Make the PC an educational tool-not an expense
Optimizing your education infrastructure with Windows Vista
Updated: October 20, 2006
Microsoft understands that technology funding can be a significant hurdle for educational institutions—one that can keep you from realizing your vision for using computers as powerful educational tools. Moving to Windows Vista can actually help reduce your information technology (IT) costs, because the operating system is easier to deploy, manage, and support.
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Reduce deployment cost and complexity
Deploying an operating system throughout your institution can be expensive. In part, this is because you need to create, test, and maintain separate images of the operating system for installation on each type of computer, in each language required, throughout your institution. That's a pretty labor-intensive task, and your IT staff is probably stretched thin already. With the new imaging technology in Windows Vista, you can deploy a single operating system image to different types of computer hardware and machines with different language requirements—allowing for dramatic reduction in IT costs.
Before you can deploy Windows Vista, you need to make sure that the applications your students, faculty, and staff need will run properly. To help ease the testing process, you can now access an early version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit, as well as information from a community of customers, partners, and vendors who are sharing their testing results.
Enjoy easier desktop management
Windows Vista offers increased reliability and will improve desktop control and consistency across your institution. For example, new instrumentation handlers and improvements in Group Policy give your administrators a higher level of management automation. And Group Policy controls can reduce power costs by as much as $50 per desktop per year!*
The new Event Viewer includes richer data and documentation to help IT professionals view, prioritize, and respond to changes. These improvements are based on customer requests, such as the ability to use Group Policy to provide granular control for removable storage devices—which are an increasingly popular way for students to transport their schoolwork to and from the campus.
Reduce support costs
If you can reduce the manual labor needed to support your systems (such as that needed to troubleshoot a hardware problem or to guide a user through a routine process), you can really drive down costs. That's why Windows Vista's new diagnostic, self-help, and remote assistance tools can significantly decrease support costs. Windows Vista can detect and resolve many problems automatically, including hardware failures, networking problems, client performance issues, resource exhaustion, power transition issues, unbootable systems, and service crashes.
Increase return on networking investments
Windows Vista helps you increase the return on your school network or Learning Gateway investment in several ways. For example, it automatically optimizes file transfers by detecting how much network bandwidth is available and tuning itself to receive more or less data at any given time.
It is also easier to implement security settings in Windows Vista—such as creating security policies based on Internet Protocol security (IPsec), with which you can isolate entire domains or specific servers from unauthorized access. With the scaleable and more secure new network stack, you won't have to worry about deploying and managing additional software when you're ready for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Your faculty and students can use Network Diagnostics to resolve many connectivity issues without having to contact the Help Desk, thus increasing their productivity and reducing your support costs.
* Cost savings estimates developed in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
