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San Francisco Unified School District

Tricerat worked with SFUSD to resolve their print management and security issues. With over 60,000 students to educate, it was essential that the school district found a solution that met their needs.

Specs

60,000 students
160 schools
Windows Terminal Servers SQL Server back-end

Benefits

More secure environment
Better end user experience
Reduced support effort and cost
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The Situation

Similar to 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 (SIS), consisting of a Microsoft Access-based client and SQL Server back-end. To help control IT costs and ensure access to the SIS, the client component was deployed on Windows Terminal Servers.

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The Challenge

Student grades, attendance, and related records are entered into the 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 to print was often impossible before installing ScrewDrivers®. When the 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 the Systems Architect. “With all the travel, this only allowed us to resolve about three calls a day it was literally all we were doing.”

Along with gaining control over 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 considered implementing Citrix Meta- Frame. This option was ruled out based on the cost and complexity.

Problem Solved

I much prefer the ‘just works’ of ScrewDrivers
Systems Architect
We were plagued with print jobs that simply crippled the functionality of our operations. After installing ScrewDrivers, our printing issues reduced to zero, giving us time for researching new ways of expanding our use of Terminal Servers.
Systems Architect and Server Operations Manager

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