BY HADLEY THOMPSON, NEWS EDITOR
St. Bonaventure University has updated Bonnies Connect, an app available for students and faculty use. Due to the limitations and availability of the previous app and the company, Rob DeFazio, associate dean for Student Life, said that it was time for a change.
“The previous app was bought by another company and we were notified that our app would be discontinued and that the services would no longer exist,” DeFazio said. “It was important to move quickly because people use this app on a regular basis to be notified and to communicate with each other.”
The app, at the time, accomplished what we were looking for, over the years, you look to do more things and the company was limited,”
Tim Geiger, the director of Enterprise Services at Bonaventure, knew the details of the instability of the previous app.
“The previous app struggled to integrate with our SSO [when you sign into the app and are then signed out] for a long time,” Geiger said. “We started to experience a lot of student and faculty authentication issues and it was also difficult to receive support from our previous vendor.”
DeFazio suggested new functions for the app in its design process.
“One of the things that is new on this app, in the top corner there is a shield. If you click on that shield it opens right up to office of safety and security, and their number is available to call if you press on it,” DeFazio said.
Megan Bickert, a junior health science major, said that she can speak for the student population at Bonaventure that getting tickets for basketball games had been annoying.
“It was hard to log in to and time consuming. Every time you tried to get tickets it crashed and sometimes left people without any chance to get into the game,” Bickert said.
DeFazio said that though the athletics department is working on a new process for student tickets, the previous app was not meant for this function.
“The biggest complaints we got was when it came to ticketing, but that is not what that app was meant to do. They just tried to make it work the best the company could when there was a lot of blame placed on the app,” DeFazio said.
Overall, the community at Bonaventure already approves of this upgrade. Gracie Lafay, a junior educational studies major, said that she hopes to see more additions like the app to make Bonaventure an even more inclusive place than it already is.
“I like that its customizable to you, it makes it not so generalized. Bonaventure isn’t a place to generalize, so its fitting.”
