Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board
Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board Improves Network Efficiencies With Active Directory
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Company Overview
Located near Hamilton, Ontario, the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board has a staff of 1,000 who help oversee the education of 12,000 students at 32 elementary schools and three secondary schools. The school board was created through the amalgamation of the former Brant County Roman Catholic Separate School Board and the Haldimand-Norfolk Roman Catholic Separate School Board in January 1998.
Business Challenge
To manage its IT needs, the board relied on two consultants and two technicians to service approximately 50 buildings within the district. At the time, the board’s IT infrastructure was based on Microsoft Windows NT® operating system.
“At the time of amalgamation, we were incredibly understaffed and the demands on our team were huge. The result was that many of the projects and innovations we would like to have done were just not possible,” says Norm Cicci, the school board’s IT supervisor. “When we first amalgamated, we had to roll out 55 servers and Windows® 95 operating system to all our desktop clients with basically only two people actually working on the project.”
With schools and offices spanning a wide geography, managing the network was a difficult and time-consuming task for the IT team. With the Windows NT-based infrastructure, it was not possible for the IT team to manage the network from a central location. When problems occurred, the team had to drive to the various locations to fix any problems. For people at the schools and offices who had to wait for service, this meant lost productivity.
“It was an ad-hoc type of infrastructure where it was more of ‘let’s just get this in place so that we can have something working’ type of solution,” says Cicci. “There were a number of domains created all over the place, which created a number of inefficiencies in our network.”
While the board did increase the size of its IT team to 10 technicians, it also recognized the IT infrastructure was no longer viable. It also realized that Windows NT was at the end of its life cycle. “We didn’t want to leave ourselves hanging out to dry when it came to support options, patches, and virus fixes so we knew a change was needed soon,” says Cicci.
As a result, the school board began its search for a more cost-effective, easier to manage and efficient technology solution.
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Solution
Working with IT consulting firm, Centurion IT Solutions Inc., the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board selected Windows Server 2003 operating system as the foundation of its new IT infrastructure. The school board plans to migrate all of its sites to Windows Server 2003 by the beginning of the 2005 school year.
“We wanted something that was designed specifically to meet the needs of our board,” says Cicci. “This is in contrast to how we operated in the past which was focused on just having something that worked. We expect Windows Server 2003 to give us significantly better performance than old Windows NT and provide us with a way to better manage our IT infrastructure.”
Windows Provides a Perfect Match
As part of its search for a new solution, the school board compared the Windows-based platform with Linux as it already had Linux servers in use at some of its high schools. These servers were installed to control the amount of disk space used by students for projects.
“Windows NT didn’t do this by default and the other option at the time was to use a third-party product with Windows NT, which would have been too costly,” says Cicci. “That’s why we installed Linux in this situation.”
Nevertheless, the reliability and cost-effectiveness of Microsoft Windows Server-based platform made the decision to deploy the technology an easy one. As part of the deployment, Windows Server 2003 will be replacing the existing Linux servers at the schools.
Along with cost-savings, the IT team’s familiarity with the Microsoft-based platform was also an important factor in its decision.
“Our IT team consists of people and they are very comfortable in a Windows-based environment,” says Cicci. “It would not make sense for us to have to go and retrain staff. We were a Windows-based shop before and it made sense for us to remain a Windows-based shop.”
The board knew that with the Microsoft-based platform in place, it would not have to worry about support issues.
Business Benefits
The first step in the school board’s implementation of the Microsoft-based platform is to install Active Directory, the information hub of Windows Server 2003 operating system.
With the deployment of Active Directory, the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board expects to reduce network inefficiencies and improve its ability to manage the network overall. Active Directory will enable the school board to move to one domain model, where all network management is centralized and all schools are part of the same domain. This model will help reduce the burden on IT staff, while bringing cost-savings for the board.
“With Active Directory, the school board will boost its network performance and improve overall network efficiency,” says Bartek Kuzmicz, Lead Architect- Infrastructure, Promethean Systems. “They will be one force, one domain, one big family.”
Eases IT Staff Workload and Boosts Network Efficiency
The remote administration feature of Active Directory will allow IT staff to connect to any domain controller remotely using any Windows-based computer with administrative tools.
“Remote management is beneficial in that we can actually get users to restore their files instead of having to use the resources of our help desk,” says Cicci. “While these might seem like small tasks, they are time-consuming when you have to do it across a wide geography and for a number of sites.”
Centralized network management will also help reduce the need for IT staff to travel from site to site, freeing up their time to focus on more complex issues that require immediate attention. By being able to address network problems quickly, downtime at the schools and offices will also be reduced, helping to boost overall productivity.
“It sometimes takes an hour to get to one of our locations. If we can do things remotely, and if the system is more stable, then we don’t need as much tech support,” says Cicci. “Active Directory will be easier to manage and therefore it will take less of our technician’s time and expertise to do these jobs. This means we will no longer have work orders that are three or four days out. Issues can be addressed immediately, ensuring our schools and offices are up and running quickly.”
Improved Network Access for Schools
Active Directory will also allow staff such as principals or school board members to have easier access to the network, no matter where they log in within the district, with the same user name and password.
“We needed to make sure that if a principal took his laptop to any location in the board, he would be able to log in and use the same user name and password to access his information,” says Cicci. “Right now, the way we have it, we are not ideally set up to do that.”
Additionally, no matter where they are located in the district, all schools will have the same network configuration under the one domain model.
“Active Directory presents a big advantage for us. Some of the connections to the network from our schools are of poor quality as many of our schools are in rural areas,” says Cicci. “Active Directory allows us to set up site information to help control replication. This is important in that these schools will not have the same network issues that they may have had in the past.”
Easy to use tools for site administrators
Since the school district spans a wide geographical area, it is often difficult for IT staff to be able to address IT issues at schools or offices in a timely manner. To help address simple IT issues, each school has a designated site administrator. With Active Directory, the board hopes to provide these administrators with the tools to do even more, and ease the burden on the already resource-strapped IT staff.
“Active Directory ideally will give us the ability to delegate simple tasks such as clearing print jobs and changing student passwords to the site administrators,” says Cicci. “In the past, these tasks were handled by the IT staff. Being a small staff and being so geographically dispersed, a lot of times our tech people are out and unavailable to do emergency tasks. With Active Directory, we hope to give the site administrators the ability to do simple tasks, freeing up our IT team’s time for other more pressing tasks.”
Down the road, the board hopes to integrate Active Directory with its internal student administration system to ease the process when a new employee joins the board or a new student enrols in the system. With Active Directory, it will be easier to create a user account and an email address through one simple process.
“Having Active Directory in place will bring a number of new efficiencies to the way we manage our network,” says Cicci. “It is the first step as we move to the full deployment of Windows Server 2003 this year. With this new software in place, our school board will be able to provide a reliable and scalable IT environment for the delivery of new e-learning environments for our students across the district.”
Windows Server 2003
The Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family helps organizations do more with less. Now you can: Run your IT infrastructure more efficiently; Build better applications faster; Deliver the best infrastructure for enhancing user productivity. And you can do all this faster, more securely, and at lower cost.
For more information about Windows Server 2003, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Centurion IT Solutions Inc. products and services, call (905) 502 - 3520 or visit the Web site at: www.go-centurion.com
For more information about Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board products and services, call (519) 756-6505 or visit the Web site at: www.bhncdsb.edu.on.ca
