Founded in 1851 as the first public school district in California, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is among the highest ranked in the United States. It educates over 60,000 students annually in over 160 pre-school, elementary, middle and high schools spread across the San Francisco Bay area.
Like schools and school systems across the country, SFUSD must manage electronic student records in a secure and accurate manner. To accomplish this, SFUSD developed a homegrown client-server Student Information System or SIS, consisting of a Microsoft Access-based client and SQL Server backend. To help control IT costs and ensure access to SIS, the client component was deployed on Windows Terminal Servers, which were recently upgraded from Windows NT to Windows 2003.
Data encompassing student grades, attendance, and related records are entered into SIS manually by administrative personnel in each school. Principals, guidance counselors and other authorized staff members use the system to retrieve student records and generate periodic reports. Unfortunately, getting these reports printed was often impossible.
When Lance Auman, Systems Architect and Server Operations Manager for SFUSD, first inherited the legacy system, schools in the district were forced to wait for up to a week for support due to the time and effort associated with each call. “On average, each support call meant losing an admin for a half day - between troubleshooting the issue and round-trip drive,” noted Auman. “With all the travel, this only allowed us to resolve about three calls a day – it was literally all we were doing.”
Beyond gaining control over its printing problems, SFUSD needed a more efficient way to deliver user-specific desktops to school personnel. By limiting user access to required SIS capabilities, the District could better ensure the confidentiality of student data – and reliability of its servers. As it evaluated options for enhancing server management, SFUSD seriously considered implementing Citrix MetaFrame. This option was ruled out based on the cost and complexity.
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“We were plagued with print jobs that simply crippled the functionality of
our operations. After installing
Simplify Printing, our print issues
reduced to zero, giving us time for
researching new ways of expanding
our use of terminal servers. Based on
our experience, I simply had to get in
touch with triCerat to discuss our
extreme satisfaction with both the
Simplify Printing and Simplify
Lockdown products. They have
saved us time and money, and
improved our ability to servi ce our
real clients - our students.” - Lance
Auman, Systems Architect and Server
Operations Manager, SFUSD
