IT flexibility and stability with Oliver v5

Warren Armitage, Chief Information Officer, Brisbane Catholic Education

In this video Warren talks about how Oliver v5 has met the IT requirements of Brisbane Catholic Education.

“We like the fact that we can have Softlink provide technical support for the software and manage maintenance releases on our behalf so that our team can have relatively minimal support requirements.”

Join Warren as he discusses:

Choosing Oliver v5 (0:24)
Hosting options (0:56)
Integration with school systems (1.24)
Running within the Microsoft stack (1:39)
Softlink support (1:56)

Find more information about Oliver v5 for education offices

Read the transcript

I’m Warren Armitage. I’m the Chief Information Officer for Brisbane Catholic Education.

Currently we provide support and we manage the infrastructure that hosts Oliver, but going back from the beginning of our project we were involved right from the start in doing the evaluation and the selection of Softlink and Oliver for our schools.

We had had prior schools who were using Oliver so we had some experience with the software before the evaluation, and it had been popular with the schools, but we were looking for something that could be run as a hosted platform.

We were looking for the functionality that our schools appreciated in Oliver and we wanted something that was web-based.

We like the fact that we can have it hosted in a private cloud situation, which is the way that we use the software today, but we’ve also had experience with it hosted completely by a third party and it’s nice to be able to choose between those two alternatives.

We like the fact that we can have Softlink provide technical support for the software and manage maintenance, releases, those sorts of things on our behalf so that our team can have relatively minimal support requirements.

Oliver in our environment is integrated with our school administration system, eMinerva, and it’s also integrated with our identity and access management system so that we have a single sign-on for Oliver, as we have for all of our other systems.

Right from the start we decided that we wanted to have, essentially, a Microsoft stack for our environment and so when you write the evaluation criteria , running within that Microsoft environment was the key criteria, and Oliver met that criteria.

We have a quite a trusting relationship with Softlink. They undertake all of our maintenance, all of the upgrades, and provide us with technical support for the software. We’re very happy customers.