I work for the Howard-Suamico School District in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We are a K-12 school district with about 5100 students and 600 staff members. We are HP all the way. We have HP Desktop PCs, HP laptops, HP printers, HP servers, HP IPAQs, and HP Procurve Switches and wireless access points. Read on to see how we leverage HP Client Manager to keep on top of it all.
We have seven buildings in our district; one high school, one middle school, one intermediate school, and four elementary schools with a fifth on the way. Since our district started putting in the PCs about 12 years ago, they have alway been Compaq/HPs, and we have stayed true all the way.
Some of the Problems We've Faced
With all of our HP computers, we needed an easy way to manage them. One of our biggest problems was setting BIOS updates and settings on all the computers without having to travel to each one.
We also have about 35 Microsoft 2003 servers, and needed a way to manage them.
Another problem we ran into was applying software packages to our HP client PCs, IPAQs, and laptops. Some of the major packages we needed to get out were the daylight savings patch update on all of our Windows 2000 and XP PCs, not to mention our HP IPAQs. We also needed to implement the EZ Energy Star client software to all computers to cut energy bills and allow our district to collect up to four dollars back on every PC we updated.
How we Got our Arms Around the Problem
About a half year ago we started creating a server to run HP Insight Manager to manage all of our servers. It works wonderful, but we still needed a way to manage all of our PCs, especially for BIOS updates. So about a month ago I was on this site and saw some information about HP Client Manager and started reading about it. This was exactly the type of software we had been looking for. So I downloaded the software and got a free license and installed it on a server. I have since been updating the BIOS on the PCs building by building. It was also nice having Altiris Deployment Server, because I was able to generate lists of each model with the computer name at each building, making the process of updating the BIOS that much easier.
Also, with Deployment Server, I was able to update all of our computers (Windows 2000, and Windows XP) with the Daylight Savings Patch within a couple of hours. When the Daylight Savings patch was finally released, we were not sure how to update all 1,700 of our computers. We didn't want to go to each one and run the update, and we had some problems with our WSUS server, so we didn't feel like that was an option. So after some playing around I was able to set up one job in Deployment Server with two different conditions based on the operating system of the computers to deploy the patch without user intervention. It worked great, like I said it only took a couple of hours to get all 1,700 computers up to date.
I used the same process to update all of our computers with a new EZ Energy Star client software. We decided to enroll in the Energy Star program in Wisconsin. This client software allows us to manage the power saving settings on the computers. I was able to set up a job to deploy this software without user intervention, and after only another couple of hours, was able to get our district a grant equal to four dollars for each computer in our District.
In addition we also use Deployment Server for all of our computer imaging. We have 7 different model HP computers, but with DS, I only need one Windows XP image for all of them to use.
Return on Investment
The return on investment has been huge for our district. With only three people in our IT department, Deployment Server makes imaging the computers each year a breeze, plus every hour it saves us, saves the district. By using DS to Deploy the EZ Energy Star client software, we got back four dollars per computer which means we got back $6,800 for that, plus our energy bills for the year are about another $5,000 less. Time is money, and both HP and Altiris have saved our district and the people in my department more time than I can keep track of.