Her team includes two additional full-time professionals who support all 9 locations of the library system. The IT department is centrally located at the Lawrence Headquarters Branch. Across the 9 locations, Nawrocik and her team manage 160 PCs for the 180 staff, 100 public PCs, and 50 PCs for classrooms.
Prior to using Deploy, the Mercer County Library relied on 1-2 designated employees at each branch to help troubleshoot devices in their individual locations. Branch liaisons were essential for everything from keeping PCs up to date to day-to-day troubleshooting. “Using liaisons at the branches was sometimes troublesome,” said Nawrocik.
To manage tasks like Windows updates, Mercer County Library had a dedicated Windows update server. However, it was often difficult to manage on a network of their size and was limited to staff PC updates. In addition, other common software patches could not be pushed out using the Windows server and required a more hands-on approach. Nawrocik and her team tried various free tools to manage some of these updates, but the results were hit and miss.
Head of Information Technology, Mercer County Library
“Some branches would be up-to-date with security patches and application updates, but many others remained outdated,” said Nawrocik.
In some instances, delayed updates directly impacted the services available to the community. Some of the applications and databases in use at the Mercer County Library require specific plugins to be installed and running the most current version to work. Patrons would not be able to access information using these apps and databases if updates weren’t installed in a timely way.
“Deploy became invaluable to us during the pandemic because we were able to quickly onboard all our staff PCs,” said Nawrocik. “When we were able to have a few people in a branch we would instruct them to turn on the staff computers and we could let Deploy do what it needed to do.” The latest version of Deploy is even more convenient and can be used to wake up the computers, bypassing the need to have someone turn them on.
Remote access into the devices helped the team manage any settings changes or troubleshooting that was required. Also, the branches were on an Active Directory domain which meant that after being inactive for more than 30 days, the PCs lost their security certificate. Remote access was an important part of reinstating those certificates for devices as staff were able to return to the branches. “We use the remote access to go on and reconnect to the domain, make sure every PC was properly connected, and give everyone access to shared resources.” Because the staff PCs are brand new, the team has yet to use Deploy’s OS imaging functionality, but they are looking at it for the future.
Head of Information Technology, Mercer County Library
They now push out updates and patches without involving other staff. Many of the smaller, day-to-day tasks that previously required someone in the department to drive 40 minutes to another branch can now be resolved using remote access tools.
Mercer County Library also recently rolled out new staff PCs and used Deploy to manage the installation and updates to Windows and basic software. Deploy is set to install updates to all devices attached to the library’s Active Directory. So, Nawrocik and her team could take the PCs out of the box, add them to the Active Directory, and all updates and software would be installed automatically through Deploy.
“Once a PC is on our Active Directory, Deploy can do it’s inventory and install the programs that need to be installed.”
Moving from the demo to the paid version of Deploy was a seamless process and they were able to leverage everything they’d set up during the trial period. Nawrocik’s team required approximately a day to get all their computers set up and connected to the Deploy console.
Head of Information Technology, Mercer County Library
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