Background
Spartanburg County School District #3 is located in Northwest South Carolina, and is comprised of seven schools; four elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school. There are approximately 3,500 students and 500 teachers and staff.

Spartanburg School District #3 has been using a Microsoft based network for the past seven years, and is one of the few districts in the state that is totally Microsoft Active Directory based. The District has most recently upgraded their technology and migrated 30 servers to Windows 2003 and 1,300 workstations to Windows XP with approximately 200 network printers that need to be managed by an IT staff of only two!

Business Challenge

Streamlining Processes
The school district had long been trying to provide the students and teachers with an environment that would allow the most usage of their network, and yet be manageable by a staff of two. Unfortunately, this required a considerable amount of manual setup and complicated scripts to meet these goals.

Identity Crisis?
Spartanburg was struggling with the issue of students having to remember a large number of application logon names and passwords. Students would attempt to log onto different applications which required the teacher to assist in a one-on-one basis causing a delay in the class start time. In addition, there were other network management issues that students and staff were dealing with such as such as printer connections and application publishing.

Spartanburg needed to focus how they could best utilize the features that were available to them in Microsoft Active Directory. The problem of not taking full advantage of the built-in terminal services support, publishing shortcuts/icons to their users and managing the usage of network printers, were forcing them to rely on scripts and manual configuration to accomplish standard tasks.

The IT staff, teachers and students needed assurance that they would have convenient and immediate access to the information and applications they needed without the hassle of managing dozens of user ID's and passwords. Equally important, the solution needed to enhance network security by creating a common security infrastructure.

The Solution = Simple Sign-On

Benefits for teachers and students:
Teachers and students can now simply run the existing application without having to remember a complicated logon sequence or learn a new application. Students now simply click the application icon and start their work with no downtime during class.

Benefits for Support Staff:
Simple Sign-On immediately eliminated password reset calls. Scripting and manual configuration for the network was virtually eliminated—connection management was streamlined. The Version3 Simple Sign-On application required very little training for immediate implementation.

Benefits for the School District:
Teacher and students spend more time on key class instruction, security was enhanced since the students were no longer writing their application names and passwords in random locations. A substantial reduction in cost was realized by eliminating the need to reset forgotten or expired passwords.