Tell us about your school…
Court Moor is a maintained secondary school based in Hampshire with 1,100 students on roll. We have multiple buildings across our site and in those, we have approximately 370 PCs with NetSupport DNA installed.
What are some of the main IT challenges you faced before installing NetSupport DNA?
Before we installed NetSupport DNA, our main challenges were being able to remotely access PCs without us having to walk from building to building to do it. We also lacked a way to monitor how our devices were being used and, in addition, had little control over our power saving.
How has NetSupport DNA helped at the school?
A big plus for us is the energy monitoring and power management features. NetSupport DNA has saved us money on our electricity bills as PCs used to just get left on out of hours. What is of particular use is its ‘idle’ monitoring, so if a PC isn’t touched in the space of an hour, then it automatically gets shut down. So for us, this is a benefit as we’re saving hundreds of PCs’ worth of electric from being wasted.
How have you found the remote support tools in NetSupport DNA?
Excellent! We especially like the fact that NetSupport DNA allows us to check when students have used PCs. For example, in a busy school, it’s inevitable that damage will sometimes occur to devices, so knowing who the last user on a PC was can sometimes help us to solve it.
We use the remote tools in DNA (and NetSupport School) to immediately jump onto a student’smachine if we need to. It’s the immediacy of it that’s better for the teacher or student in terms of
response, not to mention that it saves us walking halfway across the site too!
How has NetSupport DNA helped with supporting your safeguarding efforts?
DNA gives us some extra surety with their keyword monitoring tool, which we can add to if need be.
NetSupport DNA includes NetSupport School classroom management. What do you find are the main benefits to teaching?
Computing teachers and technology teachers are the main users and they think it’s fantastic! They can bring focus to classes, if need be, by using the lock tool and quickly demonstrate a student’s work to the rest of the class. It’s instrumental for teaching as far as those teachers are concerned and to have a current replacement for our previous solution is great.
What do other staff in the school think of NetSupport DNA and NetSupport School?
Our teaching staff would really miss NetSupport School, although they’re not aware of the under-the-bonnet benefits of DNA – it’s just working away in the background.
What is it like working with NetSupport?
We have found both the Sales and Support teams very helpful. We also appreciate the fact that NetSupport looks into wish list items.
How does NetSupport DNA compare to previous solutions the school has used?
It’s much more stable than our previous software and also receives regular updates. It’s a great product and the fact that it’s always changing and there are things being added shows that it’s clearly a live solution.
How do you see your NetSupport solutions supporting the school’s IT into the future?
We hope that NetSupport continues to add features and we certainly have no plans to switch to any other software!