San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools gains complete visibility with KACE

Our county is mammoth. Not only is it 22,000 square miles, but we have over 412,000 students in our country, 33 school districts, over 500 schools. We deal with a system that involves so many needs in terms of the student needs, in terms of parent resources, in terms of school resources, that covers such a huge geographical area. KACE has brought some organization to San Bernardino County. We had no way prior to KACE to manage or control inventory, operating system roll outs, mass roll outs, we had to image systems individually-- it was consuming us. One of the biggest reasons that I went to go and ask for the KACE solution was that we had actually no control over our inventory. KACE has helped us to accomplish some normalcy in our day-to-day lives. We're able to identify the computers, we know the information about the computers, we know who's logging onto them, inventory and track our Macintosh computers. We know what they're running, and when questions come up about licensing or versions or upgrade options or things of this nature, we can go straight to KACE, pull it up and say OK, here's where we're dealing with. The biggest saving for us using the KACE appliance has been in keeping our staff at their desks. We have sites that are four hours away, in some cases. We're able to do a lot of the tasks that used to require driving time, which takes mileage, which takes hours away from productivity, and lets them do that work primarily from their desks. So this allows us to do the help desk management with the K1000, do deployments with the K2000. Send out scripts to those machines, as well, if you want to do unattended installation and maintenance and support. The KACE system helped us with the end of life of Windows XP. We ran inventory lists, we sent them to managers, we said by this date you guys have got to do something about these, and we were able to basically get our XP inventory out of the organization and convert it to a Windows 7 environment. The ability of the staff to do image bills now with the push of a button is just saving us tons and tons of times. For our Windows 7 migration, what was taking us about 24 hours we were able to do in 30 minutes to an hour with our KACE appliance. That in itself is one thing that I, as a manager, really, really appreciate. We have a dozen technicians that are using the KACE service desk t software now that are supporting about 2,700 end users. The reports that we generate in KACE allow me to look at an email each morning and tell me what's an open ticket, what's a critical item. Things that used to take me walking around to desks, I get my weekly report now automatically generated. The KACE 1000 appliance allows us to look at security differently, too. So we're actually able to identify malware or junkware that we don't want running in our environment. And with scripts, be able to take those software off of the machines as it comes across them. It doesn't require any of our folks to be involved in that process. We set up the identification for the software, set up the script, and as those machines check in on their own, that software's being eradicated for us in the environment. The KACE system does everything that a manager needs it to do. We were using probably seven different products to do what we're doing with the two appliances that we have with KACE. It does your inventory, it does your tracking, it helps facilitate staff. You need information about what's out there, what's on the network, what's being used-- it's one place to go to find it and get your answers.