Unidesk Solutions for Education

With flat or shrinking budgets, educational institutions are looking for ways to expand student access to computing resources, simplify IT operations, minimize PC replacement costs, and reduce energy use. Unidesk hosted virtual desktops, accessed by your favorite connection broker, enable you to do all this and more.

• Extend or eliminate PC refresh cycles. The 3-5 year PC refresh cycle is hard on education budgets, and new PCs are no easier to manage than old ones. With Unidesk, you can replace your old PCs with server-hosted virtual desktops that are easier to manage and thin clients that are more energy efficient. Or, re-purpose your old PCs to provide access to the new Unidesk desktops to extend their life.

• Provision new applications to lab desktops in minutes. Administrators are often asked to install new lab apps with little advance warning. Unidesk lets you respond to these requests instantly, right from your office. Package any application as a Unidesk layer - even "hard-to-virtualize apps" such as Mathematica - then simply assign it to the group of virtual desktops that makes up the lab.

• Offer customizable desktops to faculty and staff. VDI is often rejected by faculty and staff because non-persistent desktops do not keep user customizations, including user-installed applications. Unidesk 100% persistent personalization goes where profile management tools and non-persistent VDI cannot, offering a customizable user experience that lets you include everyone - without increasing storage costs or management complexity.

• Create virtual labs and training rooms. You no longer have to be bound by physical lab resources. Unidesk makes it easy to create virtual labs that can be accessed by students and teachers anywhere, anytime, even from home. With Unidesk’s rapid provisioning capability, you can even offer a virtual lab to local businesses for weekend training, and unlock new revenue sources.

• Cut desktop management costs. Many academic institutions have lean IT staffs that must be good at everything. Unidesk layering technology makes creating, updating, and patching virtual desktops easy, even if you’re not a desktop expert. Simply update the OS layer and application layers once, and all desktops receive the latest versions.

• Repair desktops in less time. With Unidesk, even deeply personalized faculty and staff desktops can be quickly fixed. If a user change breaks a desktop, simply rollback the user’s personalization layer to an earlier snapshot. If an application no longer runs right, use the Repair Application option, which forces the application layer to take priority over anything the user has done.

• Implement BYOPC and enhance mobility. Faculty and students rely on their computers for classes and assignments. But physical PCs take up space and are harder to secure and manage. With Unidesk, you can support Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC) for your students, and still offer every student and faculty member a server-hosted virtual desktop they can access from any thin client or PC.