Albemarle Public Schools Cuts Imaging Time in Half with Quest KACE

My name is Beth Skrobanski, and I work for Albemarle County Public Schools. It's one of the largest school districts in Central Virginia. We're a K-12 environment, and we service 20,000 KACE nodes. So we have the SMA and the SDA, and we both have them integrated to serve our staff and students. I'm on the service desk team, and I tend to look after the KACE [INAUDIBLE], the SMA, and the SDA, configuring them for deployment and for management of the systems. Before we got KACE, we had an issue with our previous versions of systems management and image deployment. We had a very old, antiquated service desk system that wasn't working well for us. But I would say our biggest problem was imaging, mass deployment of devices. In our environment, all of our students have a one-in-one laptop, so it's technically their textbook. And every summer, we have to re-image these computers with the latest operating systems and the latest software. And in our previous versions, we were running into time issues, like, how do you image 15,000 computers in a one-month window, so that you can be ready for the next school year? We have now got a single touch imaging solution. And we've probably cut our imaging time down to about 30% of what it was. Hard benefits to using KACE-- our service desk is really streamlined to where our scripting for our staff and students-- our user portal is fully populated with scripts from printers to software packages. We're able to track licensing. We're able to look at trends through the ticketing. We have student help desk set up so they have their own little deal inside each building where the students actually are able to use the software to work on computers in their individual schools. Since we got the KACE system, we've definitely seen a full return on our investment. And yeah, it will pay for itself multiple times by the time spent and the ease of producing the images and getting them onto the devices. KACE saves me time in my personal life, because I don't have to go home on my time and research a lot of stuff. We now have a fully automated, streamlined system that I can manage from home, if I need to. It's a godsend. It's made life much easier. So yes, I guess it has saved time in my personal life. I go to IT Ninja a lot. There's a lot of solutions in there. And I've just started posting some of our solutions up there that we've come up with in our division. The thing I love about KACE is the community that comes behind it. They do have time for their customers. And the support, when we've needed it, has been exceptional.