Are you ready to support mandated BYOD devices at your campus, business or organization?
I know that many schools in the USA are moving forward on their computer initiatives and requiring students to bring their own laptop computer devices to school everyday. (Bring Your Own Device – BYOD).
My daughter’s high school is now requiring the entire school of over 2,000 students to bring an 11 inch laptop-type device that can last 6 hours on a charge to school – everyday! The school has also obtained about 1000 Chromebooks to loan to those who do not have their own device.
You thought supporting those multiple computer labs of 40 well-defined desktop computers was difficult! I’m not quite sure if they have carefully thought out the support policies and bandwidth requirements for this new mandate this fall.
Web+Center to the rescue for a school with mandated BYOD!
Web+Center has a set of tools to manage the new BYOD chaos with:
- Trouble ticket support – Web+Center Trouble ticketing tracking system can be set up for students as well as campus staff to create, submit, update support tickets. Web+Center supports Active Directory and many schools now have student AD accounts that can be used to access their ticketing systems.
- Efficient asset tracking – With over 1000 identical-looking Chromebooks, and an extra 1000+ laptop devices on this high school campus, an asset tracking system needs to be in place to quickly solve lost, stolen, broken, replacement, and support issues for student devices. Just solid accounting of assets in Web+Center of who owns what device might help defray some of the potential theft issues that are certainly going to happen on a high school campus.
- Student FAQ portal with mobile device support – The support of 2000+ new devices for students and staff is huge. If a large percentage of those questions can be handle by FAQ articles and links, students and staff will be able to better weather this initial start-up phase of increased devices. Students being the digital natives and smart phone users they are will also love the new Web+Center Customer+Mobile app to get FAQ answers and create/submit/update their support tickets via their smart phones and tablets.
- My dog ate my research paper! – Now there will be a host of technologies challenges that will certainly provide valid and invalid excuses for students and teachers. The IT support bar must be raised to provide support for student computers using technology based curriculum that requires 100 percent up time. Tracking assets, support, repair issues allows tech challenges to be documented providing accountability and less finger pointing.
- Tech to Computer Ratio – I often survey businesses and schools to get a general idea of the ratio of support technicians to the number of users or number of computers. A well run business or organization is maybe 100-200 to 1 technician or better. A school might be in the range of 200-400 computers/tech. With this new BYOD model, I don’t think the district has hired 10 or even 5 more techs to support this initiative for 2000+ students if they will be supporting the devices in and out of the classroom. The Web+Center ticketing system with it’s time spent reporting features may quickly show the technicans workload that can help support more support resources. If you are an IT director and want to show your school board the desperate need for more tech resources, Web+Center is a just the tool to make those discoveries.
- Setting Technology Policy – If support issues go through a centralized help desk, one might have a easier time setting policy on what is support/repaired and what is not. The support policies for this big of an initiative must be clearly defined at the beginning that separates the students’ liabilities and the schools’ resources.
Conclusions: It is easy for those wishing to move technology ahead in the classroom to not fully understand the support implications. A well-configured ticketing help desk can go a long way to control the first year chaos and issues. Feel free to contact us directly if you have some immediate needs to install and or configure a help desk for your campus or business.