King Edward VI School, Southampton case study

While proud of its 450 year heritage, King Edward VI School is forward looking, vibrant and dynamic. With 970 students, supported by 106 teachers, the school sustains an outstanding record of academic achievement and is amongst the top co-educational independent schools in the UK.
Technology plays a pivotal role in King Edward’s status as a learning environment in which every pupil can thrive. The school has over 500 Windows PCs on its server network and maintains a 24x7 IT operation with just five IT support staff.

“We’re about as close to the cutting-edge of education technology as we could be,” said Bob Allen, Director of Communications at King Edward’s.

The Challenge
To meet the demands of a broad curriculum, King Edward’s has approximately 300 IT applications. However, not every one is relevant to each user and the IT team wanted to avoid cluttering desktops with unnecessary applications, which would also impact the reliability of the IT infrastructure.
The IT team realised that their existing network management software would struggle to meet users’ increasing demand for access to a wider number of applications. Before this started to create frustrations for users, and increase the number of helpdesk queries to an already busy IT team, King Edward’s decided to review an alternative that would deliver a solution to meet the evolving requirements of staff and students.

Bob explained: “It was vital that we could simplify the management of our network, including network control and administration of user profiles to deliver a more personalised IT service to end-users, while assuring the reliability of the IT infrastructure.”

The Solution
RES Software partner M-Tech Systems, suggested that RES’s workspace virtualisation technology would enable King Edward’s to centrally deliver, manage and secure the key elements of a user’s computing experience, tailored to their individual needs. M-Tech therefore invited Bob and his team to review another of its customer sites at Eastbourne College, which had already streamlined its desktop, user and IT service management with RES Software.

“While we recognised that we needed a new solution, quite naturally we were a little apprehensive about moving away from a network management tool that we had used for a number of years. However, the Eastbourne team extolled the virtues of RES Software in terms of the flexibility it delivered and its high level of usability,” added Bob.

Impressed by what Eastbourne College had achieved with RES Software, King Edward’s progressed swiftly through a successful proof of concept to a full rollout that was free from end-user disruption.

“The rollout was extremely smooth. Knowing now what the RES Software can achieve, the rollout could easily have been completed within a month. However, M-Tech were happy to proceed at our pace as a three-month process made it more manageable for the IT team who still had to dedicate day-to-day support time to users.

“As far as users were concerned it was a seamless changeover and we didn’t need to alert them to the switchover from the old system as the process was so transparent,” continued Bob.

The Benefits
“RES Software has delivered precisely what we wanted, as staff and students can now reliably access the applications, documents and peripherals they need,” said Bob.

Faster performance is another welcome improvement – not just in terms of login times, but application installation speeds too. The new RES system allows most applications to be delivered to users ‘on-demand’, whatever desktop they are using and wherever they are in the school. The IT team also estimates that system access times are up to 80 per cent faster and user requests for IT support have declined dramatically.

“Not only has RES delivered a very reliable and stable user experience, it has also allowed us to give the user a degree of control over customising their desktop. Users can be confident that no matter what PC they log onto that their desktop will look the same. By delivering a consistent user experience, we are able to help both students and teachers become more effective in their work,” continued Bob.

“The comprehensive reporting tool alerts us to any potential application failures that can be resolved quickly before they become a significant issue for users. The time spent on network control of the desktop has reduced by as much as 50 per cent, which has allowed the IT team to refocus on the future development of the school’s systems,” explained James Constadine, Deputy Network Manager at King Edward’s.

Now that RES Software has proven to deliver significant flexibility and reliability in delivering a genuinely customisable user experience, while reducing IT team ‘fire-fighting’ time, Bob and his team plan to extend it out to the Junior School of 350 students and 40 staff. The school will also be introducing tablets and Macs onto the campus and, as RES has already proven its ability to support an evolving user experience, Bob expects the deployment to be straightforward.

“I’m surprised more schools aren’t using RES Software, as for schools that take a DIY-approach to network management, it would save them a lot of time and money. Overall, our experience with RES Software has definitely been a positive one,” concluded Bob.