Following the outbreak of Covid-19, the university had to work out how the students could get remote access to specialised software from home. Buying several hundred licences was not an option. For the last 10 years or so they had been using MyPC software in their computer labs where students could book a computer in different locations, rooms or by resource type. Keeping that in mind they started brainstorming. They looked at MyPC and combined with in-house components, managed to come up with a solution.
To ensure students had a good learning experience they needed a lot of support from ITS, the time difference of 11-hours between the two countries did not help.
However, it turned out to be a great experience knowing how the other side of the world lived, we exchanged recipes for additional tech info and both had one goal, getting AUT on the path to success. After much testing and ironing out any niggling issues a solution was found that would work for them.
"Excellent Customer Service"
“We made contact with MyPC’s sales team who showed us a lot of consideration to tide us over the COVID-19 period, offering us a discount that left no scope for bargaining.
They also offered us extended help for their professional services at no cost for a certain period. Of course, we did not tell them that the number of tickets we had raised to their technical team far exceeded that offer.
I cannot thank Jeremy, Bob and the whole team at ITS on making things happen for us. If there was an award for best customer service, they would be second in line, the first being the AUT Student Support Team!"
Sunita Taneja, ICT Service Delivery Manager
MyPC and AUT - A quick summary:
- ICT needed to find a solution for students to access specialised software and to provide online options for their courses for both Mac and PC.
- ICT leveraged the existing MyPC platform to book on campus PCs into an online booking system to create the online environment.
- Integrations between MyPC and the in-house developed components allowed students to ‘dial in’ from home and remote control AUT lab PCs.
- ICT then negotiated additional licences with the vendor at the special price.
- ICT negotiated a Covid-19 price for 6 months.
- Multiple areas in ICT worked towards this goal.
- 3 campuses are enabled - 90 rooms in total configured with 26 rooms/labs restricted to accommodate for specific academic/software requirements.
- Active Directory groups were created to ensure a specific cohort of students were given the correct access to rooms/labs for their software needs.
- Approximately 2000 PCs and 140 Macs are now part of the online/remote access solution.
- Phase 2 of the project was to get Academic Staff to enable a staff booking portal to book lectern PCs/Macs to do Synchronised teaching.
