E-business project benefits West Point area

E-business center, video conferencing center serve area businesses

By Carroll Welte, University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension

While attending a national e-commerce workshop, University of Nebraska Extension Educator Carroll Welte became aware of a $10,000 funding opportunity from the Department of Labor to increase the information technology skills of employees of small businesses in rural areas. The funding opportunity was part of a larger grant awarded to the Northern Great Plains Rural Development Commission to build an e-business ready workforce in Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Because of her involvement with the West Point Area Telecommunications Committee, Ms. Welte wrote and submitted an application to bring the e-business project to the community.

In the summer of 2002, the telecommunications committee and Cooperative Extension staff began working with Steve Hannah of the Northern Great Plains, Inc. (NGP) to build West Point's e-business ready workforce. During the fall and winter of 2003, two 3-day e-business trainings were presented to 26 business owners and employees by the Northern Great Plains staff.

To augment the NGP e-business trainings, Patty Schinstock, an instructor for the Northeast Community College, taught both a basic and advanced Web page design class; and Kathy Ellermeier, the network administrator for the high school, taught a class on networking small business computers. Of the nine businesses that already had Web sites, significant improvements were made with regard to content, layout and design. Ten businesses created practice Web sites and continue to work on them.

Because of the costs of the tools necessary for creating Web sites, the telecommunications committee used $7,800 of the $10,000 grant to create an e-business center in the computer lab of the West Point public library. The purpose of the center is also to help local organizations and civic groups build websites for a Web-based community information network.

Hardware, including two digital cameras, a flatbed scanner, film scanner, zip drives, writable CD-ROM's, a writable DVD-ROM along with other miscellaneous equipment, was purchased and installed on the computers within the library's computer lab. Adobe Elements and NetObjects Fusion software was purchased and installed on eight of the computers. A full version of the Adobe Web Collection was installed on one computer. To sustain the project, a copy of the Adobe Web Collection was purchased for the local Web site design instructor. The library staff received training in Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft office.

The required project match provided by the community amounted to $48,346.37 and was derived from the volunteer hours spent coordinating the project, along with time spent by the business owners and their employees participating in the trainings. The match was almost five times more than required by the Department of Labor.

To make the workforce even more e-business ready, the West Point Telecommunications Committee partnered with the University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension, Nebraska Information Technology Commission, and the Technologies Across Nebraska partnership to place an interactive audio/video conferencing (Polycom) system in the Cuming County Extension Office.

Video conferencing capability was established as a goal of the regional information technology plan developed by the communities served by the West Point Workforce Development group last summer. It was identified as a need when several communities conducted the Building Information Age Communities assessment as part of Technologies Across Nebraska's IT Planning and Mini Grant program.

Valmont Industries, Knobbe Commodities, and the Farmers and Merchants National Bank in West Point provided funds for a digital television to complete the system. The conferencing system will be used for trainings conducted by both higher education and industry.

TANgents, a quarterly publication of Technologies Across Nebraska, is edited and produced by Linda Tempel, University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension, ltempel@unlnotes.unl.edu, and Anne Byers, Nebraska Information Technology Commission, abyers@notes.state.ne.us. Please contact us if you would like to contribute an article or an idea for an article. Comments and suggestions are also welcome.