As a result, the College has greater ability to lockdown desktops than ever before. It also has the ability to refine security policies for various groups, including students, faculty, special-needs students, general users and others. It can delegate administration of instructional servers to other administrators. And it saves the tedious and expensive process of manually re-imaging each desktop, dramatically lowering the total cost of ownership. After migrating its academic network in just three weeks, the College now looks forward to migrating fully to Windows 2000 this summer.
Some balancing acts are easy, others are a challenge.
Before the migration, which began last fall, security concerns were very real. Once there, and with access to configuration and display options, students could change wallpaper, display pornography, download unauthorized software from the Internet, delete necessary files and programs, and monopolize machines with computer games, according to technical support specialist Maureen Tobin. Even when students were not making unauthorized use of lab PCs, this arrangement was problematic. Further, because the lockdown policy did not permit users to install their own software, the IT staff had to manually install hundreds of individual application files in the system registry to support the large number of third-party applications used in the labs. I finally gave up because the registry just wasn't big enough.