Tue, 09 Feb, 2010
The entrustIT Education Desktop is a virtual IT solution for schools and colleges. It is specifically designed to address the major challenges in schools’  ICT provision:

 

1.    Providing 24x7 access to a schools ICT infrastructure

  • For both pupils and members of staff

  • Whilst at school or when working from home

2.    Increasing the PC to pupil ratio

  • Without any corresponding increase in funding 

3.    Increasing the number of ICT services

  • Without any corresponding increase in funding

  • Reducing the amount of downtime or maintenance with the associated costs and lost productivity 

The entrustIT education desktop 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 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 - 24/7/365. All they need is access to the Internet.


·         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's "Software as a Service" licensing model. This means that the school can benefit from Microsoft education discounts and pays 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 hardware maintenance whilst support is delivered by us.


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 

·         managed internet access, protecting pupils from unsavoury content and securing online communities from outside contact.

If you're looking for an innovative way to respond to the leadings of organisations like BECTA, come and talk to us about how the Education Desktop could help.