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Monterey County Office of Ed Shifts Tech Service to Kaseya Platform

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/03/11

The Monterey County Office of Education has deployed a new service desk system to help users reach tech support staff and communicate their needs. The California-based operation provides business, financial, professional development, and technology services to the 24 school districts in the county.

The Kaseya Education IT Automation Framework was selected during an evaluation of other vendors, including LANDesk Software, EMC, Dell KACE, and Symantec. The program includes functionality for managing IT assets in complex Microsoft-heavy infrastructures from a single, remote interface (though it offers agents for managing machines running other operating systems). It integrates both service and infrastructure management capabilities. A virtual "system administrator" offers real-time web-based IT task and process management. The software handles monitoring, patch management, backups, security, and auditing functions.

"Right away, I knew Kaseya was a better fit than others, and better matched our needs," said Network Administrator Alex Zheng. "Not only was it agent-based, mitigating the firewall issue, it also supported Macs and was at a price point we felt comfortable with."

Previously, the Office of Education relied on sneaker-net with techs driving around the 4,000-square-mile county to deliver support to 900 systems. With the deployment of Kaseya, the Office of Education now has the ability to remotely maintain its dispersed systems through a Web-based dashboard.

"We like the commitment Kaseya has made toward solving common problems for K-12 school districts," said Scott Sexsmith, executive director of technology services.