HP Saves the Day with Wireless

A big problem we have been running into is how to implement wireless in our buildings. Our school district is considered to be one of the better districts in Wisconsin when it comes to technology. One of the goals of the district is to become a world class school district, yet we do not have wireless implemented in any of our seven buildings.

At the beginning of last year I started gathering information from principles, librarians, and teachers about a need for implementing a wireless infrastructure at each building. The response was that there was definitely a need for it. Now I had to start researching to best way to implement, not to mention what type of access points to use, and how to manage a wireless environment quickly and easily.

Your Solution:

After working with one of our support companies, we decided to start doing wireless studies at each building.

First, we notified the staff in each building and asked if they wanted a wireless study done. Everyone said yes, so we started with our smallest elementary school. We then went to our district office. After the study we knew exactly how many wireless access points to place at each location and exactly where they should go.

Next, we had to look at what kind of wireless access points to get. We looked at a couple of different brands, but again decided that we would get the most for our money from HP. We also decided to go with HP for our wireless access points, because we knew that if we got some HP ProCurve 2600 Switches we could do power-over-Ethernet. Plus, by getting an HP ProCurve wireless Edge card for our ProCurve switches, we could use ProCurve Manager and have one central management tool for all of our buildings and wireless access points.

The wireless access points we ordered were just basic radio ports. With ProCurve Manager we can send out just one basic configuration. Also with this set up we can tell if a wireless access point goes down, or is having issues. It definitely makes managing wireless at multiple buildings a lot easier and time consuming.

Return on Investment:

We are still in early stages with this whole project, but to me it is a classic example of how HP is again helping us save time, money, and job stress.

Instead of setting configurations on every access point we have, we set one configuration and have ProCurve Manager work through the Wireless Edge Card to manage the configuration on all of our wireless access points. That right there is a huge time saver, and will allow me to spend time with other projects.

Also, the HP radio Port access points were a lot less money than others we looked at, so again we are saving money. ProCurve manager has helped us save time managing our servers, and now is helping with managing our wireless access points, quickly and easily. We still have a few schools to go, but we now have wireless implemented within our district. More importantly, we have a strong plan to get wireless out to all of our buildings.

We are in the process of building an eighth school, and I already know it will be fully wireless and easy to manage. Thanks HP for such great products to make my life easier!

Your Company:

I work for the Howard-Suamico School District in Green Bay, WI. We are a mid-sized school district with just over 6,100 students and 600 staff. We currently have almost 2,000 computers and about 100 laptops.

We use Altiris Deployment Server, HP Client Manager, HP ProCurve Manager, HP ProCurve switches, HP ProCurve access points, HP printers, and HP desktop and laptops.

We have been using Altiris' Deployment server for five full years now. It works extremely well for us and definitely makes re-imaging computers and deploying software a lot easier.

We have had HP computers and printers as long as I have been here. All of our laptops are either for laptop carts, or for administrators. Almost all of them are HP laptops. We tried a couple of other brands a few years ago, and just did not get the same results and quality as we did with our HP laptops, so for the last couple of years we have stayed strictly with HP.