Colorado Springs School District puts CA`s Unicenter TNG at head of class for managing investments in technology

Computer Associates International (CA) has announced that Colorado Springs School District 11, a technologically-progressive school district responsible for educating over 31,000 students in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has selected Unicenter TNG as part of an aggressive program to update and manage a growing information technology network supporting nearly 60 schools.

The District`s immediate objective is to use Unicenter TNG to support a critical initiative to bring technology into the schools and raise student achievement levels 15 percent over three years. Recent approval of a $40 million bond issue a significant portion of which is earmarked for information technology underscores the community`s confidence in the school district.

"By its nature, a school district will never be able to afford the number of people required to support the technology infrastructure that schools now have to deploy," said Dr. Terry N. Bishop, chief information officer for the school district. "If we are to meet the educational goals we set for ourselves, we need to automate the management process as much as possible."

With a staff of less than two dozen IT professionals, School District 11 must manage an infrastructure that includes over 250 Windows NT servers supporting more than 9,000 desktops running Windows 95. These desktops are geographically distributed over 60 schools and administrative offices. In addition, the District operates a VAX midrange system and more than 75 Apple Macintosh desktops.

After evaluating a number of scenarios, and based on the recommendation of Intergraph Computer Systems, the district`s systems integrator, Colorado Springs School District 11 selected CA`s Unicenter TNG to address its requirements.

Unicenter TNG`s Asset Management capabilities give the school district central management of all IT assets, including desktops, software, peripherals, and servers. In addition to providing a snapshot of the contents of each desktop and the ability to cross-check systems against specifications, asset management allows managers to control software licenses.

The school district anticipates that by automating the management of software licenses alone, Unicenter TNG will pay for itself merely by identifying instances where the school district can renegotiate site license agreements. For example, the school district might have a site license for 100 simultaneous users of a particular educational software package, but if Unicenter TNG`s utilization history reveals that the district never uses more than 25 sessions at any time, it can renegotiate the site license downward for considerable savings.

"Until we deployed Unicenter TNG, there was no way for us to know how our educational software was being used across 57 schools and over 8,000 desktops," Dr. Bishop said.

Unicenter TNG was critical to managing the rapid influx of computers at the start of the academic year. "We had two weeks in which we were to receive the first of 8,000 shipments of desktop systems," said Dr. Milt Nielsen, Director of Technology Services. The school district ordered the 8,000 systems in 12 different profiles (three physical configurations, each running one of four software configurations) to meet the requirements of different classrooms. In addition, systems were to be preloaded with specified software.

"Every box looks alike from the outside," Dr. Nielsen said. "Unicenter TNG was absolutely indispensable in allowing us to cross-check our deliveries and to create and maintain an accurate inventory database by location."

After the desktop systems were deployed, the school district ran a centralized cross-check and detected four systems that were out of compliance with specifications. "Detecting such discrepancies using traditional audit and quality control measures in the time we had would have been impossible," Dr. Nielsen noted.

Unicenter TNG Software Delivery was also deemed indispensable in supporting the educational goals of the school district. Software Delivery allows one technician to deliver upgrades of systems software and applications to user desktops both PCs and Macintoshes from a central location.

The School District had only two weeks to configure 8,000 desktops with classroom-specific software. While the operating system and most of the application software was pre-installed at the factory, the original load did not include much of the educational software the students needed. To automatically push updated software or applications that rely on CD-ROMS such as encyclopedias to the classrooms, District 11 makes heavy use of the software delivery function.

"We use software delivery extensively to meet instructional objectives as well as repair systems," Dr. Nielsen said. For example, if a student inadvertently deletes a critical file, a technician from the central office can remotely restore the needed file. "`Impressive` is the first word that comes to mind when we describe Unicenter TNG," Dr. Nielsen said. "We could not believe how easy it made configuring the thousands of systems. We threw every kind of disaster in its way that you can think of and it did a tremendous job for us."

For example, at one point the district was in the midst of downloading a set of applications for a particular school when the T-1 line supporting the network went down. "We thought we were in a big difficulty as a number of systems timed out, but Unicenter TNG just kept track of itself and when the T-1 came back up it picked up right where it left off. What a set of bookmarks! We were very impressed," Dr. Nielsen said.

"We have hardly begun to tap the capabilities of Unicenter TNG," Dr. Nielsen said. "We have a number of skeptics in the information technology department they are paid to be skeptics and they believe Unicenter TNG is the best value that the school district has ever realized."