Supporting campus with a small team
Clarkson College was the first nursing school established in Nebraska in 1888. Currently the college has around 170 faculty and 1,100 students.
Travis Wilkinson, senior systems engineer, is on a four-person IT team that supports the entire campus — including faculty, students, campus infrastructure, and a residence hall. Approximately 500 students are online across 26 states and faculty teach remotely, complicating the device management process. In addition, Clarkson College’s IT team provides some support for student personal devices.
While Travis’s team has a lot on its plate, the small team has gone from five to four full-time employees within recent years.
“In the IT landscape, everyone’s trying to do more with less,” said Travis.
The team needed a tool up to the task.
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Switching from Deploy & Inventory to Connect
When Travis joined the IT team at Clarkson College in March 2024, PDQ Deploy & Inventory was already in place. However, he quickly realized that it hadn’t been managed for some time.
“Some of our devices were on the domain, some were in Azure AD — we really didn’t have a single pane of glass; it wasn’t easy to understand how many devices we actually had that we should be managing ... And that’s scary, not having confidence.” The substantial remote population, lack of visibility into all devices and their current statuses, and some process inefficiencies prompted the team to search for a tool that could better fit its current needs.
IT was in the market for an effective solution with a clear way to see that updates and patches had gone through successfully, which was lacking in some other solutions.
“The key thing that stood out about PDQ Connect was the ease of use. You install the agent and it’s that easy; with the agent there, you can push out your installs,” said Travis. “There’s no end user interference, no pop-ups — the end user is unaware and not bothered.”
Getting the most out of PDQ Connect
PDQ Connect has streamlined multiple facets of Clarkson College’s IT processes.
“The overall ease of use, the overall reporting, and the fact that it’s a SaaS app that didn’t cost a whole lot more than what we were paying before," said Travis. “It just made it a no-brainer for Clarkson College.”
Remote updates
Before PDQ Connect, the IT team was expending a lot of effort and time on manual work. Previously, end users would submit tickets when they needed new software updates.
The team now leverages PDQ to remotely push out packages silently and proactively.
“Customers have no idea; they just get an email from us that tells them we’ve updated their software. Everyone is a lot happier.”
Automation
Keeping up with software updates is a continuous challenge for IT teams everywhere. The Clarkson College IT team set up an automated deployment in PDQ Connect that runs every day at noon to keep devices updated with the latest software from PDQ’s Package Library.
“We're a really small team, so anything that we can automate is huge because that frees up our time to work with our customers, especially our students, and provide great customer service.”
In addition to the software applications available in PDQ Connect’s Package Library, the team also leverages the feature’s Microsoft and Windows updates as well as the PSWindowsUpdate packages.
“When our security team notifies us of a critical vulnerability for Microsoft, for example, it’s beneficial to be able to go into PDQ Connect and see that those updates are already being applied to everything that’s online — and for offline devices, they're already queued ... It’s helpful knowing those are being handled immediately.”
Visibility
PDQ Connect’s extensive insights and reporting greatly enhance visibility to help the Clarkson College IT team optimize resource allocation.
“It provides a lot of insight, so we can manage our PCs better — we'll see that we have five PCs that are low on disk space and decide to check that out," said Travis. “Or being able to run a report that shows all the software packages that are on our computers allows us to see exactly what’s there and address any unwanted packages.”
Imaging & the Entra ID integration
Formerly, the team’s imaging process took a lot of time.
“Our imaging process when I got here was long and drawn out,” said Travis.
The team was using Autopilot and Intune primarily, and the process was heavily manual — missed installs and other mistakes were taking up a lot of time. Now, the Clarkson College IT team uses Intune to install the PDQ Connect agent on a new device, and Connect takes it from there.
“PDQ Connect does all the heavy lifting because the success rate is 100% whereas with Intune, even if you had a successful deployment, the next one may not be successful.”
PDQ Connect’s integration with Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) groups lets sysadmins see Entra ID group information within Connect — allowing them to create groups in PDQ Connect that are identical to their Entra ID groups.
“Once we log in and PDQ Connect has detected the Entra ID groups, all the automations from PDQ push out; a really simple install. The fact that we have taken the human error out of imaging — as long we’ve built our packages right — means that we’ve reduced our time from almost a whole day down to about an hour. That’s meaningful.”
Saving time & increasing impact
PDQ Connect has freed up bandwidth for the Clarkson College IT team, allowing them to better serve users and increase their strategic impact.
“PDQ Connect has given time back for our team to focus on other things,” said Travis. “It’s upped our customer service game because we are less pressed for time.”
The team is also now able to get more involved with other college projects and contribute their technical expertise and innovative ideas.
“It’s allowed us to be on committees and provide input where before we probably would have foregone that because we didn't have time and it wasn't really business critical,” said Travis. "We're able to hopefully get things right technically the first time instead of having to go back and redo them. That's going to be a big money saver for the college.”
“We're able to weigh in and maybe help facilitate learning through technology more because we're able to be more involved.”
