Brisbane Girls Grammar orders Windows 7 & the lot

Jenna Pitcher
Friday, 27 August 2010 11:30

IT Industry - Development

Microsoft Office 365

Brisbane Girls Grammar School (BGGS) has revealed it is one of the first Australian private education bodies to undertake a roll-out of the Windows 7, Office 2010, Exchange 2010 and Hyper-V packages across a whole organisation, telling Microsoft’s Tech.Ed conference on the Gold Coast this week that it recently upgraded its systems and some 1,150 desktop PCs and laptops.

“The system runs extremely well, and we run a devoted Microsoft platform for the different modules and systems tied together,” said the school’s IT director Nathan Pilgrim. “We’ve seen significant improvements in performance and big reductions in help desk calls as well.”

Like other Australian organisations who have discussed their Windows 7 deployments, BGGS used Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager to deploy the new operating system. “Effectively, we pushed those out with SCCM and then we layered the applications on top,” said Pilgrim. “They are just [Microsoft Installer] packaged and deployed … we run just over 200 different applications.”

“Basically they are targeted — if it is a science computer or a English computer they make it a different set of applications — so basically SSCM manages all of that.” Pilgram had considered other deployment solutions. “We looked at Altiris and we also looked at [Norton] Ghost at the time,” he said. But the organisation had already been using SCCM in its previous Systems Management Server incarnation.

Pilgrim, and his team of five deployed two versions of Windows across 1,150 machines — Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise — with over 1,300 users on the campus.