BRINGING CAMPUS SERVICES ONLINE

The demand for online services is growing in every corner of today’s campus institutions. The new breed of student instinctively looks to the Web or a mobile phone to conduct transactions. They expect a higher level of service, and they expect it to be available anytime and from anywhere. For them, the term e-Commerce has little meaning…it is simply commerce in its most convenient form.

With this in mind, forward-thinking institutions are using the Blackboard Community System to establish a Networked Transaction Environment™ (NTE), in which any student, teacher or member of the campus community can use a universal account on campus, off campus and online for all commerce transactions, activities and facilities access and web services. Building a NTE enables institutions to realize important benefi ts such as improved business effi ciency, better service to the campus community, safety and security, new commerce opportunities and distributed management.

By creating an online environment for cam-pus services, the Blackboard Community System™ enables institutions to provide higher levels of service to their constituents while identifying new revenue streams.

To achieve the promise of the NTE, institu-tions are using the Blackboard Community System in unique ways to:

• Provide students with the ability to man-age their accounts online

• Enable campus departments to more effectively communicate online

• Extend commerce capabilities with web-based storefronts

• Provide a cost-effective platform for in-tegrating the academic, community and transaction environments

“I am excited about the poten-tial the Blackboard Community System gives us to bring togeth-er three important aspects of the college experience. Students are now able to obtain informa-tion about academics, social life and commercial e-Commerce in a single online location. Recently, the Blackboard Community Sys-tem enabled several students to pay an overdue fine that result-ed in the release of records, and these students regained the ability to register for classes. This action was performed on-line without requiring the stu-dent to visit another location on campus. The result is improved services for our faculty, staff and students.”

—Brenda Hovden Director of Card Services

Creighton University

Online.

A POWERFUL SET OF CAPABILITIES

The Blackboard Community System enables self-management of one card accounts, more effective ways for campus departments to communicate with students, staff and faculty and highly efficient e-Commerce transactions. This robust software application provides an intuitive Web interface to facilitate better services to key constituencies.

The current generation of students has a whole different set of expectations around self-service. They do not want to wait in line at the card office to add money to their ac-count and they certainly do not want to wait for their statement to arrive in the mail. In order to drive larger account deposits and greater use of the campus card, institutions must provide students with the same online account management capabilities received from banks and other modern service provid-ers. Through an easy-to-use interface, the Blackboard Community System provides powerful self-service capabilities—even en-abling parents to make online deposits to their students’ accounts which are updated in real time.

Campus departments, from Dining Services to Resident Life, have decades of experience communicating with the campus community, oftentimes using flyers and menu boards. Today, there are more effective methods for both broadcasting information to students as well as gathering real-time feedback. Through the Blackboard Community System, Dining Services can easily build their own online community with nutrition and menu information while Housing maintains its own community site with a poll on student housing preferences.

Many campuses are interested in extending use of their one card to the online environ-ment, enabling them to expand their service reach and identify new revenue streams. With a customizable product catalog and pre-built shopping cart, institutions can quickly set up their own e-Commerce environments. On the same powerful system, the Biology department can conveniently sell lab sup-plies while Parking Services speedily collects parking fines. The Student Association can even sell tickets to their latest event.

Featuring a robust core set of capabilities in Self-Service, Communication and e-Commerce, the Blackboard Community System enables a whole new category of service to your campus.

SELF-SERVICE

The Blackboard Community System’s self-service capabilities enable greater efficiency with higher levels of service.

Online Account Management provides cardholders with a web-based interface for self-manage-ment of their universal accounts. In addition to viewing their bal-ance with Regulation E-compliant statements at any time, cardhold-ers can deposit funds online us-ing a major credit card. They can also report their card as lost or stolen without having to visit the campus card office.

Integrated Credit Card Payment Gateway enables institutions to accept credit card payments for purchases as well as for campus account deposits. This capabil-ity enables institutions to cost effectively process and settle these transactions through this Blackboard-provided service.

COMMUNICATION

The Blackboard Community System allows information to be targeted, customized and communicated at many levels: for individual users, for groups and for different organiza-tions within an institution.

Web Broadcast Announcements provide campus departments with the tools to easily distribute infor-mation to the campus community. Announcements can be easily up-dated and maintained—without re-quiring knowledge of HTML or web development tools.

Web Surveys and Opinion Polls enable campus departments to quickly and easily gather infor-mation and feedback from their campus constituents. Through the easy-to-use web interface, non-technical users can develop online surveys and polls in real-time.

Self-Service, Communication and e-Commerce

Community Building Tools enable the institution to more effectively col-laborate and communicate with differ-ent campus constituencies. Campus departments such as dining services or resident life can develop their own campus community sites to communi-cate and collaborate.

Multi-Institution Branding and Man-agement facilitates separation of multiple institutions, departments or groups—all on one Blackboard server. For example, Dining Services, Alumni Affairs and the Student Association can each be given their own domain and the ability to manage and brand their domain with the appropriate look-and-feel, including different colors, lo-gos, tabs, modules and channels.

E-COMMERCE

Enabling online commerce to support cam-pus activities and to improve student conve-nience are key capabilities of the Blackboard Community System.

Web e-Commerce with Shopping Cart functionality provides an online storefront that allows administrators to create multiple online stores where account holders can pay for goods and services with both their campus ac-counts and credit cards. For example, the Chemistry Department can have one online store that sells lab equip-ment and supplies while Campus Park-ing can sell parking passes.

Customizable Product Catalog func-tionality enables campus merchants to build their own product catalogs and tailor those catalogs to specific sets of users.

Multiple Vendor Inventories and Order Fulfillment enables campus vendors to manage their own invento-ry and fulfillment processes. Vendors enter available product quantities and update quantities as new inventory is available for sale.

Allow self-service account management by individual users.

Build online storefronts with integrated payment processing.

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Transaction Environment,

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ADMINISTRATION

Built on a scalable and reliable software architecture, the Blackboard Community System is easy to administer and man-age. It reinforces Blackboard’s unique approach of ensuring that our platform integrates with complementary systems to deliver a complete solution.

Blackboard Building Blocks provides data and system in-tegration capabilities enabling the integration of back-office systems as well as third party systems with the Blackboard Community System. The lead-ing providers of Student Infor-mation Systems, bookstore, library, parking, print manage-ment and POS systems in-tegrate their platforms with Blackboard through Blackboard Building Blocks.

Multi-Site Single System Ca-pability enables institutions with multiple locations to offer the same services to all campuses

from a single system. These capabilities include support for multiple sites within one physical campus or locations across the state or country.

SIS / Bookstore / Library In-tegration provided through Blackboard’s core technol-ogy schema enables third-party system integration and interop-erability between Blackboard and external systems. Clients can seamlessly connect to all systems on campus for more efficient operations.

Standards Compliance and In-teroperability is a fundamental capability of Blackboard’s plat-form. Blackboard is a strong advocate for industry stan-dards including data encryption and security (AES, SSL and Twofish), authentication (LDAP, Kerberos, etc.) and safety (Un-derwriters Laboratory).

The Blackboard Community System is part of the Blackboard Commerce Suite™, a family of integrated solutions for implementing a comprehensive

transaction environment on campus, off campus and online. Comprised

of the Blackboard Transaction System™, BbOneSM and the Blackboard Community System™, the Blackboard Commerce Suite enables institutions

to look beyond the campus cards of the past.