Managing School District Computers from a Central Location

Summary

The Oshkosh Area School District (OASD) needed a convenient way to manage servers and workstations across all school district facilities. With over 1,300 staff members and 10,000 students, the school district’s facilities are dispersed across many locations. The information technology department needed a comprehensive solution for automated software deployment and configuration management, in order to avoid spending time on repetitive tasks. Aaron Vanden Heuvel, Technology Infrastructure and Services Manager for OASD, sought a Microsoft Partner organization to assist with the project. “The reason we chose Concurrency was we needed to be efficient and effective with our time and budget dollars. We needed a partner whose resources we could trust were on point and that there would be little overhead to their efforts on the project. We did not want to feel our consultants were learning on the job, on our dollar,” said Aaron. We then worked with Aaron and his team to plan and put in place hardware and software needed to manage updates, changes, software installations and more from one central location. The new tools also provided detailed systems reporting.

Solution

This project provided OASD with a comprehensive workstation and server management solution for integrated inventory, assessment, deployment, configuration, and update management. Working closely with the OASD information technology team, we gathered information about worksites, connection speeds, number of workstations at each site. We then planned a System Center 2012 Configuration Manager environment to provide solutions for:

• Systems inventory and asset intelligence
• Software and operating system deployment
• Software update management
• Desired configuration management
• Operating system deployments
• Network access protection
• Systems reporting
• Centralized antivirus deployment and management

We upgraded OASD’s existing System Center 2007 environment to a fresh installation of System Center 2012. We then deployed System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and shared knowledge on using it to manage System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection, applications, Microsoft updates, and operating systems.

“We were pleased and impressed with the amount of collaboration in the process and the efficiency with which Concurrency completed our project,” said Aaron Vanden Heuvel.