paper -
55 Creating the Standard Desktop Environment in a Non-Standard World
Catherine
Yang, Bentley College
The purpose of this paper to give user services staff
an overview of issues to consider when trying to standardize desktop
environments and deliver software upgrades to faculty, staff and students, as
well as to outline some tried and true solutions to these problems.
One of the constant struggles of a user support
organization is in delivering software upgrades to faculty, staff and students.
Although large enterprise software dissemination systems exist in the corporate
world, the divergent needs of the academic computing environment are often not
addressed in these systems. Common software deployment techniques in the
academic world range from simply supplying media for installation to creating
elaborate homegrown batch files to deliver customized upgrades automatically.
This paper will outline several successful upgrade strategies, and provide an
in-depth exploration of the approach used at Bentley College.
At Bentley College, we have found that the needs of faculty, staff and students are diverse and even contradictory, and have developed different methods to deliver software to our different audiences. This paper will detail the solutions we have developed over the last few years. Our hybrid approach utilizes locally developed utilities, off-the-shelf software, as well as an enterprise desktop management system (i.e. Microsoft’s System Management System). In addition, we will review the policies and procedures we have established to support our technical solutions.