Up until this year, Georgia Southern University (GSU) had a university-based app that did everything for everybody.
However, Ron Stalnaker says because the app’s mission was to serve everybody, it didn’t serve anybody.
“We knew that we needed to start changing our strategy to create specific apps for specific audiences, because each audience wants different content,” says Stalnaker, Associate CIO and Director of Enterprise Technology Solutions at GSU.
But while the university planned to construct multiple apps for multiple needs, it needed a place to store the final products.
As a result, the university partnered with Apperian to build the Georgia Southern University App Store.
“We acknowledged we were going to be creating specific apps for specific audiences, but we also wanted a platform that would allow us to publish and communicate those apps and give our users one spot to find them,” Stalnaker says. “We partnered with Apperian because they had an enterprise app store that allowed us to wrap our apps in a secure environment and publish the ones that are available.”
Stalnaker says the new app store is only for GSU -goers.
He also says the store enables students, faculty and staff to locate their corresponding solutions in one place without confusing the apps they need with ones they don’t need.
“So if you’re a student and you log into our app store, you’re only going to see the apps that would benefit you as a student,” Stalnaker says. “If you’re faculty, you’ll see apps that will benefit you as faculty…Some of those apps are very specific and for sensitive information. With that internal app store, we can even publish apps for our presidential cabinet without having to publish them into a public app store.”
Amos Wasgatt, Sales Executive for Apperian says GSU’s app store will especially guide students to the most applicable apps, and deter them from downloading ones that are not authorized by the school.
“When it comes to mobile, [Apperian’s] been used as a way to advertise different functionalities and give students access to an approved set of applications,” he says. “A lot of students don’t know which apps are approved and listed by the university. That’s where we come into play and say, here are the sets of applications that are approved by your school, or have been built by your school for you. That way, when students come on campus, they get their app analog and say here are all my apps that I can utilize on campus.”
Stephen Skidmore says the app store structure provides benefits found in enterprise and consumer app stores, such as increased community engagement.
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