News & Insights
We believe that higher education deserves better software,
and employees deserve better work environments.
Commitment to change is more than a statement - it requires action. We have decided to pause, perhaps indefinitely, any engagement through Twitter. We absolutely will not support any platform, person, or entity that allows racism, anti-semitism, sexism, or any other form of hate speech to go unchecked.
In the early ’90s, an SIS was created for CWSL to store critical student data. In 2021, CWSL set out to modernize the school’s software platform, but the project didn’t go quite as planned. Here’s how the diverse law school began their partnership with West Arete to build an innovative, custom solution for their campus community.
We close West Arete on Juneteenth as a small but concrete way for the business to show respect—to give pause and weight to these historic milestones of freedom and empowerment in our country's history. We close as a celebration of Black Americans’ culture. And we close to recognize that our work is not done.
People often wrestle with the cost of a high-end laptop, because they run thousands of dollars. We did the math and it's totally worth it to buy top-of-the-line equipment for employees.
Building custom software is expensive. It generally involves at least several months of design and development effort, combined with extensive planning and input gathering throughout the organization. Most organizations aren't prepared for the actual cost of custom software since they don't take maintenance costs into consideration. Now add headaches, setbacks, and shrinking budgets. Don't worry, it gets worse. Let's dive into a key distinction of custom software development: software maintenance costs vs. software development costs.
Now more than ever, university IT departments need to eliminate waste and manual labor, and replace these areas with automation. Identity services are a great place to focus on, because they cut across all parts of the university. There’s a rare opportunity coming up the week after next: Internet2 is hosting their BaseCAMP introductory workshop online for the first time. This is an IAM (Identity and Access Management) workshop that’s geared toward beginners. It’s perfect for technical staff who are new to identity, but it’s also perfect for the managers of those staff.
COVID-19 mobile apps provide important breakthroughs that supplement testing and traditional contact tracing. However, most of these apps are designed for use by the general public, with complete anonymity in mind. Universities need COVID-19 apps that include strong identity (while still preserving privacy). Without identity, campus teams will struggle to get good data or thorough adoption, and the administration won’t gain enough data to assist decision making.
We believe that the best institutions will rise to the challenge to demonstrate what they’re capable of in the face of adversity and their reputations will be positively impacted for years to come. Colleges and universities are centers of critical thinking, and mental and habitual self-discipline. They’re also surrounded by communities that are filled with a sense of pride and a desire to do good.
We all share the common objective of solving the technical aspects of these projects as seamlessly as possible, so that you can focus on changing the world for the better through your teaching and your research.
Quality mentorship is the most lasting and important investment that you can make in a member of your team. A good seminar or tutorial can change the way a developer thinks about a topic and boost them a level. But good mentoring can change their habits for the rest of their career.
The first step is often a zero-pressure phone call to answer questions and explore whether we both feel that there could be a fit.