Solving Desktop Management Challenges in Education

Just like any other workplace, Higher Education (HED) and even K-12 institutions rely heavily on technology, and a key part of their infrastructure is a network of Windows computers.

The IT departments that manage them have always faced an extraordinary range of demands, but with the current economic downturn there is new pressure to do more with less, to roll-out new projects and initiatives, tighten security, deliver updates and provide greater mobility to students and faculty while reducing the bottom-line. To meet these challenges IT departments need to automate and centralize labor-intensive functions and eliminate time-consuming manual tasks, while achieving greater security and lower energy costs.

Desktop management challenges faced by IT professionals working in education include:

• providing students and faculty members with rapid access a set of applications, resources and data as they roam between many different workstations
• lacking IT resources devoted to managing desktops
• securing incoming and outgoing data transfers
• providing remote assistance to user desktops
• protecting from users removing sensitive data using USB drives and removable storage media
• rising energy costs, and pressure to reduce wasted uptime
• re-imaging computers in labs to clean unwanted data and ensure all systems can be reverted to a known-good state

The white paper “The Challenge of Windows Desktops in Education” addresses how to achieve some of these goals in the area of Windows desktop management in an education setting. In addition, the paper looks at ScriptLogic’s Desktop Authority, which provides educational organizations the granular control they need for all Windows desktops and applications.

The paper highlights specific features within Desktop Authority that have been used by many educational organizations to drive down costs, improve efficiency and increase end-user satisfaction:

• providing a secure, consistent, task-oriented desktop for users as they roam
• reducing user logon times
• securing the desktop environment
• providing excellent remote assistance for one-on-one support
• reducing energy costs with centralized power management