A recent Dell and Intel-commissioned Harris Interactive online survey of 203 US school system administrators and IT decision makers highlights the tablet management challenges faced by schools today. The results show that tablets are increasingly becoming a standard IT device (53 percent of IT decision makers surveyed have deployed them in their schools). However, other studies show some tablets can cost significantly more time and money to manage. According to the results of the Harris survey:
- Preparing tablets to work in a school’s existing infrastructure can cost more than $1,400 on average.
- These costs include time spent on tasks such as device management, password setting and resetting, enterprise domain and access configuration and policy development.
- Fifty-seven percent of education IT decision makers using tablets say there are applications currently used on their desktops and laptops that cannot be currently accessed on their tablets; 46 percent say some can only be used with limited functionality.
- Additionally, 41 percent say they have to purchase applications to mirror desktop and laptop functionality.
- 31 percent say they require additional software or tools to manage tablets.
- Fifty-nine percent of school system IT decision makers and administrators say choosing devices that integrate with their existing IT infrastructure and that can be managed by existing tools is the best way to minimize total cost of ownership for tablets.
The Dell Latitude 10 tablet was designed to overcome these challenges by facilitating management and deployment by IT. Several schools and districts are deploying the recently announced tablets. Fargo Public Schools, Spartanburg School District 3 and Westwood Independent Schools have selected the enterprise-ready Windows 8 tablets for their touch experience, reliability, security and ease of management.
“We want our students to learn the needed skills to be successful in the 21st century and we believe they must have the right devices at the ready that will help them not only consume information but also produce new projects and content,” said Bill Westrick, IT Director, Fargo Public Schools. “We chose Dell Windows 8 devices because teachers can integrate them into their existing curriculum; students can now produce information as easily as they can consume it and the Dell Latitude 10 tablets are easy for us to manage within our existing IT infrastructure.”
