School District #69 (Qualicum)
Terminal Services gets high marks
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Company Overview
School District #69 (Qualicum) in British Colombia, has a population of more than 5,000 students and 330 teachers and administrators within a 500-sq.-km - from Nanoose Bay in the south to Cook Creek in the north and inland to Cameron Lake, including Lasqueti Island located 15 km from mainland B.C. There are eight elementary schools (Grades K-5), three middle schools (Grades 6-8), two secondary Schools (Grades 9-12), an alternate school, and a community school (K-12) on Lasqueti Island. There is also a French Immersion program (K-12) and an International Student Program. Education for francophone students is provided in Nanaimo, B.C., through the Francophone Education Authority, B.C.'s provincial francophone school board.
Business Challenge
With 15 separate locations operating within such a large expanse, the three-person information systems team at School District #69 (Qualicum) was constantly on the move. Adding applications or resolving networking issues within the existing environment meant serious traveling time - 15 km by ferry in some cases. With such a hectic schedule, it sometimes took technicians up to a week to get to a site, figure out the problem, and then resolve it.
"If there was a problem at False Bay School on Lasqueti Island, for example, it would take us a whole day to get there and back when all that was wrong was the printer queue," recalls Janet Gregory, Information Technology Management Consultant at School District #69 (Qualicum). "It was time-consuming and expensive. We were desperate to make a change."
Further, because the district technology plan provided provincial funding for hardware on a 6 year cycle, many were running outdated hardware. The challenge, said Gregory, was to modernize the environment in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
According to Gregory, faculty and students were using systems running legacy applications such as Windows 3.11. It meant that students that were looking to improve or learn computer skills they were stuck with software that was outdated and not in use in either the University or Corporate worlds.
"We just had to find a way to do more in less time and at less expense," she explains.
Options Explored
In early 2000, the IS team conducted a thorough analysis Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server coupled with Microsoft Terminal Services thin client and they were particularly impressed with Microsoft's stability, scalability, power and performance.
"We asked ourselves, 'What is the world doing now? Where is the world going?'" says Gregory. "Because Microsoft Terminal Services is server-based, we could provide our users with a Microsoft Office 2000 desktop and current applications on older hardware, rather than trying to upload modern, up-to-date software on a server that was bound to buckle under the pressure. A thin client offered us those capabilities, and Microsoft had one of the most cost-effective thin-client solution to take our school district into the 21st century."
The School District also considered UNIX and Linux alternatives but ran into a number of roadblocks with regards to wide deployment of any such solution.
"While UNIX and Linux alternatives seemed appealing from a price point, the cost of maintenance, available applications and the interface were what discouraged us from using it," said Gregory. "The Microsoft software is open to more applications that are relevant to our students and we believe the Graphical User Interface of Windows is much easier to learn than that of Linux."
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Solution
In April 2000, the School District conducted a pilot project at Oceanside Middle School to gauge the success of a Microsoft-based centrally managed environment based on Microsoft 2000 Advanced Server and Microsoft Terminal Services.
Terminal Services provides remote access to a server desktop through thin client software, serving as a terminal emulator. Users log on and see only their individual session, which is managed transparently by the server operating system and is independent of any other client session. Client software can run on a number of client hardware devices, including computers and Windows-based Terminals.
Deployment Time
Implementation, which took place over Spring Break, was simple and painless: the IS team uploaded Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Terminal Services to a new server and then spent several days writing log-in scripts and mapping drives.
"We weren't really sure how the whole thing would work so we initially kept all the data on the Novell server and people logged in that way," says Gregory of the pilot's dual environment, created with Microsoft and Novell, Inc. technology. "We created a log-in script that mapped their mail and their drives over to the Novell server, so to the user it was seamless - they didn't know where their data was residing."
Because several of the district's outdated computers using Microsoft Windows 3.11 could only boot to a Novell network, the IS team had them continue to boot through Novell and then out to Terminal Services using a terminal connection. This meant the school could retain a computer lab full of outdated hardware while still providing users with an advanced environment using Windows 2000.
"When students and teachers arrived back to school after the vacation and saw Windows 2000 running on old machines, they were quite impressed," says Gregory. "In fact, the pilot project was so successful that the school decided to buy new monitors, keyboards and mice. To the users, they look like brand new machines when, in fact, we're still running on those old boxes."
In June 2000, district-wide rollout of Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Terminal Services began. By Summer 2001, most of the schools had made the switch and Oceanside Middle School had moved off of the old system completely.
Business Benefits
Terminal Services has eased network administration considerably, leading to a much more satisfied user community. With Terminal Services running on a Windows 2000 Server, all program execution, data processing, and data storage occur on the server, centralizing the deployment of programs. Software is installed only once on the server, rather than every desktop throughout the district, helping reduce the costs associated with updating individual computers. The IS team can remotely manage the server from any client over a wide-area network or dial-up connection.
"If it's the weekend and I need to check if a backup ran as planned, I can sit in my home office in my pajamas and see if it worked," says Gregory. "I don't have to travel to every single school to determine the success of the backup, which saves a tremendous amount of time. It used to take up to a week to get out to Lasqueti Island depending on our workload and on the ferry schedules, but since we installed Terminal Services I've only sent someone out there once this year - we can fix almost anything from the head office."
Given the distance between the schools and head office, there's at least one teacher in every school who serves as an on-site network administrator. Says Gregory, "If they call me and say, 'I have a print queue that's stuck and I can't get any jobs out,' I can now sit at my desk, go into the server, look at it, and clear the queue. I don't have to get in my car and drive 15 or 20 minutes to the school. It saves us hours of time."
Remote administration came in particularly handy for Gregory last Spring while she was vacationing on the Greek Islands. The school had been experiencing some minor difficulties with its mail server just before Gregory left for vacation and she knew it would worry her while she was away. But thanks to Terminal Services, "I found myself sitting in a little Internet café seven hours south of Athens and was able to check the mail server to be sure everything was working smoothly."
Finally, moving to Terminal Services has allowed the School District to retain its existing hardware and save thousands of dollars in the process. Gregory says it would have cost about $45,000 to upgrade Oceanside Middle School's computer lab had Terminal Services not come on the scene. The first two schools to make the move saved almost $75,000 combined.
Resulting Value
By the end of Summer 2002, 13 of the 15 schools will be on board with Microsoft. Gregory is particularly excited about the grand finale because it will unite two French Immersion schools - one elementary and one middle school - through fibre optic cable running from the School District's head office. The project, made possible by the provincial government, allows both schools to share French Immersion content and students have continuity as they move through the system.
"Content will be delivered extremely fast when Terminal Services is running on a fibre connection," says Gregory. "Users won't even notice the data is traveling several kilometres - they just log on and the tools they need are there."
Based on the project's success, the School District is now completely committed to a single-server environment based on Windows 2000 on the desktop and the server. Now maintenance and installation of new software is done in one place and time-to-install has been reduced dramatically. Most troubleshooting and network administration can be done remotely and now if there is a problem it can be dealt with in a timely manner without having to wait for an IT person to arrive onsite.
"A dual environment is too confusing and requires too much maintenance," says Gregory. "Thanks to Microsoft, we're now running a very smooth operation whereby all the applications that school district runs on are current versus being proprietary pieces of software that were based on the MS-DOS operating system. There is one server and one environment from Microsoft that can be updated very easily, which in turn has reduced our management and infrastructure costs."
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Co. information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/casestudies
http://www.sd69.bc.ca
