Bournemouth University needed to upgrade its network and Open Access areas to enhance the software and services available to students and staff alike. Windows® 2000 Terminal Services are now used to give students and staff quick and easy access to Office products.
Profile
In the words of its mission statement, Bournemouth University aims to be a "pre-eminent vocational university, well-founded in terms of educational quality and student appeal, in order to develop the full potential of its students in an enterprising and stimulating learning environment." Indeed, the university already enjoys a worldwide reputation as a centre for vocational excellence. In April 1998, the Financial Times stated that the university led the way in terms of permanent graduate employment in the UK, with 74.8 percent of graduates gaining meaningful permanent employment. In recent Teaching Quality Assessments, the Media Production, Marketing, Advertising, and Communication courses achieved scores of 22 from a possible 24 points, making them amongst the most highly rated in the UK.
The university's 11,500 students are provided with a broad choice of courses, ranging from Animation to Midwifery. Course delivery is equally flexible, with 2,000 students on placement courses in businesses and organisations around the country, communicating electronically with the University for tutorials and placement support. Meanwhile, of the 9,000 remaining students, 1,000 have a mixed "learning diet", with the bulk of course delivery provided by distance support services, coupled with a reduced attendance at the University.
In recent years, financial pressures on the higher education sector have led to educational establishments developing a more commercial-style offering. In the 1997/1998 Annual Report, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Gillian Slater, characterised these developments: "The higher education sector is taking on some of the characteristics of a commercial marketplace. The students may be viewed as customers by the institutions within that market. Whilst some of the more traditional institutions struggle to come to terms with the modernity of this approach, Bournemouth University is tackling the challenges of a growing, yet more discerning, student base. This climate has given us many opportunities to build on our strengths as we enhance our growing reputation as a dynamic and enterprising university."
Situation
The university has a solid IT infrastructure, supporting its commitment to being an ever more dynamic organisation. Dr. Chris Hall, Head of Academic Services at Bournemouth University, explains: "All courses have a major focus on the vocational skills needed for future employment success, and IT is a fundamental skill for all courses, providing immediately relevant skills whether students are studying nursing or multimedia communications. We also provide specialist IT courses, such as software engineering, animation and electronics, all delivering differing skills and requiring different technology. We have a pretty uniform PC standard base, delivering Windows NT and Office for the vast majority. For the animation course, we provide Silicon Graphics with some flavours of UNIX, as well as HP UX and specialised packages for electronic engineering courses. We also have a small minority of Apple Macintosh computers. In all, across the campus, which is located across two main sites in Bournemouth and Poole, we have 500 workstations and 2,500 PCs."
Both campus sites are linked by dark-fibre connections. The network consists of two linked but independent networks—an ATM network, which supports the academic community, and an FDDI network, which supports the administrative community. Dr. Hall adds: "The IT strategy we have put in place over the past four years has enabled us to provide a high quality network with a resilient infrastructure and stable servers. We have been working towards a uniform solution, which is why we have now standardised on Windows NT Server and Microsoft Office, which provide quality and consistency and a low cost of ownership. The whole thrust of what we have put in place is to deliver high quality administrative systems as well as tools for learning and teaching."
Bournemouth University has an extensive intranet, encompassing progressively more information and teaching tools as well as providing the environment for computer conferencing and online assessment. This can be accessed in Open Access areas. The Open Access Computer Centre is Bournemouth University's general computer resource—available to all students enrolled on full-time and part-time courses. The Centre is part of Academic Services, consisting of labs at both the Talbot Campus and the Lansdowne Campus. For most of the year, the Centre is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is closed between Christmas and the New Year.
In September of this year, the Open Access Centre was upgraded to Windows 2000 Server running Terminal Services and providing the Office 2000 family of products. This was part of a dual approach of addressing uniformity of service for legacy hardware and new terminals from NCD, and using the technology to upgrade the administration areas to a common desktop in the near future.
Dr. Hall explains: "About three years ago, we identified that the thin-client computing approach seemed the best way forward for our organisation, for two main reasons. Firstly, we had a large number of legacy PCs and wanted to provide up-to-date functionality for all our users. This would have been difficult on the hardware we had in place without using some kind of thin-client technology. Secondly, we wanted to reduce the cost of delivering new technology to standard desktops, which we found we could do through a number of different solutions, such as NTrigue and Citrix WinFrame using terminal sessions. These solutions were partially successful, but the experience was not uniform. We found some stability and reliability issues when we tried to scale the number of terminal sessions. However, the exercise was useful in proving that the concept of thin clients was suitable."
Talking to other universities, Dr. Hall found that opinion in the community was that the Citrix MetaFrame solution did not scale very well. With quad processor servers, there were signs of serious limits on the number of concurrent terminal sessions. In addition, if the University had implemented a server farm with clustering, the licensing costs of Citrix MetaFrame meant that the solution would have been cost prohibitive. Dr. Hall adds: "With Windows 2000 Server, Terminal Services are built in as standard."
Solution
Bournemouth University had been evaluating Windows 2000 for the past couple of years and found it to be stable enough to consider implementing it before its release. Dr. Hall adds: "We were driven by the fact that we had to coincide with academic terms, which meant that we had to install a solution by the time students came back to university. The alternatives to thin client computing, using PCs with locally installed software, was not conducive to our environment and, after evaluation, we found that there was no alternative. Whilst it was a risk, we had fallback solutions and lined up support from Microsoft and Compaq for the servers, NCD for terminals and load balancing, and from Getech. Much of the early tactical evaluation for the product was carried out by members of our IS team, notably Ken Bissell and Grant Tiller, so we had a good knowledge of the product and its capabilities and had plans in place to minimise the risk if we had any problems."
The rollout began at the end of August, after a successful pilot (started in the spring) of several terminals running both Windows NT Server 4.0 Terminal Server Edition and Windows 2000 Server Terminal Services. To date, 60 terminals have been upgraded in the Open Access Centre and Dr. Hall is confident from their tests that the solution will easily scale up to 250 Terminal sessions. The end goal is to upgrade between 250 and 300 terminals in the Open Access Centre and also upgrade the student laboratories and administration network.
Benefits
Dr. Hall is pleased with the way the project has gone and how it has been received by the students.
The six Compaq dual-processor Pentium III servers with NCD transparent load balancing across the servers are working well. Dr. Hall states: "Compaq were all lined up ready to provide support, but the servers went in, configured easily and are working very well."
Dr. Hall adds: "Microsoft’s input has been great and helped tremendously. It has been particularly helpful in quickly sorting out any configuration issues with terminal services and has given us confidence that Windows 2000 is ready for us to use. During the first two weeks of the term, we’ve had over 1,600 individual students using the terminals, with very few problems and no reliability issues. We now have the full bank of servers operational with load balancing, and this also seems to be going well. We will now be increasing the numbers being served in this way."
"The rollout went very well indeed," continues Dr. Hall. "The solution is stable and we’ve had no crashes. The number of individual students using these machines is around 1,700, and it’s interesting to gauge the difference between last year and this year. In 1998, we had a slow environment delivering Windows 3.1 and Word 6.0 to the client. Now we have Office 2000, with much higher performance. It’s difficult to say it’s totally from the implementation of the new Windows 2000 solution, but we’ve seen increased demand and a much lower volume of complaints. Last year, e-mail used to be at a level of 10,000 a day; now we’re seeing up to 30,000 to 40,000 a day, which might be symptomatic of students generally having a higher awareness of technology. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, however, and the students are swarming all over the computers. There are queues forming to use it."
Dr. Hall is careful to map out the future use of Windows 2000 at the University. "We will be moving to Windows 2000 en masse, but not until 2001. We can see Windows NT Server 4.0 working well at the moment, but we’re seeing good cost of ownership benefits from Windows 2000. We’re planning to deliver office applications to administration areas in the near future, to prolong the life of desktop PCs another one or two years."
Software and Services
Terminal
Services in Windows 2000 Server
Office
2000
