Ambitious goals
Lindamood-Bell’s mission of “enhancing learning for all people, of all ages, for life,” is a daunting challenge. Without the right infrastructure to interconnect their home office in San Luis Obispo, California to their 40 other locations throughout the United States and London, it would be impossible to deliver cohesive educational programming—much less fulfill their mission.
As Lindamood-Bell has grown over the years, more demands have been placed on its infrastructure. It became apparent to Justin Watty, Associate Director of IT, and Matt Corippo, Server Administrator, that their Mac environment needed a new management approach. They chose Jamf Pro because it was a comprehensive solution that included a full set of remote management tools while also being reliable and scalable.
Reclaiming lost time
Justin sums up their challenges, “Managing our growing environment had become problematic and overly time consuming. It was no longer workable to reimage and ship fragile iMacs, manually recapture licenses from dead machines, or update individual users.”
Matt adds, “We also wanted a new, preemptive approach to troubleshooting.”
Using Jamf Pro, Justin and Matt have been able to reclaim the time previously lost on doing things by hand. Now they can remotely deploy packages of software, security, and OS updates to all of their desktop and mobile Macs. This has eliminated the incompatibility issues encountered by users. Reimaging is now automated through a restore partition feature and can be triggered remotely or run on a schedule. This reduces the need for troubleshooting. License compliance is easier too.
“Now we treat software licenses like peripherals. We associate licenses to machines using Jamf Pro and when a computer is retired, we simply associate the license to a different machine,” said Justin. “It’s so much easier now, because we can keep tabs on everything as frequently as necessary through an automated inventory and then produce customized reports for anyone who needs them.”
Streamlined maintenance
Matt was pleased to see the how Jamf Pro cooperated with their servers. “We run a mixed server environment and it was nice to see how well Jamf Pro integrated with them,” he says. “They’ve been easy to configure and all get along nicely.”
Justin describes additional benefits, “We’ve made a lot of infrastructure improvements this year and Jamf Pro was a big part of that. For example, we have a printer on every machine—so, when we switched over to our private network we created all of the printers and pushed
them all out using Jamf Pro. This was a huge time saver and really demonstrated how streamlined our management has become. We couldn’t be happier.”