The Challenge
Lethbridge School Division is a school board, located in Alberta, Canada, with "Learners are innovative thinkers who are successful, confident, respectful and caring" as its vision. It has more than 100 years of history and is responsible for more than 25 primary and secondary schools.
Before using Gaia Workspace, Lethbridge School Division used another solution to manage all of their public facilities' bookings, like meeting rooms, conference rooms, computer labs, sports facilities, etc. However, Lethbridge faced new challenges as the operations of the Lethbridge School Division grew.
Challenge 1 — High Cost of Solution
"A School Division is a type of organization with a lot of users and facilities in different locations, sites, and floors. If we measure the license by employees/users, or by location and site, the total cost is very high even if the unit price is low. We need to support all the employees/users and automate facility booking in one solution."
Educational organizations need a reliable and flexible solution with the right features. Gaia Workspace helps our clients, like a school board, merge each school's floor plans, simplify booking rules, and mark the bookable facilities on an intuitive floor plan interface. In business conditions, we simplified the price model based on the locations and sites without limitations on users, which makes it more affordable.
Challenge 2 — Different Rules for Different Positions
"Lethbridge has more than 2,500 users in our facility booking solution. It is impossible to manage those users by importing data manually. Most users just need access to their own schools' data, but some employees, like IT or management, people need to have access to the other school locations. They need to monitor all the facility bookings, configure, and modify the booking rules. They want to book the facility and sync the bookings with the calendar."
In Gaia Workspace, we use the sub-tenant setting to handle these challenges. We treat the Lethbridge School Division as a big tenant and set up the schools as sub-tenants. Once we sync all the employees and users from Azure AD, we put the employees into the sub-tenant bases on their organization ID. All the employees can only access the data in the sub-tenants (their own schools) records. However, we set IT and management team as "Admin" roles, so they can access the facilities and data in the root tenants.
Challenge 3 — Complicated Booking Process
"My colleagues just want to simplify the facility the booking process without the intuitive floor plan as they worked in the schools for many years. They know every bookable facility without checking the devices or amenities conditions. They want to check the booking records and make bookings on the same page."
This is a new challenge for Gaia Workspace as most big organizations with over 1,000 employees have many sites and multiple floors. Their employees are not familiar with the booking facilities and prefer to use the search function to seek the right facilities. However, school employees are different, they are working in the same organization for many years and are very familiar with the facilities and attached devices or amenities. Therefore, we develop a new Calendar View and visualize the facility status on a daily, weekly, and monthly base.
Challenge 4 — Timely Customer Support
"Customer support is extremely important to us because we will have hundreds of booking records in the system. If there are any problems, our IT team will provide the first line of support. If it is out of the scope of the first-line support of Lethbridge IT, we expect a quick response and substantial help from the solution vendor."
The Gaia Workspace team is small but very professional. Our unique competitive aspect is that every employee in Gaia Workspace is familiar with the system's solution features and details. If the support team is absent, all the team members can respond to the customer demand and provide professional second-line support. We never miss customer cases based on our service level commitment.
Results
- Affordable location-based pricing model without per-user limitations
- Sub-tenant architecture supporting 2,500+ users across 25 schools
- Role-based access control for IT, management, and school staff
- Simplified booking with new Calendar View for familiar facility management
- Azure AD integration for automated user provisioning
- Timely professional support from the Gaia Workspace team
"It has been a very easy transition to Gaia Workspace. The support from the team has been amazing. They have worked with us every step of the way to ensure the product works the way we need it to. They are quick to respond and have made a great looking, easy-to-use product."
— Mark Taylor, Technology Support of Lethbridge School Division
"Gaia focuses on customer experiences and the end user, a transparent company that produces solutions and results."
— Jesse Sadlowski, IT Director of Lethbridge School Division
About Lethbridge School Division
Since 1886, the Lethbridge School Division has offered high-quality learning experiences over a broad range of programs to meet the needs of a wide variety of learners. The Division educates over 11,000 students within the City of Lethbridge.
The Lethbridge School Division takes pride in the breadth of its programs, the expertise of its staff, the quality of its facilities in over 25 schools, and several outreach facilities throughout the city. Our schools have a grade structure comprised of kindergarten to Grade 5 students in elementary schools, Grade 6 to Grade 8 students in middle schools and Grade 9 to Grade 12 students in high schools.