The first school in what is now Garden City was a log cabin built sometime between 1840 and 1845. Today, the Garden City School district has approximately 600 staff and 5,500 students using 1,300 workstations. Half of the workstations are running a Windows environment, while the other half are Macintosh computers. The school district was experiencing problems with students getting into and changing the proxy settings in Internet Explorer. Students were also changing other settings and using Windows Networking to get into other machines in the building that were not secure.
The IT staff at Garden City were already using Deep Freeze to protect their systems. They now deployed WINSelect to restrict the functionality on their systems. Garden City currently has WINSelect installed on almost 100 computers in the district. The IT staff has configured the program to control their web browsers and to control where students can save files. WINSelect also lets administrators disable the right-click mouse option to prevent students from accessing restricted places on the system.
Faronics’ IT Solutions Simply Workstation Management at Garden City Public Schools
by Kelly Batke
Michigan based Garden City Public Schools were constantly experiencing problems related to students tampering and changing the proxy settings in Internet Explorer. Students were also frequently right-clicking in certain task bars or menu bars, which was difficult for administrators to control or restrict.
The school needed to invest in an IT solution to gain control over the schools workstations, and was excited to learn about Faronics WINSelect. WINSelect makes it easy to manage the functionality of computers in public access, kiosk, library, educational, and corporate environments, and empowers IT administrators with enterprise control over a workstation’s system settings. The school was also familiar with another one of Faronics’ IT solutions- Deep Freeze, a powerful system restore solution.
The two IT solutions together have returned control back to the IT staff. “WINSelect has completely taken away the day-to-day problems,” said Tim Klan, Technology Supervisor at Garden City Schools. “Partnered with Deep Freeze, it (WINSelect) relieves my tech department from having to touch the machines for anything other than hardware issues. We spend little if no time on the machines that we have this installed on.”
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