Brainerd Public School District of Minnesota is one of the largest school districts in the area. Nearly 7300 students and 1000 faculty and staff members comprise their thirteen schools. As with most public educational facilities, budget cuts constantly create setbacks with technology, affecting Quality of Service (QoS) delivered to teachers and students.
Brainerd initially operated 2 different networks of Macs and PCs. With only 4 technicians for the whole district, Brainerd constantly faced difficulties supporting a large network and at the same time keeping Total Cost of Operation (TCO) down. There simply wasn't enough time to physically touch and update every single machine and help all users. Additionally, the district covers nearly thirty miles and driving across town to fix a printer is costly and time consuming.
In response to the school's growing technological needs, Brainerd rolled out a Terminal Server 2000 lab. Students have access to a standardized curriculum dispersed through TS. MS 2003 Office is the main productivity suite while other curriculum is predominantly web-based apps. They standardized on having 1 mandatory profile and have everyone login the same way.
Citrix was also initially deployed for 80 secretaries that used a financial and student management application. “With 80 clients at $40 a client per year, we were looking at nearly $3200 a year alone on Citrix. And that was only for the administrative staff!” said Pam Dyson, Director of Media Technology of Brainerd Public School District.
Although this was a step in the right direction, the team realized they needed another management system if they were to move forward with TS. “Terminal Services alone is very frustrating. Load balancing 16 servers, re-initializing printers every time people login, and losing users’ favorites are among many daily issues” said Dyson. "We also didn't want to use roaming profiles because of all the issues associated with it."
“Once I saw the differences and changes that had been made between Terminal Server 2000 and 2003, I knew that an application like triCerat would be the icing on the cake for us. Adding triCerat was going to help us do exactly what we needed.”
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“With budget cuts the way
