How Goverlan helped the Ellenville Central School District to successfully meet the district's IT needs.
Company: Ellenville Central School District
Industry: Education
Location: USA
Supporting entire school district: 3 schools, 2,000 students + 300 staff
Lean IT department - 1 Sys Admin + 1 Technician : 750 machines
Limited options to push tasks to groups of users/machines
Constantly deploying new software district-wide
Improved time-to- resolution
Powerful administrative tools to extend IT reach
Customizable/shareable/reusable actions that can be pushed to users/machines, ad-hoc, scheduled or ongoing basis
Global - level software deployments
The Ellenville Central School District endeavors to be a school community in which all children learn, achieve, and exceed the competencies outlined in the New York State Learning Standards as prescribed by the Board of Regents and the Board of Education. The District maintains the highest academic standards to provide every student with a foundation that will make them life-long learners, capable of competing in a world economy. www.ecs.k12.ny.us
The Ellenville Central School District, including an elementary, middle and high school, aims to provide the highest academic standards to its students in Ellenville, NY. To support its mission, the Ellenville IT Department - comprised of one systems administrator and one technician - supports the entire district's network infrastructure, totaling 2,000 students, 300 staff, and 750 computers.
Relative to the number of computers and users they support, the Ellenville IT Department was stretched thin. The department also encounters new software updates often and needed an efficient way to perform district-wide deployments.
After evaluating other solutions, Bill Cramer, Director of Operations and Network Administration, chose Goverlan as Ellenville's systems management solution for its ease of use and broad feature set versus cost, noting; "From the standpoint of Dameware and LANDesk, Goverlan was much easier to use, more cost-effective, and a more fullfeatured program."
In an age of escalating technological demands and shrinking budgets, systems administrators have to wear more hats than ever before. Goverlan's administrative capabilities and integrated functionality make scripting virtually unnecessary and offer SysAdmins broad-reaching features to make their work more efficient and expedient.
"A lot of the functionality that I might take the time to write in a script is already built into Goverlan. Within a few clicks I can build something to automate a task that might have taken me an hour or two to write and test in a script - now I can test and deploy in 10-15 minutes," stated Cramer.
Goverlan offers perpetual licenses priced per technician with no node fees. In a time of dwindling budgets for school IT departments, this makes it a particularly cost-effective systems management solution. "With its no-cost-per-client motto, the current pricing model allows for an organization to purchase Goverlan for its available tech staff while not having to purchase it for all their desktops and servers, which would be significantly costlier. This model is very much in line with the available support budgets in K-12 technology departments," elaborated Cramer.
Deploying Goverlan is effortless as the small service agents (less than 5MB) are auto-installed and self-maintained.
The Ellenville IT Department uses Goverlan's Remote Control and Administrative Suite to successfully manage the school district's infrastructure. "Goverlan's return on investment was seen on day one. The functionality of all the components makes it a well-rounded tool to meet any helpdesk management needs and its advanced feature set allows for an unlimited number of uses for systems management," remarked Cramer.
In particular, Goverlan's Scope Actions feature has proved the most valuable in saving time and effort by increasing the department's administrative capabilities exponentially. Scope Actions puts an extensive range of administrative features at a SysAdmin's fingertips. The customized actions can be saved, shared and reused, and then pushed to specified groups of users and machines or single targets - in real time or scheduled to run when needed or on a recurring basis.
"We use Scope Actions, or ‘Scopes' to run reports for our computer inventory, asset management and software licensing; as a tool to make global changes to software or PC management; to make changes in our server infrastructure; and also for software Active Directory records or inventory on a regular basis. We also use Scopes to run reports, make machine changes, and install software remotely on mass numbers of machines. We have greatly reduced our operational time by being able to recycle and reuse these Scope Actions on other projects as they arise," explained Cramer.
With Goverlan, operators can search for logged-in workstations by username and instantly gain access to in-depth, real-time system information such as memory usage, performance counters, and running programs in a simple drill-down menu. These features have allowed the Ellenville IT Department to improve their time-to-resolution. "Goverlan's search features in an Active Directory environment for user and computer management make for an extremely efficient workflow. Using this search feature, now we can quickly isolate the user and/or the machine that is having problems and reach a resolution much faster," expounded Cramer.
With Goverlan, the Ellenville IT Department has improved their time-to-resolution and administrative capabilities. They now perform their daily support tasks with more efficiency and speed, allowing the small department to successfully manage the multi-school district's network. Cramer summarized; "Goverlan is a very cost-effective solution in terms of its features, security and performance."
