Finding my school district: School District Locator | Texas Education Agency
School district in Georgia phases out OpenOffice.org for 20,000 computers
Open source software
SW
free software
Soft
|
Share
In 2008, due to the economic crisis, the leadership of the Forsyth County Department of Education, located in the state of Georgia near Atlanta, decided to replace the Microsoft Office suite with OpenOffice.org on 20,000 computers. Prior to this, the district’s schools used Microsoft Office 2003.
However, during the migration, users encountered a lot of compatibility issues that did not appear during the pilot project. “Students, faculty, management and support staff on the [school district] board—from financial analysts to bus schedulers—have spent time and effort trying to adapt OpenOffice. org to meet our needs,” says Bailey Mitchell , CIO of the Forsyth County Department of Education.
Compatibility issues were particularly acute, according to Bailey Mitchell, when “performing business analysis using data from the Student Records Information System, opening data sent in from the State Department of Education and other government agencies, or performing almost all file related tasks. in HTML or XLS formats”.
Ultimately, the school district made the decision to move the computers to Microsoft Office 2007 and upgrade when the new version of Office 2010 was released. The reverse migration was performed on all 20,000 computers installed in 35 schools and administrative offices of the school district. “When using OpenOffice, we had to spend 10-12 hours training each employee, and they still ran into problems,” says Bailey Mitchell. “After returning to Microsoft Office, no one stated the need for any formal training.”
Vadim Glushchenko, Competence Center for Global IT Cooperation: It’s time for countries to defend their digital sovereignty
Internet
As a result of migration, there has been a particularly significant increase in productivity for employees involved in accounting, financial planning and human resources.
They often use spreadsheets in their daily work. “Office Excel 2007 is a great product,” says Sue Darison (Sue Derison), Director of Information Systems, Forsyth County Division of Education. “Because we no longer have to deal with OpenOffice incompatibility issues, importing, exporting, and analyzing data is now a third faster. Moreover, since sorting, formatting, creating tables and graphs in Office 2007 is more functional and convenient than in previous versions, my personal productivity has increased by 50 percent,” says Sue Darison.
In addition to Microsoft Office, the District plans to use Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Live@Edu, a communications and collaboration product, to enable schools to take full advantage of the SaaS education model. “We’re going to use the rich media editing capabilities available in Office 2010 as we move forward from textbooks to a predominantly online environment,” said Bailey Mitchell.
- Free Photoshop: The Best Online Photo Editing Software
Egor Grebnev
Bainbridge Island (USA) School District
Bainbridge: Key Customer Success Data
24/7 remote monitoring anywhere, anytime
Central location to access performance data
Reduce troubleshooting time from multiple hours to several minutes
Task
・ The Bainbridge Island School District is facing a problem monitoring a complex network: a central data center and 35 data centers for 9 schools and 11 facilities doing everything possible to safely return the equipment to the network”
・ Limited resources made monitoring and response even more difficult
Solution
EcoStruxure™ Connectivity and Efficiency
Apps, Analytics and Services: EcoStruxure IT App (formerly Mobile Insights), EcoStruxure Asset Advisor (formerly Remote Management Service)
Edge Control: EcoStruxure IT Management Solution cloud-based data center infrastructure (DCIM)
Connected products: UPS, racks, and PDUs
any time.
• A 24/7 cloud monitoring app provides troubleshooting capabilities, reduces mean time to repair, and saves you worry.
results
• EcoStruxure IT offers comprehensive information for complex hybrid IT environments. Through continuous remote monitoring, fast troubleshooting and data analysis, staff have full visibility and access to relevant and up-to-date information delivered directly to their smartphones.
• IT and administrative staff can now work with peace of mind knowing that Schneider Electric service experts are monitoring the situation around the clock and monitoring the data center.
• With real-time data, Schneider Electric’s service department can successfully troubleshoot and, if necessary, supervise, significantly reducing the mean time to repair.
• Downtime for troubleshooting has been reduced from hours to minutes.
Alan Silcott, Bainbridge Island School District Network Director (USA)
Customer Story
“All this makes my life much easier, both at work and outside of work.
“Thanks to this solution, I can spend less time in the office. When a storm rolls in, it only takes me a minute to connect to the system from my smartphone and take the necessary actions, whereas before I had to spend a lot of time setting up a laptop and dial-up networking. It allows me to spend more time with my family.”
Read full story
Find out more about our solutions
Learn about the benefits of cloud-based data center infrastructure management
Learn about EcoStruxure IT
Learn why IDC calls EcoStruxure IT a “transformative platform”
Discover innovative data center design solutions
Check out more success stories
That’s not all. We have many stories of successful business in store.
Discover EcoStruxture
Learn how to succeed in your business.
Innovation Summits
Read the latest news from the Innovation Summits and find out about the next event.