(FRANKFORT, Ky.) – A statewide, centrally-managed technology infrastructure that brings a new standardized e-mail system for all K-12 schools in Kentucky and increases collaborative opportunities within the learning environment is being celebrated today.
One of the largest such deployments ever rolled out in the United States, e-mail systems for schools across Kentucky are now maintained by the Kentucky Department of Education, reducing costs to individual districts by standardizing hardware and software configurations and eliminating the need for districts to manage upkeep. This also will allow school districts across the state to more easily collaborate, offer new educational services and curriculum and connect teachers, learners and administrators from districts of all size.
"Ultimately it is about improving the educational opportunities," said Chuck Austin, manager of the Engineering and Architecture Services Group for the department's Office of Education Technology. "In an education organization, it is important that everyone be able to communicate easily, seamlessly and with the same kind of user experience whether they're using a work station, a laptop or a mobile device. In addition to increasing opportunities for learning and collaboration across and among all school districts in the state, the new communications system is expected to bring significant cost savings, too."
In a two-phase process, the department deployed Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange 2003 and distributed 200 Exchange servers throughout every school district in the state. The department then centralized systems management and administration to alleviate the burden on local school district personnel, while still allowing school districts to manage local user access.
The simpler systems management tools relieve local school district personnel of the burden of hardware and software configuration, servicing, patching, monitoring, security and disaster recovery and licensing concerns, while providing school districts with control over end user usage as appropriate.
"What this means for our local school districts is they can use more of their precious resources on teaching and learning," said Austin. "If each of the districts had to individually update their systems in the way we have, it would cost the school districts ten times as much for research development, testing, personnel and ongoing management."
The overhauled communications system has also helped the Department of Education address regulatory and organizational challenges, such as meeting federally mandated guidelines for protecting the privacy and security of children. "We were able to meet those requirements while keeping the system open enough to allow for collaborative efforts among all student and adult users across the state, including 600,000 students and 150,000 teachers, administrators and staff members," said John Logan, messaging and active directory architect in the Department of Education's Office of Education Technology. "This was a massive and complex undertaking, and we owe its completion to creative technical design by our technology staff and partners, cooperation from our local school districts and responsive support directly from Microsoft."
Serving 1,200 public schools within 175 school districts, the scale of the project brought unique challenges. For example, the vast majority of the system users share computers, which made the task of setting up individual e-mail profiles very difficult and cumbersome at the local level. The department worked with Microsoft to bring new functionality to Exchange 2003 that allowed users to use Online Web Access as their main e-mail client.
"In addition, the Microsoft solutions can follow the students, teachers and employees as they move through the education system, allowing for consistent and predictable management of accounts from an administrative perspective," said Whitney Roberts, principal consultant and lead solutions architect for Kizan Technology.
"Microsoft is committed to helping education organizations like the Kentucky Department of Education address administrative challenges in a way that also benefits the end users, especially the learners and educators," said Anthony Salcito, general manager of Microsoft U.S. Education. "We congratulate the Kentucky Department of Education for showing tremendous technology innovation by taking on this massive public sector challenge, diving deep into the complex technical and organizational issues, and using architectural and solutions leadership to put together the product features and functionality the department needed to optimize opportunities for local school districts, their administrators, teachers and students."
##