First Class Users

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10 Comments

Comment by Gary Falcon on June 18, 2009 at 12:54pm

For those of you attending NECC, I want to extend an invitation to our FirstClass Customer Reception on Monday, June 29.

The event includes food, drinks, great people, a short presentation from one of our customers, and an iPod Touch give-away. (Surely the iPhone client will have been released by Apple by then, right???)

Comment by Gregg Kaloust on May 27, 2009 at 7:34am

Can anyone who has moved to google apps or other "cloud" solution comment on bandwidth requirements if everyone is working/uploading/downloading through the external pipe?

Comment by Matt Montagne on May 21, 2009 at 11:50pm

@Jan - You don't give up your unique email address/domain when moving to Google Mail from Firstclass. Everyone at your school will still have the same extension. We're in week three of a six week migration plan with June 15th as our transition date. If you have any questions at all, drop me a a note. We've published tons of transition support materials over at our Google Transition site at: http://tinyurl.com./castigoogle

I have to say that this transition process has been an absolute blast! Good luck if you decide to go with Google for your collaboration needs!

Cheers!
Matt

Comment by Jan Chernin on May 19, 2009 at 9:57am

I'm tempted to move away from using FC now that we have designed a Drupal CMS that replicates some of the better features of FC without the clunk. Others who are moving to Gmail; are your teachers willing to give up their unique school address?

Comment by Steve Taffee on May 13, 2009 at 6:49pm

Hi Everyone - For those of you who have moved from FirstClass to Gmail I am wondering if you saw any strange email formatting issues during the interim period when you were in the pilot phase and perhaps POPing email from FirstClass to your test Gmail accounts. We are seeing this specifically with Firefox version 3 on Macs. No problems on Safari.

Comment by Steve Taffee on April 21, 2009 at 8:05pm

I just wanted to announce here that we have decided to move away from FirstClass to Gmail and Google apps. We have a number of documents we're willing to share on this transition, and welcome ideas from others who have made or are considering making this transition.

Comment by Steve Taffee on December 5, 2008 at 6:29pm

I have created a web page
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfvzx67g_5gjd2zfgx

where we are starting to list positive, interesting, and negative thoughts regarding moving from FirstClass to Google. You are invited to contrbute to it. Perhaps I need to add you through your Google accounts to do this. Nos sure. Let me know if you are interested in contributing.

Comment by Antonio Viva on May 20, 2008 at 8:39pm

We are also giving serious consideration about moving away from FirstClass and would like to know if any other schools have made the move to do so. If so? What have you moved to as an alternative? Thanks in advance.

Comment by Steve Taffee on May 1, 2008 at 10:59am

Brent - I think we're on the cusp of moving away from FirstClass ourselves. It seems to many of us here that while FC doesn many things ok, it does not do any one thing particularly well, apart from it acting as a one-stop shop for faculty who like drag and drop. Despite its recent changes to it UI, it still feels clunky and old-fashioned compared to other systems. FC Ed might mitigate that with its cool templates and wizards, but the pricing for FC Ed is to out of line with reality that it is not a player for us. We are currently investigating where we want to go with course management, FC, FinalSite (our web provider), Blackboard, Moodle, Drupal.... All the usual tradeoffs between build it or buy it. We're probably a year or more away from actually moving to another system, and we will experience some resistance due to personal and institutional inertia. So I think we'll start small with some teachers using a different CMS, and more web-based content instead of FC content. Yeah-I know FC can make web pages, but....

Comment by Brent Stimmel on April 16, 2008 at 11:35am

Has anyone moved their school away from Firstclass. We are planning to get rid of firstclass after using it for many years. Any advice on possible backlash?