Islip School District Deploys 175 Applications with Specops

Like many school districts, Islip SD has often struggled trying to juggle the large and growing number of differing PC images that represent the various combinations of installed programs for each of its hardware platforms. This made managing software extremely difficult and time consuming for IT experts at the Long Island, NY based school district.

“Rolling out new titles either meant hundreds of manual installs, or refreshing images in order to re-image entire labs or even a whole building,” stated James F. Prudente, Islip SD’s Director of Network Operations. “We made it a priority to dramatically cut down the number of images, with a goal of eventually “push” deploying every single piece of software the district uses.”

“Islip looked at a number of options, including native group policy, before deciding to embark on a trial project with Specops. Native group policy includes basic functionality for deploying software, but it is rather limited in that it only works with MSI files and lacks the ability to easily target specific systems,” stated Prudente. “It was clear then that if we were going to accomplish our goal of pushing out all of our software, we needed a deployment product that went beyond native group policy.  Being a Microsoft shop however, it was critical that whatever solution we chose integrate tightly into our Active Directory infrastructure."

“Because Specops Deploy enables us to work with EXE installers as easy as MSIs, we are able to deploy dozens of titles that we simply could not with native Group Policy. Advanced targeting allows us to selectively install software based on a multitude of criteria, ensuring that each system gets exactly the software needed. And Deploy’s reporting capabilities let us see for certain that our installations are working as expected."

 “Even having worked with the product for several years, I continue to be impressed with its flexibility. We’ve used it to push hotfixes, install fonts, add and remove desktop icons, and more. When our anti-virus vendor released a bad virus definition that caused crashes, we were able to use Deploy to check for the bad definition, replace it with an updated one, and reboot the PC. Deploy can be used to perform virtually any task that doesn’t require user interaction.

“We recently met an important internal goal and are now pushing out all of our software – more than 175 titles and nearly 60GB of installers – to over 1300 PCs, all via Specops Deploy."

“It’s rare that a product does more than you expected when purchasing it, but that’s exactly what we’ve found with Specops Deploy,” stated Prudente. “Deploy is without question the single-most important piece of network management software we use, and we literally could not manage our network without it.”