Campus Technology: Students at Tompkins Cortland Community College in upstate New York can use mobile phones to check their grades and course schedules, sign up for text alerts about class cancellations, and view a campus weather cam. They can even view their debit card account balances-- all courtesy of the TC3Mobile portal. The students at the Dryden, NY, campus may not realize it, but the introduction of the TC3 Mobile portal can largely be attributed to the fact that their director of campus technology is an avid snowmobiler.

It was in the spring of 2006 that Director of IT Marty Christofferson started using a live Doppler radar feature on his Cingular 8525 phone (now AT&T) to check weather reports about snow levels and road conditions. "I realized I had a computer in my hand," he recalls. "So I started thinking about how to adapt it for the school's purposes, because 99 percent of students have cell phones." Not long after, Christofferson led a development effort to port several of the features in the myTC3 web portal (powered by SunGard PowerCampus Self-Service) to mobile devices. "We thought about what students would want to do on the go, and what would fit on a 2.5-inch screen," he says. Then, to keep the mobile portal fast and efficient, the developers cut out all graphics. "It's very stripped down in appearance, almost like going backward." (For more on TC3's mobile portal design, see "Getting More Out of Mobile," CT October 2008)

But going forward, Christofferson believes mobile administrative applications are going to be important. "There are so many things you could do with a smart phone, it's mind-boggling," he declares. "We built these apps as an experiment, just to see if we could do it, but now we're moving to a complete mobile platform integrated with the ERP system."

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