By the end of the year, Cornell alumni will have a new way to connect with each other and their alma mater. And university staff will see a reduction in the administrative work it takes to organize and support the 1,500 alumni events Cornell sponsors each year around the world.

The university will begin to phase in CornellConnect, an online collection of communications and networking tools for alumni, early this fall. "The loud and clear message we're getting from our alumni is that we need to be more technically savvy in our interactions with them," said Chris Marshall, associate vice president for alumni affairs.

Through CornellConnect, alumni will be able to access and edit their own information through a searchable online directory and share as much or as little of that information as they choose with various groups and people. A "live" calendar will list Cornell events, and alumni will be able to register and pay for events online and see who else has registered. Career and business networking tools will include job and resume databanks, mentor matching and a "Yellow Pages" for businesses. And Cornell's 85 clubs, 60 class years and 20 affinity groups, as well as some colleges and schools, will be able to maintain Web pages with such interactive options as online discussion groups and photo galleries.

The Cornell Entrepreneur Network will begin using CornellConnect's event registration tool early this fall. The Johnson School and the School of Hotel Administration will join the testing in midautumn. By the end of the year, any alumnus with an activated NetID, which allows access to many Cornell online services, will be able to join CornellConnect. The university provides each alumnus with a NetID; to activate it, alumni can go to http://www.alumni.cornell.edu/netid/.

Cornell comes to online networking late in the game. Peer institutions have been offering similar services to alumni for as long as 10 years. One of the obstacles has been Cornell's decentralized structure, Marshall said. "It's not easy to integrate one system throughout all the colleges, units and alumni."

Cornell will spend $75,000 in the first year to license the software from Harris Connect, and at least that much to integrate the software into Cornell's current systems. That's less costly than having each alumni group pay $5,000 to $10,000 for individual systems, Marshall said. The event management system alone will cut down on the time and resources that staff and volunteers currently spend signing alumni up for events via phone, collecting checks and cash, designing and mailing printed invitations and entering contact information manually. "It's what I call the stubby-pencil drill," Marshall said. "It's enormously time- and staff-intensive."

If the experience of Cornell's competitors is any indication, CornellConnect should be more effective as well. Peer institutions have significantly increased the percentage of alumni e-mail addresses they've been able to collect after offering similar systems, Marshall said. "Out of all the strategic planning that we've done, the No. 1 priority is this initiative: to launch a technology tool that will allow us to better engage our alumni with each other and with Cornell."

For more information and to receive updates via an e-mail list, visit http://cornellconnect.cornell.edu.