Product Review
Save Time with GroupLogic’s
Mass Transit 4.5
by Mitchell Levine
Managing the largest computer
network in secondary education is a vast undertaking,
but New York’s Department
of Education is doing it. With the new year beginning,
the goal of implementing the “one-to-one computing
standard” in our city’s public schools, or
the ideal of one computer for every student, teacher,
and administrator in the system, is quickly becoming
a top priority—and formidable stressor—in
technology procurement here.
With 1254 K-12 schools in the five boroughs, tech managers
in New York education have a logistical challenge every
bit as vast as their counterparts in the corporate sector,
but nowhere near the amount of resources available to
deal with it. In the corporate world, IT directors can
simply buy all of the latest and greatest products the
high-technology industry markets with their annual budget
each year, and just throw out all the old stuff. Plus
they usually have full staffs of techies to configure
it all.
Needless to say, that’s not the way it works in
education, where administrators consider themselves fortunate
if they actually have one full-time manager handling
their computers. With a major initiative like the one
now facing the Department of Ed. happening, it’s
a very good thing indeed that an application like GroupLogic’s
Mass Transit 4.5 is now available. Mass Transit 4.5 is
a systems control interface that can be run from any
remote Windows NT/2000/XP and Windows Server 2003 computer,
enabling a Systems Administrator to control most aspects
of a remote environment, including starting or stopping
services or devices, adding new services or devices,
managing the system parameters and resources, and adjusting
security levels. An integrated Event Viewer lets the
Administrator monitor all events as though they were
being run on the host computer, and the software even
supports remote installs without ever having to be physically
present on that station.
I didn’t have a large network of Windows machines
available to set up my trial on, but I was able to install
the software on a small (four units) one, and perform
remote configurations with relatively large amount of
ease, even as a non-expert. For a school system which
is soon going to be configuring literally thousands of
new computers, it’s easy to see how this would
be a must-have app. Unfortunately, the product will be
of no use to the many students and teachers that work
with Mac OS only, but considering the fact that most
of the mobile units currently being deployed run some
variant of Windows, it still should have broadly applicable
functionality for a large number of end-users in the
districts.
While Mass Transit does have
a learning curve—although
most IT managers probably have much more network savvy
than I can boast of—its ability to maximize time
efficiency in a school system with little to spare makes
it effort well spent.#
For more information, as
well as a trial download, visit the manufacturer’s
site at www.grouplogic.com.
