Migration Expert Zone

Pop quiz: how is a school district different from a Fortune 500 enterprise?

Answer: it’s not. Well, okay, school districts aren’t trying to turn a profit, but from an operations standpoint, a district works about the same as a big business. There’s a large-scale IT infrastructure that serves thousands—if not tens of thousands—of “employees,” and a need for bulletproof security, reliability, and usability.

Consequently,  it’s worth studying the recent migration efforts of the San Diego Unified School District, the second-largest in California with around 132,000 students and more than 6,600 teachers. The district had two primary goals: to bring technology students already know into the classroom, and to support the professional development of its teachers.

Oh, and one more thing, as noted in the San Diego Unified School District Case Study:

 The school district needs a reliable operating system. “We need something that just works. If the technology doesn’t work, or is slow to perform, teachers won’t use it. There’s no point in making efforts to bring technology to the classroom if it’s unreliable or slow,” says [Chief Information and Technology Officer Darryl] LaGace. Specifically, the school district wanted to improve startup and logon times for computers. “On a good day, computers can take six minutes or more to start up—that’s unacceptable. With that kind of unreliability, teachers and students alike abandon the technology because they don’t have the time or the patience to wait or to call technical support for assistance in the middle of class,” continues LaGace.

As part of a five-year initiative, the district began rolling out Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Enterprise on netbooks and tablets, which it found to be the most cost-effective solution for the student population. Likewise, it installed 11,000 thin-client PCs at the elementary-school level.

Here’s the part of the study I really like: The district is using Server 2008’s Active Directory and Remote Desktop Services to push software to the students’ PCs.

See the parallels between a school district and a big business? Among the benefits San Diego has reported are significantly faster log-on times, an increase in the number of deployed systems without a concurrent increase in IT-management costs, and vastly improved security.

Okay, class: go study this case study.