New Brunswick Public School District

Success Story

Novell and TransNet empower New Brunswick Public School District to integrate technology and learning by providing centralized desktop management and improving infrastructure reliability, availability and security.

Overview

New Brunswick Public School District (NBPSD), a school district composed of nine elementary schools and three high schools, serves more than 6,000 students throughout the New Brunswick area. Understanding the advantage of integrating technology in the classroom, NBPSD and its 1,100 faculty and staff strive to stay on the cutting-edge of technology.

Challenge

New Brunswick Public School District wanted to provide its students, faculty and staff with the tools and resources needed to enhance learning as well as ease administrative burdens for its undersized IT staff.

With numerous schools spread throughout NBPSD, technicians spent much of their valuable time physically traveling to separate sites to distribute software and address other desktop emergencies. The school district needed to alleviate onerous support tasks and administrative costs by implementing a centralized desktop management and software distribution solution. With limited IT resources and budget, NBPSD sought the guidance of TransNet, a full systems integrator, to implement the most appropriate and cost-effective solution.

Novell solution

"The Novell solution has enabled us to empower our faculty and staff by infusing technology into their classrooms. With a stable, secure and always available network, our educators can now concentrate on the most important job-teaching and encouraging our students."

Brian Auker
Technology Specialist
New Brunswick
Public School District

Together with TransNet, a Novell® reseller partner, the school district selected Novell NetWare® 6 and Novell ZENworks® for Desktops to create a stable, cohesive network and provide students and staff with constant, reliable access to resources and tools.

"Novell technology and the design work, planning and engineering of TransNet, have enabled us to create a reliable and secure network environment," said Brian Auker, New Brunswick Public School District technology specialist.

"With NetWare 6 and ZENworks, we have a more secure and efficient infrastructure in place, allowing us to completely devote our energy and resources to educating our students."

Based on Novell eDirectory™, NetWare 6 enables the school district to provide a stable, secure environment along with anytime, anywhere access to network resources. NetWare enables group logins-based on room numbers or pre-determined groups-allowing for simplified resource management, a substantial cost-savings for the organization.

"Given the design analysis, it was clear that the combination of NetWare and ZENworks was the best and most economical solution for the district, bar none," said Paul Kramer, TransNet manager. "NetWare 6 offers the district unparalleled stability and security, and because Novell technology is rock solid, we never have to worry about servers going down."

To simplify printer tasks and enable its students, staff and faculty to work outside of the classroom, the district also plans to leverage the Web-enabled features of NetWare 6, including iPrint and Novell iFolder™. iPrint will eliminate location and network barriers for the school district by allowing its users to print to any remote location on the network. Now even the youngest students can locate, install and print with a click of a mouse-all through a Web browser. Novell iFolder offers NBPSD the ability to synchronize, back-up and access files from any Internet-enabled device, allowing its users to access and update files at school or at home.

NBPSD chose to implement ZENworks for Desktops because of its dynamic delivery of applications, content and services as well as software self-healing functionality. The remote control functionality of ZENworks enables the district to streamline workstation repairs and upgrades, eliminating the need for technicians to travel to each school to perform manual repairs or upgrades, saving the organization a substantial amount of time and money. The school district also plans to deploy ZENworks for Desktops 4 to aid with its future rollout of Microsoft Windows* XP.

"ZENworks for Desktops is equivalent to a handful of employees," said Auker. "It allows us to instantly push out software, monitor inventory and effectively control our entire desktop environment."

Results

With the guidance of TransNet, New Brunswick Public School District has already witnessed substantial benefits from the Novell solution. With Netware 6, the district's infrastructure is now more reliable, flexible and easier to manage, significantly increasing user and support staff productivity. The solution has also helped the organization achieve zero downtime. ZENworks for Desktops is automating key network management tasks, such as software distribution, upgrades and repairs, enabling the district's IT staff to focus on more pressing IT issues, a significant cost-savings for the organization.

"Today a computer has to be what a chalkboard was-it has to be integrated. The Novell solution has enabled us to empower our faculty and staff by infusing technology into their classrooms," said Auker. "With a stable, secure and always available network, our educators can now concentrate on the most important job-teaching and encouraging our students."