A recent Harris Interactive online survey of 203 US school system administrators and IT decision makers highlighting the tablet management challenges faced by schools today show that tablets are increasingly becoming a standard IT device. Of the total IT decision makers surveyed, 53 percent have deployed them in their schools.
Other studies show that some tablets can cost significantly more time and money to manage. Customizing tablets to work in a school’s existing infrastructure can cost more than $1,400 on average. These costs include time spent on device management, password setting and resetting, enterprise domain and access configuration and policy development.
Fifty-seven percent of education IT decision makers using tablets say there are applications currently used on their desktops and laptops that cannot be currently accessed on their tablets while 46 percent were able to use some with limited functionality.
Of the respondents, 41 percent had to purchase applications to mirror desktop and laptop functionality and 31 percent require additional software or tools to manage tablets.
Fifty-nine percent of school system IT decision makers and administrators say that the best way to minimize total cost of ownership for tablets is choosing devices that integrate with their existing IT infrastructure and that can be managed by existing tools.
The Dell Latitude 10 tablet fits easily and securely into existing school IT environments to help improve IT efficiency and decrease total cost-of-management. It is managed like any standard Windows-based laptop, so the Dell Latitude 10 tablet is significantly easier to deploy and manage than the iPad in large scale implementations.
According to third-party testing performed by Principled Technologies, in comparison with the iPad in large scale education deployments, the Latitude 10 essentials configuration requires 52 percent less time to manage. It is 99 percent faster for software updates, saving approximately 197 hours with automated updates and saves IT time by doubling the number of devices a single IT staff member can manage.
