Standard Operating Environment Gives New South Wales Schools a Competitive Edge

Overview

The New South Wales Department of Education and Training provides educational services to 1.2 million students at 2,600 schools and Technical And Further Education (TAFE) colleges across the state. It manages a fleet of around 160,000 desktop PCs that comprises many different models from a variety of vendors. This makes maintaining a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) difficult because the Department needs to build and constantly update more than 100 separate images. The Department ran a proof of concept project using Microsoft Windows Vista on desktop PCs at a selected Sydney high school. This pilot project demonstrated the savings the Department could achieve by slashing the number of SOE images it needed to maintain and reducing the management and support effort required.