Mobile Computing | News

Norfolk Public Schools Implements Mobile Device Management System

• By Leila Meyer
• 12/11/12

Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia has implemented a new system to manage more than 900 mobile devices used by the students and teachers in the district.

In May of this year, the school administrators started looking for a solution to manage the devices without taxing the district's limited IT resources. They wanted something that was easy to use, could scale easily as the district adds more devices, provided timely upgrades and updates, and offered 24/7 support.

After testing AirWatch for a few weeks, administrators decided to adopt the tool, and within a few months the IT team had installed AirWatch on the district's entire fleet of mobile devices for faculty and students. The district has been using AirWatch to monitor devices on the network, provide secure e-mail capabilities, and track mobile assets.

"With AirWatch we're able to easily manage our entire fleet and keep track of where the devices are and how they're being used," said Joakim Jader, directory service engineer for Norfolk Public Schools, in a prepared statement. "Since all of our devices are the property of the school, we need to ensure that they're being used correctly and that we can keep track of inventory. The asset tracking and reporting functions are crucial for our team to report back results and have a complete picture of our mobile investments."

AirWatch employs a multi-tenant architecture for managing hundreds of devices based on user roles, device type, or location groups. It enables administrators to maintain control of the entire device fleet while also enabling individual schools or departments to control their own devices. According to the company, a small team, or even an individual, can manage the entire mobile environment.

Norfolk Public Schools is located in Norfolk, Virginia and operates more than 45 elementary, middle, and high schools serving over 31,000 students and employing over 3,000 teachers.

Further information about AirWatch is available on the company's site.