Pascal Vallet, Director of the French School of Seoul, talks about how he uses Azendoo
Not only is Pascal Vallet the Director of Establishment at the French School of Seoul, he is also responsible for implementing communication and collaboration tools for the l’AEFE in the Asia-Pacific region. That’s why we’re so excited that we got the chance to talk to him about how he uses Azendoo to get stuff done.
So Pascal, how long have you used Azendoo?
It’s actually something very recent... 2 weeks at the most. Some of us are currently testing the application. I personally use many tools like Dropbox, Evernote, To-Do List, SugarSync and many others, but I can’t force my staff to do the same. This means that we are juggling different tools, which confuses some co-workers. Our goal is to effectively manage our professional exchanges internally at the school, and externally between schools across Asia and Oceania.
What were you looking for when you tried Azendoo?
Well, we noticed that we use email too much, even to organize our work and make reminders. Sometimes we even responded to people just to let them know that we received their message and that we’ll get back to them later... it's just counter-productive! Email is denatured and forces us to use it for organizing our work, our tasks and our collaborative projects.
Our goal is to put in place different tools that are revolutionizing the way we work, especially for collaborative projects that could benefit from the use of such a solution. It takes a certain exchangeable "density" for the use of a collaborative platform to overcome email.
We began by studying open source tools, but they were often limited. More importantly however, it required an initial investment and installation, plus time-costing app management and administration needs. We wanted to gain time and increase productivity, not spend more time managing an app.
So we focused our efforts on three tools:
Teambox: meets our needs, but is too messy, not ergonomic enough and therefore less suited to teams that are not used to working with a tool that requires a paradigm shift in the way we work.
Teamoffice: the extra service for document creation seems too ambitious to compete with tools such as Google Apps, besides our focus is more on project management and not document sharing, even if it’s important.
Azendoo: the last application that we tested, surely because it’s newer on the market or maybe because it’s not as heavily referenced. We found Azendoo thanks to an article that provided a comparative application study.
Did you struggle to get your team on the application?
I assigned some of my colleagues to study the product, as a test. There are 10 co-workers using the app so far. We’re planning on implementing it’s use throughout our schools starting next academic year, and then assess its impact on the way we work, our efficiency and time management. So no, getting people to use Azendoo is relatively painless.
What is your favorite feature?
The interesting thing about Teambox or Azendoo is the ability to integrate Google App Education applications in order to manage document sharing. Other than using Google like a meeting report that makes its rounds by email.
A natural way to share Google Drive documents with everyone who has the link is very significant:
Azendoo manages sharing and allows us to edit a document without sending it to everyone by email. Plus, this feature is the same with an Evernote note, Dropbox, etc., for users who prefer other file sharing tools already integrated in Azendoo. The difference between collaborative tools, all of which allow you to create projects and synchronize your staff, is the simplicity and ease-of-use of Azendoo, plus the integration of already-existing file sharing tools. Not to mention the fact that it’s financially interesting for the world of education (free).
What improvements would you make to the application?
An enhanced mobile application so that we can consolidate our collaborative and personal uses (ToDo / DueDates) in one app.
A desktop application (like Evernote’s offline mode that I adopted after trying and comparing with Springpad)
The app probably lacks an administrative management aspect, which could confuse companies that are used to giving special rights to different people using their tools. However, I understand that you’re proposing a new organization system that can be mysterious at first: the logic of Azendoo is a surprising and interesting chemistry between a professional tool, used to synchronize a team on projects, and social tool where the user is the sole master of his identity, his interactions, his profile and his account.
Azendoo provides administration control possibilities to workspaces and content organization. With business uses, administrators like to stay in control, especially when it comes to personal management.
Moreover, Azendoo allows everyone to participate or create workspaces independent of the organization (association, personal, etc.). A usage chart or guidelines should be created by the business in order to establish what can be done and in what framework.
Anyway, congratulations on what you are doing, and for the image of France that you instil abroad!