Southwest Telecommunications Cooperative Boosts Productivity with WebInteractive and WebDemo

Linktivity Products Positively Impact Advances in the Education Sector

The Situation:

Members of the Southwest Telecommunications Cooperative (SWTC) are connected to a vast wide area network, which provides distance learning and data services to over 40 Southwest Minnesota school districts. SWTC’s staff is required to provide payroll, finance, network and technical support, maintenance of ITV connections, studios and switching centers to its cooperative members, which covers 21 counties and over 14,000 square miles. The significant amount of time spent on travel and administrative projects, made it next to impossible for the staff to perform other critical functions, including the development and advancement of distance learning programs.

The Solution:

After conducting thorough research of the products on the market, the only solutions that met all of SWTC’s needs were Linkitivity’s WebInteractive, a real-time software tool that provides a simple way to remotely and quickly manage and resolve online PC support requests, and Linktivity’s WebDemo, an easy to use in-house server software solution that provides all the tools necessary to conduct a Web-based highly interactive successful meeting.

"Linktivity’s WebInteractive and WebDemo have had an overwhelmingly positive impact on our staffs’ productivity,” stated Rod Wrege, director, Southwest Telecommunications Cooperative. “The software packages are extremely easy to install and use, allowing us much more efficient use of our talented employees."

The Results:

Prior to WebInteractive and WebDemo, SWTC’s support people routinely had to spend several unproductive hours per day driving to perform small support tasks, and now that drive time has been virtually eliminated. Additionally, SWTC has seen increased efficiency in its payroll and finance departments, both of which hold training sessions several times per year for school district business officers. These sessions typically ran for 45 minutes to an hour.

"Prior to the installation of WebDemo and WebInteractive, district personnel had to spend as much as two hours driving time (one way) to participate," stated Wrege. "Now, we can deliver these sessions via real-time over the Internet and the school personnel do not have to spend wasted time behind the wheel."

"Additionally, the finance support staff love using WebInteractive to transfer program update files to the end user workstations," stated Wrege. "As soon as the transfer is complete, they take control of the end user's computer and perform the updates for them. This saves several hours of phone support time."

About Linktivity
Linktivity, a 20 year-old Tucson, Arizona-based division of Converging Technologies Inc., provides server-based communications and control products that enable person-to-person interactions through a browser window. Linktivity products include WebDemo, a Web-based, real-time conferencing and collaboration software tool, and WebInteractive, a real-time software tool that gives support professionals an efficient way to manage and resolve online support requirements for personal computers. For more information, please visit www.linktivity.com.

About Southwest Telecommunications Cooperative
Southwest Telecommunications Cooperative (SWTC) is a collaborative organization of 44 public schools, Redwood County Tele-Network, Southern Exposure Tele-Network, Des Moines River Valley Tele-Media and Southwest/West Central Service Cooperatives. Our focus is on distance learning which is provided through interactive television and wide area data networking. SWTC covers 12 counties in southwest Minnesota, with headquarters and the network operations (NOC) center in Windom, MN. The NOC provides regional, statewide, national and international videoconferencing capabilities through a network of fiber optic, microwave, and leased digital circuits .