References
"Overall, we are very satisfied with the baramundi solution."
Nordakademie
Reference
The Nordakademie Hochschule der Wirtschaft is a private, state-recognized university of applied sciences. The students cooperate with corporate partners at the Elmshorn and Hamburg locations to solve problems from the real world. The aim of the academy is to make teaching and research as market- and application-oriented as possible, so that students are prepared for their future professional life in accordance with the principle of "Lifelong Learning". A total of 3,000 students are enrolled there, who are supervised by approximately 100 lecturers and 120 employees.
The IT of the educational institution at the two locations is managed by a team of three employees and one trainee. The system administrator in-charge, Jan-Hendrick Singer and his team take care of 200 end devices – mostly Dell and Lenovo notebooks or Microsoft Surface with Windows 10 – 30 of which are located in Hamburg. The University of Applied Sciences relies almost exclusively on mobile workstations. The notebooks, which are only switched on every few weeks in the classroom by students, represent a major challenge. "6 years ago, IT realized that we needed a central management solution to manage these devices. The effort to manage devices individually over their entire life cycle had simply become too time-consuming.”
The solution in the pandemic: baramundi
In its search for an appropriate solution, the University of Applied Sciences soon found what it was looking for: The baramundi Management Suite (bMS) offered the right profile for the institute's needs as centralized Unified Endpoint Management. This decision now paid off substantially in the wake of the Corona Pandemic 2020: "We had to set up a large number of home workstations in a very short time. For us, the challenge here is that the users operate their devices outside the network and often even travel in unsecured WiFis.
Furthermore, it is impossible to predict if and when they will connect their devices to the university network via VPN. baramundi offers an elegant solution for this. With the baramundi gateway, we can securely administer all devices outside the network via an encrypted connection without the user having to start a VPN connection himself," says Singer.
The baramundi support team has proven to be super-fast and competent. Thanks to this support, it is no problem for our small team to implement projects of this size at short notice. In particular, the on-site training sessions at baramundi in Augsburg have paid off for me in the long term. I can only recommend the 5-day basic course to everyone.
Jan-Hendrick Singer, System Administrator at Nordakademie
Effective for routine tasks and special projects
The team has been using the bMS for all key IT application areas since its introduction in 2014. For example, the bMS has supported the team in the migration from Windows 7 to Windows 10, as well as in the timely distribution of the latest Windows release upgrades. In addition to these larger projects, the team automated the distribution of patches and software with baramundi Patch Management, Managed Software, OS Install and Deploy, as well as the management of mobile devices with baramundi Mobile Device Management.
Conclusion
"Overall, we are very satisfied with the baramundi solution. Especially now, in the acutely difficult situation with Corona, the tools for remote maintenance and support of home offices are worth their weight in gold. The simple, automatable distribution of applications to the sometimes highly specialized equipment of our instructors would hardly be possible without baramundi. Automation Studio in particular is a great help to us when it comes to implementing complicated setups on a large scale. For schools and universities like ours, the bMS is an invaluable tool for this very reason."
