Preparation and teaching methods are the keys to digital transformation in the public schools

It’s one thing to roll out computers to a bunch of kids. How to maintain them on a day-to-day basis is a different animal altogether: The pupils bring the PCs home with them. And from home they need access to exactly the same functionality and programs they have available to them at school. This is particularly important when everyone needs to work from home for long periods of time. The challenge is handled with Office365 and the cloud-based printer software from Printix, making it possible to print from remote. Prints are then ready and waiting to be picked up at the school. 

“But the PCs need to be maintained, of course. And our concern was: Eventually, the devices will start clogging up, and we will need to run diagnostics to find out why. And then what? How do we do that? To solve it, we have decided that if there are problems with a device, it can simply be reset by the pupil,” says Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen. So, no matter where you are, you can ‘do-service-yourself’. So far, there have been no issues – no users have needed to reset their device.

“Vallensbaek Municipality as an organization is based on dialogue and closeness. This means that we quickly hear about it through the grapevine, if something’s not working  —  from either pupils, teachers, management or parents. Basically, we would know, if something’s not working. Everyone seems happy, and the feedback we received on the roll-out itself was very positive,” Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen concludes with satisfaction.

Vallensbaek has bought Lenovo machines. Because of the Corona pandemic, the roll-out of the new machines was postponed until September 2020 — and the pay-off for the delay was that the children got the very latest models.

Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen conferred with consultants from CTGlobal to identify the best approach to both roll-out and on-going operations. CTGlobal have implemented several technology solutions throughout the municipality, and as a result have a good understanding of both the infrastructure and the internal IT competencies. Together, they decided that Autopilot and Intune would be the best tools for the roll-out.

“We’ve been using Intune for many years, but only for our mobile devices. We wanted to apply the Apple roll-out method in our Windows world, and that’s when CTGlobal told us about Autopilot. Every school was receiving between 400 and 550 devices – the largest school, with 550 devices, we rolled out in a single day, thanks to Autopilot. And all 2,500 devices were rolled out in just three days – including the unboxing, which incidentally generated 19 pallets of cardboard!”, says Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen.

The roll-out itself went quickly, primarily because the IT team had prepared diligently, and had spent a lot of time on e.g. trimming the set-up.

“Of course, a lot of the things we’ve been used to being able to do via group policies and SCCM, are not possible, more difficult, or need to be done in a different way, in Intune. So, it’s been an exciting journey, but also challenging and time consuming, to achieve a result we are happy with,” says Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen. 

CTGlobal’s Kent Agerlund, who was advisor to Vallensbaek Municipality, describes how the requirements to the roll-out of the computers, and the fact that they would be used by pupils both at school and at home, exposed a number of the limitations of traditional PC operations: 

“The pupils’ PCs aren’t tied to specific networks, and are not connected behind the organizations firewall. They are connected via the internet, and must therefore be managed through the internet. With Microsoft Intune – or Microsoft Endpoint Manager, as it has been renamed – Vallensbaek achieves precisely the flexibility they need in their administration of the machines, without compromising on data security, or the pupils’ user experience on the individual devices,” says Kent Agerlund, co-founder and partner at CTGlobal.