Universities of up to 5,000 students

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Fewer users doesn't equal fewer problems. Smaller universities are often challenged with similar workloads as their larger brethren, but with leaner IT departments and budgets. Universities and higher education institutions with anywhere up to 5,000 students require an efficient software deployment solution that can be managed with ease and deployed with confidence.

AppsAnywhere has found a place of favor within IT of universities and colleges with up to 5,000 students worldwide by elegantly solving challenges the largest 'overkill solutions' can't. All with a lean price point that's easy to approve.

AppsAnywhere's value to universities of 5,000 users or less

The challenges of application delivery for universities with up to 5,000 students

The first and most obvious challenge for universities with 5,000 or fewer students is the budget and resources available to IT. With software delivery being a complex and incredibly nuanced endeavor, effective solutions are often not viable for such higher education institutions due to their cost.

Furthermore and traditionally, more inexpensive solutions have a tendency to demand a high workload when it comes to implementation, deployment, maintenance and upgrades. Sometimes the trade-off of cost for workload is manageable, though in most cases for organizations with fewer than 5,000 students, the extra staff resource required also pushes certain solutions out of budget. A good example of a delivery technology that consistently demands too much in the way of staff and budgetary resources, is desktop virtualization or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Both Citrix and VMware are widely and well known for their VDI solutions; Citrix Virtual Desktops (Formerly XenDekstop) and VMware Horizon View. These are both very powerful and capable solutions, though they are also well known for being the most expensive solutions available. Read about the benefits, limitations and potential alternatives to another well-adopted VDI solution, Dell vWorkspace and flexiLabs solution (formerly Quest).

Resource: Exploring the hidden license costs in application delivery and VDI solutions >>

More traditional and familiar solutions, such as imaging have been instrumental over the past thirty years to IT departments getting off the ground in making software more available. But as software libraries, contexts to deliver to, and students' expectations have grown, more numerous and sizeable images are required to hit every criterion. It has become progressively less and less viable for leaner IT departments to manage using imaging. One of the biggest reasons for this is because entire images must be rebuilt and redeployed for even the most minute of changes, such as additions of, or even patches to software titles. That being said, imaging still has its place in certain situations. Two of the most common imaging technologies to have been used are Microsoft's SCCM and Symantec's Ghost. Also historically used for some of its imaging capabilities is Dell vWorkspace and flexiLabs solution (formerly Quest).

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AppsAnywhere Features

AppsAnywhere's value to organizations of 5,000 users or less

How AppsAnywhere solves challenges for universities up to 5,000 students

When used with its Cloudpaging integration, AppsAnywhere helps smaller organizations virtualize applications separate from the operating system they are to be executed on. A more refined and efficient form of virtualization than VDI, app virtualization carries vastly lower staff and hardware requirements, is a generally cheaper alternative and is often a better tool for interacting with system processes, such as file directories, system drivers and context menus.

AppsAnywhere plus Cloudpaging also provides a method of refining the time-consuming and laborious task of imaging; When an organization virtualizes its software estate, apps can be deployed, patched, upgraded and added to on an individual basis. This negates the need to totally rebuild images and then reimage machines for even the most minute of alterations to an app or group of apps.

The added benefit of this is not only a reduced workload, but a reduced workload at an opportune time. Gone are the days where small IT departments experience a severe summer spike in tasks and inevitably have to put other projects on hold in order to image and deploy all the software required for the next semester/academic year.