As the new semester started, Cornell replaced the online community, group and club management system OrgSync with a fresh interface — CampusGroups — after their OrgSync contract expired on June 14.
In March, graduate student trustee Manisha Munasignhe grad and former Graduate and Professional Student Assembly president Ekarina Winarto grad shared the intention of the university to search for a replacement to OrgSync in a Sun op-ed, citing conversations with President Martha E. Pollack and campus leaders.
“It became clear that everyone shared a similar sentiment,” they wrote. “OrgSync sucks.”
And in 2015, some student group leaders told The Sun that they believed their organizations were passed over for student activity funding due to errors with the OrgSync site.
The new CampusGroups aims to fix these issues and is full of features for student use, according to a student body-wide email from Karli Buday, Interim Director to Campus Activities within Campus and Community Engagement.
Like OrgSync, the system centralizes student organization registration processes, club requests for SAFC & GPSAFC funding and event management. It also features calender-integrated scheduling tools and the possibility for integration with social media platforms.
For student group leaders, CampusGroups seems to be a “better” choice than OrgSync with which they had some troubles with the system when registering their organization, especially when signing up officers, according to Jiali Liu ’21, President of Amber Dance Troupe at Cornell.
Liu said that CampusGroups “seems more user-friendly and has more functions than OrgSync.”
“It can be used as a platform for organizations to post events information instead of merely used for registration and applying for funds,” she continued.
Wentao Zhang ’21, President of the Cornell Invest in China Society, also prefers CampusGroups — especially its new event page.
“[S]ince it has a nice event page on Campus Group, we can post our events there and hopefully will reach out to more people,” Zhang told The Sun. “I hope this can draw more people to the organization.”
Even students who are not student group leaders found Campus Group webpage “looks better” and “contains useful information,” according to Ruizhe Huang ’21.
“I didn’t know OrgSync before, but when I received the email about CampusGroup, I logged in to it and I think the navigation is pretty clear for me,” Huang said. “I’m thinking to use it for information search if I want to join some organizations.”
However, this transition, like any other change, is not without its drawbacks. According to Karli Buday, student groups needed to download all files and documents from OrgSync and re-upload them to Campus Group. They also need to build a new website if their current website was created through OrgSync.
“It’s going to take some time for us to figure out how to navigate the new system,” Liu said. “I believe this applies to other organizations too.”