The Alpha School District (AASD)* serves a growing community of nearly 50,000 residents just north of a major metropolitan area. To meet the needs of an ever expanding curriculum, the district has placed a strong emphasis on technology to enable a quality teaching environment The IT staff is responsible for every computer, application, and user across 8 campuses. However, maintaining and managing all of this technology proved to be a challenge, especially considering the time needed to keep the over 1400 workstations running and up to date with the applications the teachers required. In order to best manage this system, the Director of Technology for AASD implemented a plan to utilize a server-centric, or thin-client computing model. “Standardization, centralization of hardware and software, as well as usability by our staff was what our District needed. In looking for a solution, I first found Citrix, which in turn led me to ACS.” ACS understood not just the technology but also the other inherent k-12 hurdles and had built bridges in other school districts across the same obstacles that AASD faced. ACS utilized the IDS-Links solution to centralize the distribution of such educational applications as SchoolMax, Accelerated Reader, Star Math, Star Reader, and the MS Office suite. This system was available for any workstation – Mac, PC, or Linux – that had the ability to access the internet through a typical web browser. ACS also provided the tools to manage the functionality of the districts network and allow it to maintain maximum uptime and usability by staff without increase the number of IT technicians employed by the district. The majority of the implementation took less than two weeks and afterward the school started up for the year. At this point, ACS assumed complete responsibility for the IDS-Links solution at the district and the performance of the applications delivered by it. The Technology Director summed up the partnership between AASD and ACS by saying, “We are now centralized and standardized. It was a smooth and easy implementation. Our teachers are excited about the portability that they now have with all of the applications and documents; whether moving from classroom to classroom, or accessing it all from home. We are excited about the fact that we chose ACS as the company to work with.” AASD is a fictitious name, but references are available and may be supplied upon request | 
