SUCCESS STORIES

Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES)

Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES) is Australia’s largest provider of specialist, multicultural language and employment services.  With the assistance of Government contracts, AMES successfully educates and services over 30,000 people every year.  As a not-for-profit organisation, AMES reinvests its resources to increase the range and quality of its services to new Australian residents, their families, international students and the community.

AMES Challenges

AMES had two main requirements  
1 – Standardise their classroom workstations
2 – Implement a stable and reliable platform

AMES had a multitude of workstations across their 26 Education Service Centre classrooms throughout Victoria and New South which posed many technical inconsistencies.  Kevin comments, “We had approximately 22 Workstations in each classroom, no two workstations were the same which meant that the speed in which applications ran varied as did the applications installed.  This was frustrating for students and teachers alike.  Teachers were also spending a great deal of class time trouble-shooting problems plus we had the added worry of security.”

AMES also needed to upgrade their network infrastructure.  Kevin explains, “Whilst we were already running a Citrix environment, we had an old version installed which had no maintenance attached and was not managed, as a result our servers were constantly crashing causing considerable down time for staff, students and teachers.  We also had the need to connect small remote offices but with the unreliable environment this was not feasible.”

AV Tech Solution

AV Tech designed and implemented a SOE for all workstations that has the ability to scale as AMES requirements grow.  This SOE ensures that the operational functions of all the workstations are the same across the board.  Kevin comments, “The project delivery of the SOE means that the look and feel is the same for each Workstation in every class room, the delivery was also done in a cost effective way which was a key requirement for us as we are a non-profit organization.”  The new SOE was based on a Wireless LAN environment, Kevin continues, “having a Wireless classroom has meant that teachers are able to arrange the layout of their classroom without the constraints of cables.”

AV Tech also implemented a Windows Directory Service to simplify the management of providing a single, consistent point of management for all users and applications.  The Directory Service also strengthens security by providing administrators with powerful and consistent tools to manage security services.  Kevin notes, “The Directory Service has meant that students are no longer able to download from the Internet to the workstations, security is no longer an issue.”

Key Benefits

Kevin explains, “AMES now has a teaching environment that has increased the productivity of students. Teachers have found that their classes run far more efficient.  We have the added benefit of security and most importantly the cost of administering and managing the classroom environment has significantly reduced.”

And what about the upgrade of the Citrix environment, Kevin says, “We have had little down time as we now have a stable managed environment.  We have seen increased productivity right across the board.” 

AMES has their own large internal IT department and Help Desk but call on AV Tech for specialist skills.  Kevin comments, “Why invest in the training and certification of our own engineers when we can utilize the investment that AV Tech has made with their engineers.  We use AV Tech as an escalation point for issues that are above and beyond our own internal resources.”

Kevin concludes, “After the successful completion of the two projects we have no doubt that we choose the right solution and the right company to implement this solution.”

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