Schoolwires, one of the leading vendors in the education space, debuted Centricity, its newest offering, at the National Educational Computing Conference a couple of weeks ago. Centricity brings together a suite of new and existing tools and capabilities, ranging from content management and communication features to new features centered around community-building tools.This focus on building communities enhances already solid capabilities. The Schoolwires system already allows schools and districts to create and manage multiple sites, and the full Centricity suite offers support for additional features such as blogs and social networks. It also offers strong security features and its performance is solid.

I'm a fan of hosted solutions like Centricity, as they simplify the work of managing hardware and software. IT staffs, particularly in an educational environment, are already stretched thin, and anything that makes their job easier is welcome.

Schoolwires solutions already have a substantial base of more than 3,500 schools, with an estimated user base (including students, parents, teachers, and administrators) of around 3 million. Those are impressive numbers, and you don't get that big without a lot of satisfied customers willing to sing your praises. To that end, Schoolwires has made it easy to contact an existing customer via its site and hear from those who know firsthand what the systems are like.

To get an idea in the meantime, Schoolwires has a sample site available, which shows off the capabilities of its suite of tools at a high level. It's more of a clickable mockup than a fully functional site, though, so interested parties will want to request a more thorough demo.

With a notable list of features and a satisfied customer base, Schoolwires is clearly doing a number of things right. Centricity, as well as its other offerings, are well worth checking out.