When Buffalo City Schools decided to investigate desktop virtualization for its 59 schools, administrators had several goals in mind. These goals included reliability, off-site access to applications and files, electronic assignment ability, secure remote access and saving technology dollars.

And when Buffalo completed a 90-day pilot study this past school year using HP SchoolCloud powered by LaunchPad virtualization solution, the pilot achieved all of the district’s goals for their new virtualized environment.

“The students were able to work on projects both here at school and at home. Compatibility issues are no longer a problem," said a Buffalo City School teacher who participated in the study.  "I was also able to modify work at home, which students could then access at home."

Deployed in conjunction with low-cost thin client devices, HP SchoolCloud will be rolled out in a phased approach in all 59 of their schools, eventually becoming available to over 33,000 students.

ClassLink LaunchPad is the centralized point of access where teachers and students login to see a customized, dynamic desktop from which all applications can be accessed from any computing device in the school, community or home. LaunchPad allows the district’s IT staff to perform all maintenance in one central location.

“Implementing our virtualized environment with ClassLink has been a great experience,” said Dan Marmion, CTO, Buffalo City Schools, NY. “Not only will this help ease the workload for my IT staff, but more importantly our teachers and students will now have more access to high-tech resources right in their classrooms. This environment will most certainly have a strong positive effect on teaching and learning.”