Winter – Fall 2022

Technical Assistance for the Win Upgrade

Windows 10, Windows 7, Microsoft

135

Thea Bowman Leadership Academy – Elementary School

Thea Bowman Leadership Academy (TBLA) is a tuition-free public school located in Gary, Indiana.Thea Bowman prides itself in engaging scholars in rigorous & robust curricula and instruction, affording students a college prep curriculum, a high-quality STEM program and a plethora of dual credit course offerings.

Onboarding of laptops is one of the regular IT tasks which goes on in any company. But to have the onboarding process done smoothly and ensuring post-onboarding, device management configuration is achieved correctly is also one of the things which should be taken into consideration.

So here the main goal is to ensure to get the onboarding for the laptops done as soon as possible as it’s a huge number but ensuring all tasks are executed correctly and automated if possible.

One more thing also to be kept in mind is that making sure all the devices are protected and are compliant with CIPA which is Child Information Protection Act.

The onboarding process was started with making sure there are no physical damages on the laptops and completing the configuration till the device comes to the regular desktop interface.

We had a batch file ready to be used which was used to configure settings such as:-

• Uninstalling any free softwarespre-installed on the laptop.
• Setting the device to never sleep.
• Disabling Hibernate mode.

We completed the windows updates and hardware updates provided by the laptop vendor to make sure the device is ready and protected by the software updates as it includes security/bug fixes from the software vendor. Hardware updates ensures the internet, sound, the display, power management and other things of the devices are working fine.

Also we joined the devices to domain, and onboarded them to the remote device management portal through which we achieved things such as:-

• Installing Antivirus software
• Creating User accountsas required by the organization.
• Installing essential softwaressuch as Adobe Acrobat Reader, Java and Adobe Flash Player.
• Installing essential web browserssuch as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
• Installing softwares requested by the organizationwhich is a school here so we installed softwares used for tests(given by the students) such as NWEA and TestNav.

As the devices are onboarded to the remote device management portal of ours, the following post onboarding tasks are done:-

• Regular maintenance.Example clearing disk space if we receive a low disk space alert or checking the device when we receive a high CPU usage alert.
• Monitoring of the devices.
• Windows Patching.
• Antivirus Licenses and Regular updates.

As the device management portal automatically applies policies for the devices connected to the network, we protect the devices from intrusion or any security threat as the students might open any website and we have policies which block students from using websites which can be of a security threat. Also the devices are setup in carts and are named according to the cart numbers.

The project was always going to be completed but doing it in the right way and the right resources such as batch file to automate settings configuration and pushing out the softwares from the remote management portal does help in speeding up things when it pertains to a large number of devices.

In this way, the support engineers could complete the project faster and move on to their regular tasks and also not too much pressure for them. With regards to the school, they receive the laptops faster which they can start using for the students and the students get accustomed to the laptops.

We also ensure having CIPA compliance by having policies applied to it during the onboarding of the devices to our remote management portal.