Enterprise Mobility Successes: Education – Humbolt State University

[Brad Anderson]

First published on CloudBlogs on Feb 10, 2015
Check out this very detailed new case study from Humbolt State University. The students and faculty at Humbolt account for 3,200 desktop, notebook, and tablet PC’s. That’s the easy part. The hard part is that each department at the school used its own collection of IT tools and processes. This fragmented and disjointed support system led to a lot of end-users problems. On any given day the IT teams at Humbolt would struggle with distributing security updates, publishing/installing basic apps, imaging, and an inability to ever have a clear understanding of all their PC assets and/or their health. Support calls were so long and frequent that very little time was left for projects that improved education. The solution for all of this came in the form of SCCM. Using free-upgrade option in the Enrollment for Education Solutions (EES), Humbolt centralized all of their IT functions on SCCM 2012, and later SCCM 2012 R2. The benefits were immediate. This case study goes into great depth on these eight big areas of improvement:

• Achieve Consistent Operating System and Application Deployment
• Flexibly Apply Security Updates
• Ensure Device Security
• Gain Accurate PC Inventory and Application Management
• Deliver Easy Remote Connectivity
• Improve Employee Productivity & Autonomy
• Maintain Centralized Device Control
• Free Up IT Staff Time for New Projects

Humbolt also moved from another anti-malware solution to System Center Enterprise Protection (SCEP) – which discovered 30 pieces of malware their previous solution had not found. Every IT team I know is working to address over half of the challenges listed above – it’s pretty interesting to see what Humbolt put together. Read the whole thing and get into the details of Humbolt’s deployments here .