Network Refresh - The Bishops Stortford College

Bishop's Stortford College is a co-educational, day and boarding school for over 900 children aged 4 to 18 years.

Migration Summary

Migrating from NT4
Steve Bacon is Head of IT at Bishop’s Stortford College. He was happy with NT4 which the College was running, but he was aware of the need to upgrade to XP Pro on the desktops as support for NT4 was coming to an end and because of the extra functionality afforded by XP Pro. He had set himself a target of one year for planning, testing, familiarisation and full implementation of Server 2003 and XP Pro.

Both Steve and Margaret (the College’s IT Technician), attended an Akhter Refresh Seminar in Peterborough with 8 other schools. They were individually convinced of the benefits of the Akhter proposal. Steve says “There was a meeting of minds. We could both see the management advantages of upgrading and the possibility of squeezing a process that we had envisaged doing ourselves over a period of a year into a matter of weeks or even days”.

“We both realised the potential of Akhter’s management tools and were particularly impressed by the fact that Jigsaw and RemInstall are NON proprietary. We were looking for tools which would work alongside Windows, complementing it rather than taking it over, in turn allowing us the autonomy of our own procedures when required”.

Huge time saving!
At BSC there are many buildings comprising individual classrooms that are all locked out of class hours. Margaret is pleased with the time Akhter has saved her: “Akhter’s solution means jobs that previously took hours and involved visiting a variety of locations, can now be done in just a few minutes from my desktop”.

And Steve is finding more time to drive the College IT facility forward; “I have spent the last year developing productivity on the network, rather than getting bogged down in day-to-day administration tasks.”

One year to 10 days! Instead of taking a year to get up and running with Server 2003, Akhter were in and out in just 10 days. The College hit the ground running after the Summer 03 break. And, with the exception of a single hard drive failure which was dealt with immediately, Akhter’s engineers have only visited to make courtesy calls when they have been passing.

And the staff and pupils are happy too!
Steve and Margaret were pleased to find a solution that made the Department more efficient and which provided staff and students with the latest, more intuitive, operating system and office tools. “Our new network has reduced management time, which in turn has allowed the Department to spend more time assisting staff and pupils to make the most of the much improved features of the new operating system”.