Johnson School of Management Empowers MBA Students with Mi8

Mi8 CorporationUniversity's Johnson Graduate School of Management is ranked by Business Week as one of the top ten business schools in the nation. The Johnson School MBA places an equal value on collaboration and competition. Original concepts such as Immersion learning, innovative cross-teaching approaches, unique international business options and a focus on leadership make the Johnson School a model for management education.

As part of their innovative approach, the Johnson School wanted to provide Microsoft Front Page, Access and NetMeeting to students and staff in specific courses. In a traditional IT environment, this would involve installing the software on the desktop computers of all staff and students involved, or on any computer resources the students might use. This is a mammoth task in itself, but add to this the complexity of maintaining and upgrading the software and the ever-changing roster of students, and this project became an enormous burden for the IT department.

The IT team at the Johnson School chose to outsource the provision of these services to <%=company%>, a company that provides software delivered over the Internet—an approach the company calls "Netsourcing." Mi8 delivers the software to students via a Citrix Metaframes thin client running within a standard Web browser, and Cornell pays a monthly rental fee to Mi8 for each student who utilizes the service. Students receive seamless access to the software necessary for their classes, and Mi8 proactively manages and maintains the system to enhance the reliability and performance of Cornell's computer resources. Mi8 also provides online subscription management, relieving the Cornell IT department of the burden of managing a subscriber base that changes with each semester.

Using the service, students can create and maintain web sites and other Internet-based projects from computers onsite at the university or remotely from any PC with an Internet connection. The students' files are stored in a secure, central location so the students are not dependent on floppy disks or other removable media to store their projects. This central storage also includes regular backup of files by Mi8.

The service provided to the Johnson School affords course participants the freedom to choose the computer they wish to use to complete assignments without being restricted to particular lab computers or having to own expensive software.

Larry Fresinksi, Information Technology Services Director for the Johnson Graduate School of Management, said, "We could not have offered these tools to our students in a cost-effective manner if we tried to accomplish the tasks in-house. Mi8's ASP model saves us time and effort, and is the most cost-effective way for us to handle our student subscriptions."