Product
Review:
GroupLogic’s
ExtremeIPz
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 Extreme IPz is now available.
Extreme
IPz (IPz) 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
IPz 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. #