OGGO/Case studies/École CREA

The IT of a creative arts school, in Geneva.

École CREA teaches design and the creative arts in Geneva. Its classrooms run on Mac, its software changes every September, and a class doesn't get postponed because one machine won't start. OGGO has looked after that setup since 2010 — the oldest client in the house, and still with us.

Does your setup look like this? — or call 022 830 21 00

Twenty minutes is enough to tell what is holding and what is about to give.

The case
01

What wasn't working

You don't get to catch up on the start of term. The rooms are empty in August and full in September, and a machine missing the right version of a piece of software doesn't hold up one user: it holds up a whole class.

A school doesn't have a fleet, it has rooms: identical machines that all have to start up together, with the same software, on the first day of term. And students who move from one workstation to the next with nothing following them.

02

What we put in place

55 staff Macs and 12 iPhones are enrolled in a management console: configured, updated and fixed remotely, without walking from desk to desk. And the students bring their own: around 500 MacBooks go through the same console — a laptop is enrolled at registration, not at the office. The network is Ubiquiti, supervised from a single console, and the storage is backed by an off-site copy held in our own data centre in Switzerland.

The fleet is deployed and handed back machine by machine, the creative software is pushed from one place, and the storage is sized for art-school files — not for office documents.

03

What holds today

For eight years, an Apple-certified technician has been on campus Monday through Saturday morning. Not a phone line: someone who knows the rooms. That is what keeps a machine failing at nine from becoming a cancelled class at ten.

Sixteen years on, the same firm looks after the same setup. The servers and network have been replaced to keep up with demand, the computers are renewed as they go, and the school has never had to go looking for another provider.

The case in numbers

55staff workstations managed
2010start of the relationship
16years, without a break
6days on site per week

A school, a studio, an office — the method doesn't change.

We look at the setup before proposing anything at all. That holds for a classroom just as much as for a design server.

Book a meeting — or call 022 830 21 00