Education Desktop

There area number of factors that combine to drive a renewed focus on the provision of ICT in schools:

• ICT is now ubiquitous throughout the curriculum – this means that access to a school’s ICT infrastructure must increasingly be available 24/7 to both pupils and staff, from home as well as within school
• Pressure to increase the PC to pupil ratio – central government is pressing for improved access to ICT for each pupil but without significant additional funding
• Need to make best possible use of limited budget – much of schools existing budget is spent on preventative and remedial maintenance rather than planned provision.

The entrustIT education desktop concept directly addresses all of these issues:

• The school’s ICT services are provided from a dedicated data centre which is professionally managed, backed-up, and secured from all external threats. This means that the school no longer needs to devote resources and budget to the day to day management of ICT infrastructure – instead the school’s ICT services are available to staff and pupils from anywhere at anytime – 24/7.
• Because in-school equipment is used only to connect to the hosted service, with all processing now being done remotely, schools no longer need invest in traditional PCs – devices known as ‘thin clients’ can be used instead. These look and feel like high spec PCs, but have no internal processing capability – they simply connect to the remote service. Of course, without the internal complexity, thin clients are a fraction of the cost.
• The entrustIT desktop delivers a familiar Microsoft Windows environment and exploits Microsoft Software as a Service licensing model. This means that the school can benefit from Microsoft education discounts and pay only a fixed monthly charge based on the total number of users. Furthermore, the reduced complexity of the equipment in-school means significant saving on maintenance costs.

The entrustIT education desktop provides an infrastructure which supports a whole school on a single coherent, secure network. The solution provides:

• support for pupils, teaching staff and administration staff, including provision for remote connection with full access to the IT
• secure data management, disaster recovery and malicious threat protection
• full email server capabilities and diary management / scheduling.
• shared drives and folders and central storage of school data
• the ability to schedule meetings across multiple calendars / diaries
• management and support service releasing school staff and budget from IT management issues.
• centralised deployment, licensing and management of software