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Solutions for Education
The Importance of the PC at Learning Institutions
The personal computer is more important to the learning experience at universities, colleges, and K-12 school districts than ever before.
– At K-12 school districts, not only has the PC pervaded classrooms and labs as a vital teaching tool, but PC proficiency itself has become part of today's curricula, having emerged as a vital part of preparing a student for life after school. Many of today's sophisticated K-12 classrooms come equipped with a "shared" desktop on each desk, and virtually all lab settings come pre-equipped with dedicated PCs.
– Many higher education institutions hand a notebook computer to each entering student; others offer students PCs at such deep educational discounts that acquisition is virtually guaranteed. Many of today's sophisticated university or college classrooms come equipped with shared desktops, and virtually all lab settings come pre-equipped with dedicated PCs. Also, faculty and staff depend on the PC for administration, research, and communication needs, further increasing the scope of the higher education computing environment.
All of this ensures that the PC landscape at today's school districts, colleges and universities is sizeable, diverse, and complex, supporting an extensive breadth of applications.
The Unique PC Management Challenges at Schools, Colleges and Universities
There are several challenges that arise from this increasing reliance on PCs in school districts, colleges and universities:
- The need to respond to an increase in IT support requirements, without an increase in IT support staff.
- The need to manage shared computers that have a high likelihood for unauthorized downloads, accidental malicious program installation, changes to settings, and data deletion, all of which can negatively impact other users.
- The need to manage multi-use computer labs, requiring pre- and post-class configuration changes.
- The need to manage software licenses across a user base that is highly fluid due to graduating/transferring students and semester-by-semester course changeover.
- The need, at today's higher education institutions, to support a highly mobile, distributed user group that has come to expect portability in its computing environment, possibly spanning a variety of geographic locations.
- The need to maintain some level of application version control across far-flung, "autonomous" PC users.
- The need to protect against viruses and spyware that can result from the use of multiple open Internet connections.
- The need to stay current with application offerings in order to stay competitive.
- The need to support "virtual" students working from home on unmanaged PCs.
The AppStream Solution for Schools, Universities, and Colleges
AppStream's application streaming and license management platform provides an optimal solution to serve the unique PC management needs of the education market — providing a frequently-mobile, fluid university user community with managed, guaranteed access to necessary applications from anywhere at any time — including remote campuses and shared computers — all without placing undue burden on IT staff.
AppStream enables IT staff to provision to each student the set of applications required to support that student's course-load. Students can then access the applications they need at any time. When the student logs into any computer on the network, AppStream loads the application icons that the student is permitted to access. Clicking on an application icon streams the application from a centrally-maintained application repository to the PC the student has logged in to, installing and launching the application in seconds in a process transparent to the student.
This on-demand approach to application access solves many of the unique PC management problems of the education market. AppStream enables overtaxed IT staff to:
- Do more with less, centralizing support and management at the AppStream server, which houses all application masters.
- Update and patch applications centrally with guaranteed implementation on all PCs, enabling them to stay current.
- Limit application access to only "approved" applications that are tested and accessed via the AppStream server.
- Provide on-demand application access to anyone, anywhere on the network.
- Easily manage multi-use computer labs, facilitating application access without repeated configuration.
- Effectively manage software licenses by assigning licenses to users, eliminating software piracy, guaranteeing compliance with contracts, and automating the tedious process of re-harvesting.
- Provide application access to a highly portable user community, across geographic locations.
- Guarantee consistent versioning among applications, while maintaining the flexibility to provide access to multiple versions if required.
- Secure the PC's applications through guaranteed patching.
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