For a school district with more than 300 applications running on more than 600 servers, the ability to have a single source of entry for unified access to all of that information was a dream of Broward County's Education Technology Services division. Broward officials wanted to have "one web site [where] you could log in as a teacher, student, parent, or administrator and see the things you need to see," says Vijay Sonty, the district's CIO.

But as things stood, throughout the district there were resources "all over the place," explains Chuck Stanley, director of technical support services. "It took someone with a few years of knowledge to find out, This is where I go to find information about [school] boundaries, this is where I go to find information about specific students.'"

Different data silos existed, which gave rise to redundancies and inefficiencies. First, a user had to find the silo that contained the information he wanted. Then, he had to sign in separately, with a different password, for each different application.

Together, the Broward tech team created a vision of a portal called the Knexus Workplace for Education. Knexus, defined as the merging of knowledge with technology, would be a management access system that would unify Broward's applications, information, and diverse databases through a single portal.

The portal would give district administrators the ability to customize the gateway for the information they needed to support No Child Left Behind goals and effectively manage their schools.

Content and applications would be tailored to specific job requirements to meet the needs of all administrative personnel.

But the team also wanted to include teachers and students in the initiative. So they created a second portal, called the Broward Enterprise Education Portal (BEEP), which would give teachers, administrators, parents, and students log-in access to current and relevant resources and information focused on student achievement.

The two portals currently exist separately, but in the coming year, during the initiative called Knexus Phase 2, the portals will be combined.

Transforming the workplace with Knexus

Working with IBM, the team developed a pilot called WebSphere Portal Extend v5.1. The pilot included 30 targeted users, including principals and guidance counselors. In March, the first phase was completed, and 2,000 administrators, principals, and guidance counselors were given access to all the information.

The Knexus Workplace was created to have multiple levels of integration for easy information access; anytime, anywhere access via any device; customized interfaces for different roles and stakeholders; support for open standards and interoperability; and ease of integration with various SAP enterprise applications.

Now, administrators can gather reports and information, under a single sign-on, about issues such as:

• Failing students--Users can generate a report on all the students who are failing in a particular year, for example. If they want to look at specific student information, users can then click into a tool called Virtual Counselor that shows all the information on each particular student--grades, absenteeism, previous schools, and so on.
• Students at a particular test level--Guidance counselors can identify groups of students who aren't meeting graduation requirements, so these students can be called in for extra help, for example. Or, they can look at groups of students who will be graduating, so those students can be called in for career counseling.
• Teachers by school year or by subject areas--This is useful for principals who want to pinpoint teachers whose students' learning gains are below or above a certain level. If below, the teachers might be targeted for additional classroom support or professional development; if above, they might be tapped to serve as mentors or staff leaders.
• Predictive flagging--Users can look at groups of students over a 10-year history to look for trends and to ensure that certain types of students do not get pigeon-holed into a specific type of class, simply based on one characteristic of their history.
• Standard policies--As school policies and procedures shift, users can look them up in a single source to keep abreast of changes.