Hertford Regional College improves student computing facilities with faster desktop deployment

Customer challenge

Technology plays an increasingly important role in the educational environment. Hertford Regional College must therefore ensure students' desktops perform at optimum level throughout the year, particularly with the growing number of online tests. With up to 12,000 students and 900 staff using the college's 1,800 devices, data volumes can spiral out of control by the end of the academic year. This has resulted in performance issues and means that the college must rebuild its desktops on an annual basis.

Computacenter solution

To increase the efficiency of its rebuild process and improve desktop performance, the college enlisted Computacenter's help to implement an automated desktop deployment solution. Based on Computacenter's Desktop Technology Optimisation (DTO) approach, the technology enables the college to schedule desktop rebuilds remotely. This meant that the college was able to rebuild all 23 of its computer rooms in just three days and simplify an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007.

Results

By reducing the time taken to rebuild desktops, the college has been able to increase the efficiency of its IT team and allocate more resources to projects that will deliver operational and educational value. Hertford Regional College is also able to provide students with a better learning experience and ensure they have access to high performing desktops for online tests and research.

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Customer profile

Providing quality courses and teaching
Hertford Regional College provides a comprehensive range of both full and part-time courses to 12,000 students. Formed in the early 1990s from the merger of Ware College and East Herts College, the college and its 900 staff are based at two main sites.

The college's mission is to enrich the community through skills and learning for all. To help achieve this goal, Hertford Regional College has developed strong links with local councils, business and other educational organisations. The college is committed to providing quality courses and teaching in a well-supported educational environment.

Business challenge

Safeguarding IT performance
Technology has become inherently linked to the learning experience. Online tests, multimedia teaching materials and web-based research all play an important role in the modern delivery of education. As a result, Hertford Regional College needs to provide staff and students with reliable access to the organisation's desktops. Students and staff have access to 1,800 desktops, which are based in 23 dedicated computing rooms.

With hundreds of users accessing each desktop over the course of the academic year, the volume of data on each device steadily increases. This often results in performance issues, which have to be resolved by the college's 13-strong IT team.

Maintaining high levels of desktop performance is also particularly important for the college to run online exams. Peter Dutton, IT Director at Hertford Regional College, explains: "Our courses include an increasing number of web-based tests. To run these successfully we need fully functional and highly performing computer rooms."

The college has developed new buildings and increased the number of computer rooms to keep up with this growing demand, but keeping the technology 'clean' was a major issue. "We were receiving a rising number of complaints from students about the operational speed of desktops," adds Peter.

To help deal with performance issues, the college rebuilds each desktop every year, and sometimes more frequently. Although this approach helped to remove the annual logjam of data, the rebuild process was not efficient. As Peter explains: "The rebuilds had to be done during the six-week summer holiday period to ensure that they didn't impact student courses. The task had to be carried out manually, which was very time-consuming."

Computacenter solution

Automating tasks for increased efficiency
To simplify the rebuild process, the college first partnered with Computacenter in summer 2007. The two organisations worked together to implement a remote deployment solution based on Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 to automatically rebuild student computers.

Following this success, in summer 2008, the college was keen to extend this functionality to staff computers and take advantage of additional benefits that were available through new versions of the software. The college opted to deploy Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2008 (SCCM) to provide a remote deployment solution with extended functionality.

Computacenter also provided guidance and consultancy to help the college's internal IT staff reconfigure Active Directory to enable both student and staff computers to be managed centrally.

Alan Evans, a Technical Architect at Computacenter, comments, "Based on our Desktop Technology Optimisation approach, the technology enables automated remote deployment of the college's software packages to minimise the manual intervention necessary in rebuilding desktop computers."

Computacenter used Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 to develop an effective deployment solution that met the college's needs. Knowledge transfer was a focal point for the project. As well as implementing a working solution, the Computacenter team was keen to ensure that the college's IT staff were comfortable with the solution and able to manage it on an ongoing basis.

All standard college software is now installed using Microsoft SCCM. Its zerotouch deployment function enables the college to schedule desktop rebuilds for entire computer rooms or individual devices as required. "Our computer rooms need to be equipped with different applications depending upon the lesson or exam that is taking place," comments Peter. "Using Microsoft SCCM we can repurpose a room overnight."

The technology enabled the college to rebuild all 1,800 computers in 23 computer rooms in just three days. This process used to take 2.5 days for each room when conducted manually.

As well as simplifying the rebuild process for repurposing computer rooms or cleansing data, the college can also upgrade to new releases more easily using Microsoft SCCM. For example, when the college upgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2007, it was able to schedule the deployment of the new software for when staff were attending training courses on the new software. "When staff returned from the training session, their computers were already running Microsoft Office 2007. This enabled us to upgrade in a very short time period," comments Peter.

Results

Improving student facilities
The rapid desktop deployment solution has had a far-reaching impact on IT at the college. "Using the solution has transformed the way in which we provide IT support," comments Peter. "Less time is spent on problem analysis, as a system rebuild will fix the majority of problems. The ability to fix problems remotely also reduces the need for IT staff to travel to our two smaller satellite sites."

By enhancing its approach to desktop management, Hertford Regional College has been able to:

Improve examination facilities: A computer room can now be prepared for an online test overnight. This means that the college has a choice of 23 rooms for online testing which simplifies timetabling.

Enhance student and staff satisfaction: The colleges computers now offer faster performance, which means less complaints and more productive students.

Free up IT resources: Computer rooms can now be rebuilt automatically with minimal manual intervention. This reduced workload has enabled the college to redeploy its IT staff and expand its network support team.

The ability to commit more resources to network management has proved critical to the college's IT and learning strategy. Hertford Regional College is already taking advantage of a wide range of new technologies that can help improve efficiency and reduce costs, such as voice-over-IP and a campus-wide wireless system, which increases the reliance on its network infrastructure. As a result of the simplified deployment model, the college has been able to boost its network support team without increasing its headcount.

"We have a number of IT projects in mind, particularly around our new buildings," comments Peter. "The automated desktop deployment solution puts us in a much better position to implement and support new technologies, which will help us to broaden the range of facilities available and attract more students."