Project Description

Peterborough Regional College

Peterborough Regional College is a major college of further and higher education situated in an attractive and extensive site near the centre of the cathedral city of Peterborough.

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Peterborough Regional College is a major college of further and higher education situated in an attractive and extensive site near the centre of the cathedral city of Peterborough. The college delivers high quality education and training to over 15,000 students annually and offers courses at all levels from short, introductory courses up to full degrees and postgraduate training. Peterborough Regional College has achieved an excellent OFSTED / ALI inspection, placing it in the top 5% of general FE colleges nationally, and has won prestigious awards for marketing and publicity, their catering training restaurant and, uniquely, successive Helena Kennedy Awards for student achievement. The College’s mission is to achieve ‘Success in a caring college’.

The IT department maintains the college’s PC’s (over 1020) , representing 15,000 users. Managing a network of this size is complex and requires strong collaboration among the IT team members. The team needed a central place to store information about IT procedures, general documentation, and network information. While the college did have an internal Intranet in place, it was not searchable so retrieving information was very time consuming. Because of the retrieval problems the system was underutilized for IT support issues and valuable information was not documented. The team needed a searchable central repository for their IT documentation.
Peterborough Regional College selected the Novo Knowledge Base. Once the quick and easy installation process was complete, the staff began to create articles and to capture documentation based on known issues. Articles were organized and placed into the appropriate user-defined categories, and the built in editor allowed content to be typed in, or copy/pasted from existing documents. The software also provided the college’s IT staff the ability to include file attachments and images such as screenshots throughout their documentation. Articles could also be linked to other “related articles” to aid the searcher in finding additional relevant information.
The IT department states, “The Novo Knowledge Base has proved an invaluable tool for the IT department”. Now knowledge is not simply retained in the mind of an employee, but is documented and shared for all team members to gain from. IT best practices are now recorded for future use and all of this information is available on demand. The simple to use search tool has provided standard and advanced search capabilities, so focused results can be quickly served to any user.
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