St Catherine’s School Sydney delivered new tech to students just three weeks before school started using SureDeploy

The Challenge

Time for a major hardware refresh

A future-focused school, St Catherine’s prides itself on providing a high-quality technology experience for its students. Having reliable, quality devices is essential in supporting students’ learning while at school, as well as equipping them with the skills they need to thrive in their future careers.

St Catherine’s approach to device leasing and management had grown organically, in line with the needs of students and staff. However, maintaining the optimal operation and security of 1,500+ devices had become overwhelming for the school’s internal ICT team. New devices would take around six to eight weeks to provision and deploy, and IT resources were tied up with ongoing maintenance.

The school sought Microsoft’s advice on the most suitable technology and partner to assist in this scenario, and were referred to CNS's SureDeploy.

The Solution

In keeping with the school’s focus on innovation, St Catherine’s ICT team wanted to roll-out brand new devices for their Year 5 and Year 7 students, deciding to wait until the Microsoft Surface Pro 8 Laptop series became available in Australia.

Unfortunately, this occurred just a few weeks before the start of the school year. With SureDeploy, however, the team were able to make it happen, rolling-out the new devices to the entire cohort, in three weeks that would have been impossible without SureDeploy’s automation of Intune.

A new device management strategy was established, structured around the needs of different year groups. From Kindergarten to Year 4, students use Surface devices which remain on campus . When a student reaches Year 5, they are provided with a brand new Surface Laptop which they can take home and treat as their own. This device is refreshed when the student reaches Year 7. Students in Years 10-12 are permitted to bring their own laptops.

The Results

Moving to SureDepoy delivered several significant benefits for St Catherine’s.

Devices can now be deployed faster and without excessive burden on the ICT team, who are now free to focus on other areas of the school’s technology.

Security patches can be scheduled, deployed to a pilot group and then pushed to the wider student groups. The school’s ICT team can rest easy knowing security vulnerabilities are constantly monitored and resolved. This applies not only to Windows devices, but for all of the school’s applications.

SureDeploy keeps every single application in the school’s Intune environment and endpoints up to date, by automatically pushing the latest applications into Intune and to our devices for us – ensuring all student devices are always running the latest version of every learning applications.

If a problem with a device does occur, it can simply be replaced by a new device, without the student losing any of their cloud-based files or settings.

This has reduced the workload on St Catherine’s help desk significantly, and allowed the team to focus on more strategic improvement initiatives.

Image credits:
Images sourced from St Catherine's School website and YouTube channel.

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