Success Story: August Bebel Schule
The school builds an easy-to-administer intranet and improves team collaboration with Zenkit Base
August Bebel Schule is a vocational school based in Germany that was established in 1967. The school offers seven different schooling types, including technical education, dual education, and many more, in two campuses in the Rhein-Main area. This delivers a huge spectrum of education and further training courses in diverse areas of focus. Currently, with over 100 teachers around 1900 pupils are able to pursue professional education at the school. Furthermore the school has 4 administration colleagues.
If you are wondering how such a large and diverse school as August Bebel Schule ensures their school management runs smoothly, you’ve come to the right place! Today, the vice principal of the August Bebel Schule, Uli Luft, is excited to share with us how Zenkit Base fosters team collaboration to enable them to run the school more successfully. Uli Luft installed Zenkit together with the administrator Volker Berg at the school around two years ago.
Offenbach am Main / Hanau Steinheim
100+ teachers
Around 1.5 years
Intranet building, organization Wiki, document & appointment management, and project management
“Zenkit Base allows us to build an intranet where important information is clearly outlined and easy to administrate.”
Running a school at this scale is not easy at all. There are lots of files to be handled, as well as many processes to be followed. An intranet where important information such as processes, documents, and guides is shared is considered by August Bebel Schule to not only be helpful, but also necessary for their team collaboration.
As we can see in the collection example (picture 1), staff can find important request forms to download, and other helpful documents including general instruction, Corona info, e-class materials, and certificates to use. Uli emphasized that Zenkit‘s flexibility and intuitive interface allows administers to easily establish, structure, and maintain its entire intranet. In this way, Zenkit Base offers a centralized space for teachers and administrators to create and find helpful information. Besides, it also equips August Bebel Schule with a channel to communicate and react quickly in terms of any new situation, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
Picture 1
Another collection example (picture 2) is called „Who is who“. This school knowledge base is presented in Wiki view, allowing employees to navigate among all important information alphabetically.
This collection helps to optimize their onboarding process and keep all employees on the same page. For example, when a new employee joins the team, they simply need to grant him or her access to this collection in order to present a clear overview of everything they need to know. Staff can understand how the school works by reading the rules of conduct & regulations for school equipment, etc. They can easily get familiar with all the office and classroom allocations by reading the building plan for the two campuses. Whenever they have questions or need to collaborate, they can also reach out to colleagues within the same or from different teams by finding the personal emails and phone information here.
A digital Wiki is an essential and clever Zenkit implementation for August Bebel Schule. All employees with access to Zenkit can view and use all processes that are of significant importance for school development and administration from anywhere in the world at any time. It saves employees‘ time in looking for information, creates transparency, and fosters team collaboration.
“Zenkit Base helps create transparency and foster collaboration by providing a clear overview of employee info, school processes, and rules.”
Picture 2
“The multiple views and fields help us to organize work with flexibility and clarity.”
Uli emphasized several times how much they appreciate and enjoy the multiple views and fields available in Zenkit Base. For their school-wise projects, such as a project week, they like to choose the Kanban view. It can beautifully visualize the stage of each task and help employees track its progress. In terms of the setup, they add a text field for the definition of responsibilities, a date field for deadlines, a member field for in-charge staff, files field for relevant forms and participant lists, etc.. This helps the entire team to monitor the details of each project easily. With this setup in mind and their previous experience, they reuse the same template without having to rebuild the setup for the next project.
In addition, they established an appointment collection to organize appointments of various specialist groups using the calendar view in Zenkit. With this collection as well, multiple fields help to optimize their process. They supplement each item with an invitation, attached files, assigned members, and other additional data they need for each appointment. After the appointment, they attach any new documents for future retrieval. The wide range of views and fields allows them to customize each collection to target their actual needs.
In the future, it is planned that not only the teachers and administrators, but also the students of the technical school will implement Zenkit to plan their projects.
In the end, we asked Uli whether there is anything he wants to share about Zenkit. He emphasized an important aspect for their decision to choose Zenkit was, of course, Zenkit‘s compliance with the GDPR legislation! As we can see from one of their workspace examples (picture 3), Zenkit is a trustworthy solution where you can store and manage different data for different purposes without having to worry about your data security.
In fact, data security can be considered the fundamental yet essential factor when choosing a software in this digital world, no matter if you‘re running a small business or a big institution, and regardless of your industry. With Zenkit‘s transparent privacy policy and GDPR compliant practices, the personal data of August-Bebel-Schule is and will always be fully protected.
“Zenkit Base ensures our data security with its GDPR-compliant practices.”
