Introducing The Dock
All you need to navigate Hobart and William Smith.
Built on the Slate for Student Success platform, The Dock is Hobart and William Smith’s centralized hub for student support and connection. With the ability to access and manage campus resources, The Dock will serve as the launching pad for a student’s journey. Unmistakeningly HWS, The Dock, will be built for and by the Hobart and William Smith Community.
What is Slate for Student Success?
A platform designed for higher education to support campus communities from enrollment through graduation. It centralizes data, offering tools for advising, intervention, personalized communication, and reporting. Slate helps ensure all students can make informed decisions, build meaningful connections with campus partners, and move confidently through their college journey.
Slate offers a breadth of functionality driven by student interaction. Students can see a holistic picture of their academic progression, create and manage tasks, and access critical information when they need it most. True of the staff/advisor side of Slate as well. Slate can support a broad spectrum of campus initiatives, practices, and communication, ultimately removing barriers to participation and enhancing the student experience.
Why Slate?
Slate was ultimately chosen for its campus alignment (HWS currently uses the Admissions instance of Slate), its ability to be tailored to HWS's unique needs, its ability to solve for multiple institutional needs, and its cost-effectiveness. In addition to centralizing information for students, Slate serves as a communication tool, a secure document storage system, and a site for institutional data. Slate can assist us in identifying retention concerns and evaluating our retention efforts, but in itself is not a retention intervention.
Project Opportunities:
Slate is a process-built platform with extensive personalization capabilities.
- Create a student-facing portal built by student input, for students.
- Evaluate current methods of practice and determine whether the data we collect and the manner in which we use it are necessary and right for student support.
- Enhance the student experience by reducing barriers to participation.
- Slate’s customization is iterative; it will grow as we grow alongside it.
What are the goals for Slate for Student Success?
- Streamline and highlight important email communication
- Centralize student resources
- Simplify and automate administrative tasks
- Provide opportunities for enhanced support
- Evaluate student success and retention efforts through data-informed decision-making
*Metrics, along with measures of success, data sources, and the frequency with which our goals will be measured through Slate for Success, are being reviewed and will be shared once ready.
How will Slate support the Hobart and William Smith Community?
- Reducing administrative labor: The Registrar’s office processes countless paper forms and email transactions every day. Automating those functions could allow the Registrar’s team to spend more time supporting student, faculty, and staff needs in other ways.
- Centralizes student information and decisions: Emails abound, a student may interact with many offices in order to complete required tasks, housing a student’s unique experience (financial aid, student accounts, academic progression) within one portal can reduce the number of times a student must explain their needs (with appropriate permissions and need-to-know basis) allowing HWS to serve a student in a more timely and personalized manner.
- Secure document storage: The Registrar’s office has long sought a solution for secure document storage. Slate meets that functionality with permission-based material storage. Financial Aid and other departments that transfer and manage secure documents are also interested in leveraging this feature.
- Data-driven evaluation: Slate supports a more intentional approach to data. Engaging the campus about what data we collect, how we use it, and whether it is purposeful can eliminate current data-collection efforts that no longer serve their purpose but remain active for historical means.
*See “What are the Potential Use Cases of Slate for Student Success” for additional opportunities.
Is Slate replacing PeopleSoft?
Slate will support additional campus platform integrations (e.g., PeopleSoft, Canvas). Slate will not replace PeopleSoft, as that is Hobart and William Smith’s system of record; it helps indicate “what is officially true”. Slate will enhance PeopleSoft functionalities, and the two programs will complement each other. Slate offers the opportunity to reduce interface with PeopleSoft, thereby streamlining processes and reducing the administrative burden. In time, Slate will serve as the launchpad for campus resources and administrative tasks.
Who will use Slate?
Slate is a role-based permissible platform. HWS envisions faculty, staff, and students all using the platform to support one another through efficient communication and by completing administrative tasks. Users will have only what they need access to, and ample training, communication, and support will be provided to each user subset before they need to use it. A tentative timeline of when users may interact with The Dock is below:
- June 2026 - Registrar’s Office, Office of the Deans
- July 2026 - Campus Life, OAFA, Athletics
- August 2026 - Students and Staff
- January 2027 - Faculty and Staff
- Summer 2027 - Other offices/departments interested in Slate integration
*See timeline page for additional details.
Submit your feedback: questions, ideas, comments and/or concerns can be submitted here.