Surrey School District Automates Processes, Saves Time & Money

Surrey School District required a cross-platform auto-discovery and secure asset tracking tool for its fleet of 6,000 PCs, 6,000 Apple desktop computers, and 800 notebook computers. The largest school district in British Columbia, Surrey SD welcomes 65,000 students each day at its 99 elementary schools, 18 secondary schools and six learning centers.

The specific challenges of the implementation included:

Dan Turner, Director of Information Technology at the School District, made the decision to install AbsoluteTrack on the computers in 2004.

“Being a cross-platform school district, we found it difficult at first to even find a software vendor that would support Apple’s OS/9. Although Absolute Software’s initial client application for OS/9 was not ideal, we were impressed that their product development team was willing to work with my IT team to design customized product code for us to build a product that met our needs. Sure, there were hiccups in the beginning, but no major technology is ever perfect, and together with Absolute Software, we were able to overcome the challenges.”

“We now use AbsoluteTrack to verify software license compliance on each machine, perform lifecycle management and execute our annual ‘true up’, which is essentially an inventory count of CPU levels, base bar and licensing,” says Turner. “With over 100 schools in the District, the true up was an annual headache for my team of 55 in IT services.”

Rob Gill, Systems Application Specialist at Surrey School District, remembers first-hand the true up process of the past: “Before we started using AbsoluteTrack, 10 to 15 of my colleagues would spend a month and a half – from mid-May to late-June – visiting each and every school in the district looking at all the computers to get inventory counts of
hardware configurations and installed software titles. During this time, everything but emergency student and teacher IT support requests would be put on hold – and this is the most critical time of year for students trying to complete their projects or teachers preparing exams or grades.”

“With AbsoluteTrack,” Turner explains, “the manual true up has become a thing of the past. Each day a computer is booted up, AbsoluteTrack sends any changes to the hardware and software data points. We find out exactly what each computer is running, how much hard drive space is available, whether memory cards are missing, and more. It’s a critical tool for lifecycle management, because now if we want to know if a piece of hardware can support more powerful software, we don’t have to visit the school and sit down at the computer to find out; we know automatically, everyday.”

Now that AbsoluteTrack has completely automated the true up process, Gill and his co-workers can dedicate more time to student and teacher issues, rather than administrative.

Another benefit provided by AbsoluteTrack is helping the District stay onside with software compliance issues. At Surrey Schools, the majority of software licenses are purchased by the District, but some belong to individual schools.

“For example, at some schools, the District will own five licenses of Microsoft Office,” explains Gill, “while the school will own three.”

Such an arrangement creates added complexity for the IT department, for it is up to them to ensure the District does not run afoul of the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft (CAAST).

“CAAST has been known to levy some serious fines against institutions that do not take software license regulations seriously – and not just corporations, but school districts as well,” says Turner. “AbsoluteTrack has become a critical tool in allowing us to help the schools ensure they stay onside with software compliance, because we can look at our daily reports for verification.”

“AbsoluteTrack has been a great investment for our School District and saves us money in many ways: it helps keep us onside with software compliance regulations, thus preventing us from having to pay fines, and it has enabled us to automate processes that were labor-intensive and inefficient. I would strongly recommend AbsoluteTrack to any School District.”