etrieve, but also positioned Metropolitan Community College for a rapid shift to a virtual experience for staff and students during the turbulent times of 2020.
Having already shifted a number of campus systems to the cloud, passing responsibility for server and system maintenance back to their selected vendors, Metropolitan Community College chose to take a closer look at the legacy ECM system deployed on campus. Key departments had been leveraging this solution for some time, yet were rapidly growing disconcerted over the system’s lack of quality support and limited functionality. After encountering Softdocs at Ellucian Live and learning of their Etrieve platform, two Metropolitan Community College departments introduced this browser-based, cloud ECM solution to their institution’s IT team as a potential next-step in their journey towards becoming truly paperless.
Once the decision to move from an on-campus ECM deployment to the cloud with Etrieve had been made, IT at Metropolitan Community College embraced a phased approach to their data migration—focusing initial efforts within Financial Aid and the Office of the Registrar. Documents managed by their legacy ECM system, ImageNow, were securely and efficiently brought over to reside within Etrieve’s visual filing structure under the watchful eye of Softdocs’ Professional Services team. Once users had been trained and the initial departments were comfortably live on Etrieve, phase two of Metropolitan Community College’s ECM migration began, including the migration of Human Resources, Payroll, Purchasing, Student Accounts, International Students, Disability, and Health.
“With Etrieve, we’ve been able to improve, and quicken, the experience of students applying for financial aid. What was once a 4-6 week [Financial Aid] process for them can now be completed in one week, or even one day in some cases.”
Leveraging Financial Aid and Forms
Heavily reliant on paper forms, Financial Aid was not simply one of the first areas at Metropolitan Community College to go live with Etrieve for content management, but was the first to successfully rollout eForms. Complete with dynamic code; these electronic financial aid forms significantly improved the speed students and employees could complete common financial aid processes. For example, students would often submit a form, erroneously thinking they had provided everything needed for a decision, and an entire week might pass before they’d discover that additional forms and/ or documentation were required. With Etrieve, students can log in to Etrieve and see everything that’s missing from day-to-day.
Standing Up Virtual Services Across Campus
“We had five days to shut the school down and go virtual as part of our pandemic response. Having already implemented a virtual filing cabinet for our college with ECM, we were able to quickly stand up Records e-forms that would allow operations and services to continue, for the most part, unimpeded.”
Facing the tumultuous waves of uncertainty accompanying a global pandemic, Metropolitan Community College turned to their deployment of ECM to rapidly extend a virtual experience to their staff and students. Top priority was setting up a few departments, including Records, with their first electronic forms. Landholm and her team successfully stood up ten new e-forms for Records before shifting efforts to support other areas. Within Financial Aid and other departments already well-established with ECM and the cloud, focus was on training users familiar with Etrieve’s Auto File function how they can use other Etrieve functionality to accomplish the same tasks while working remotely and not always on the network.