Uckfield Community Technology College

Uckfield Community Technology College originally had a Fat Client network but realised the tremendous potential of Thin Clients for saving them time and money while maintaining and improving quality of service.

It doesn’t do well to dwell on what horrors can occur but a few hints will give an idea of the truth: After the installation of their Thin Client network in August 02 nothing worked properly; they were getting up to 20 problems per day from their 240 machines; in one year they had over 40 engineer visits to correct problems which mostly weren’t corrected.

In the words of the College’s Geoff Evans: “We had an ageing stock of PCs and we knew that Thin Clients were the way to go, we wanted staff and kids to be able to log-on from home and we wanted to cut-down on our technician support time which on a network our size was a real cost issue. But it was a disaster.

“We had gone to BETT ‘03 and wandered around, then on the way out I spotted a stand that was obviously doing Thin Client networks. We went over to them to have a real go at them, to tell them that it just didn’t work.

“The stand was Surftec’s and they showed us something we’d never seen before: A Thin Client network that was working properly. I saw someone log-on to a network in a school 100 miles away and start running software on that machine.

“It took a lot of thinking and negotiation but eventually we managed to ditch our initial supplier and brought in Surftec. Two of their staff spent just five days at the school fixing all the hardware problems — the first company hadn’t installed what they were supposed to, and had failed to spot stupid hardware errors — and then fix all the software configurations so that it was appropriate to a school not a business.

“So here’s the bottom line: Since August 03 we have had no downtime. None. In fact Surftec haven’t even come to the school since then, they’ve managed the whole system remotely. It works the way I knew it was supposed to from the beginning and I’ve stopped banging my head against the wall.”

Neil Farnham-Smith says about the Uckfield experience: “The company who installed the college’s Thin Clients were a business installer and didn’t understand the requirements of education, their contractors also made installation errors.

“One of the key areas was performance; in the first instance the servers had not been supplied as specified but were installed anyway. Secondly the 1Gigabit/second switch in the main server cabinet was linked by a 10Megabit/second link to the school network. That’s 100 times too slow and they were connecting 240 computers to that.”

Now everything is resolved and the college is able to look ahead to what additional things they can do with their network instead of just worrying about when the next problem is going to arrive.