Public Sector organizations must meet customer expectations with limited resources while managing thousands of endpoints securely and efficiently across complex, distributed operating environments. To deliver high-quality services that protect critical systems from unauthorized users, Government and Education IT teams leverage BeyondTrust’s remote support capabilities to improve response times, reduce friction for technicians and ensure operational continuity.
Anthony Jimenez
Welcome back to CarahCast, a podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft production team.
On behalf of BeyondTrust, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused around scaling remote support in education and government. Tremaine McQueen, CTO of Nash County Public Schools, J.R. Williams, Senior Network Engineer at Nash County Public Schools, and moderator Bill Venticher, Director of Public Sector Marketing at BeyondTrust. We'll discuss how to evaluate remote support for real K-12 conditions, what good looks like in an intuitive dashboard, how to staff and scale with concurrent licensing, and the rollout practices that speed time to value.
Bill Venteicher
Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining today. I'd like to start by saying thank you so much to J.R. and Tremaine for joining Carahsoft and BeyondTrust to tell their story about how they took advantage of a unique opportunity to invest in new software and roll out a brand new remote support platform to support all of their students and staff across Nash County. Gentlemen, thank you both for being here today. Thank you. A lot of people on the call probably don't know a whole lot about Nash County Public Schools, so I wanted to start with an opportunity for you both to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about the IT team, the school district, and what's really unique about Nash County.
Tremain McQueen
Okay. Well, I'll start. Again, my name is Tremaine McQueen.
I've been here in Nash County for about eight years, and I actually bring 23 years of experience in technology across K-12 and higher education. What my job is here, I pretty much oversee the district technology operations, infrastructure, safety systems, and long-term strategic planning and things of that sort. I'm really passionate about bringing reliable systems and developing strong teams and using technology as a tool to remove barriers rather than create them.
So, just a little bit about our district. We do have 24 schools, but we serve 27 sites, all inclusive. Just a little bit about us, we have a team of 15 technicians and about 600 teachers, and overall we have about maybe 700 to 1,800 staff members.
I'll pause right here and let Mr. Williams.
JR Williams
I'm James Williams. I'm the senior network engineer for Nash County Public Schools. I've been here for about 26 years.
I've been in IT for about 36 years. I'm all about making the technician's job a little bit easier as far as what we can do to make the end-user have their equipment available to use. So, that's about it.
Bill Venteicher
Well, I appreciate that. I know both of you do way more than what you just explained in about 30 seconds or a minute. I'm Bill Venteicher.
I'm our director of public sector marketing here at Beyond Trust, and I really focus on telling stories about technology and trying to show the ways that we can help from an identity security and from a technology standpoint to support public sector, whether it's K-12, higher ed, state and local, or federal across our country. So, again, like I said, thank you both for joining us today. I think we're really hoping to get your insights and to share your expertise and your knowledge with our audience because I think that K-12 teams across the country are struggling.
They're juggling thousands of devices in some cases. They have tight budgets. There's constant classroom needs, and technology is changing all the time.
You know, I really appreciate you both agreeing to share how Nash County kind of leveled up this remote support approach and how that helped you speed up the process for fixing devices that have an issue or simplifying the workflows for your technicians and how you were able to leverage that technology and then show that value back to your leadership of why you're investing in these tools. So, let's jump to our first question here, and I had this a little out of order, but talk a little bit about the IT landscape at Nash County Public Schools. How many sites, and you touched on that a little bit, how many total endpoints are you managing and how many techs are on your team that you both support?
Okay, okay.
Tremain McQueen
Jay, you want me to jump in here? All right, cool. So, as I was saying before, we have about 24 schools and actually 27 sites, and that includes our administrative buildings and so forth and so on.
As far as our endpoints, we have about 3,000 plus endpoints when it comes down to our staff. Our students, we are one-to-one, but our students use Chromebooks. You know, we feel that this is, really easy to manage and push out apps and updates and things of that sort.
So, that's where we are, and we have about 15 technicians, and we have them broken down by your Tech 3s and Tech 2s, and your Tech 3s are your ones with much more knowledge, and we have them assigned to our high school, and we have our Tech 2s, which are the up-and-coming ones. They are assigned to our middle and our elementary school, but they support the district as well and has other duties and responsibilities as far as administrative to certain programs and things of that sort, but that's where we are right now. So, we have about, like I've said before, we have about right at under 14,000 students, and our total staff makeup is right at 1,700 plus.
You know, that changes every day, but that's kind of our makeup. We are one-to-one. Like I said, we utilize Chromebooks for our student devices, and I'm going to pause right here and let JR talk about our network and what we use there.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah, I'd love to hear that, and I'd love to hear kind of what a day in the life is like for your team, JR, and how you manage all of this.
JR Williams
Like you said, we are a one-to-one device for our students with Chromebooks, and our staff range from a Dell laptop to a Lenovo laptop or a PC. Right now, currently, from one end of the county to the other end is about 45 minutes, so whatever we can do to make our tech life easier to be able to repair a device, if it's a simple remote in, take care of something real quick, that's what we're looking for. What else was I going to say?
I've lost my voice.
Bill Venteicher
No, that's fine. So, what does a day look like? You know, like I'm sure it varies from time to time throughout the year.
There's probably a huge rush as you're preparing for the beginning of the school year, and there's a lot of management that happens, especially when you have kids moving from one level to the next, but what does your day look like throughout the year supporting all of those devices?
JR Williams
Well, from the get-go, from summertime, that's probably our busiest time of the year. That's when we get all those devices back, check them out, make sure everything's working and functioning for both staff and student, and then we get this mad rush when students come back to where everybody's on the network, everybody's got issues, and we've got to be able to take care of the most amount of issues we can take care of with the minimum amount of people we have. So, it can range anywhere from a simple remote in, take care of a computer, to remote in and see what the student's having an issue with.
Like I said, we have the technicians are divvied up to where they're pretty much in location to where their schools are close together, but we have occasion where they need to travel from one end of the county to the other.
Bill Venteicher
Awesome.
JR Williams
And we also have, I'm not going to forget, but we also have our testing time where the kids, they have two times that they test during the year, the high school students anyway, but for us to be able to take care of any of those issues at those times is considerable value.
Bill Venteicher
I'm sure a lot of those issues don't even come up until they realize they have to turn on their computer because they have to take a test.
JR Williams
Yes, and that's when you find out when they get ready, oh my computer's not working.
Bill Venteicher
I have two teenagers in high school in my house, so I know all about this. Well, great. Thanks for telling us some of that background.
I think that's really important to set the stage because I think people will identify that they're dealing with a lot of the issues that you're dealing with. Let's dive a little deeper. I know that most IT teams are dealing with a constant struggle and CTOs are figuring out across all of their tools and applications that they have, that they've subscribed to or that they've purchased, and they have to figure out which ones are we going to tolerate and we're going to keep, which ones are we going to invest more in, which ones are we going to migrate to a new type of solution, and which ones are we just going to eliminate because the technology isn't needed anymore, right?
I know that there was some changes that happened at the state level that allowed you to start thinking about a new way to handle remote support. Maybe, Tremaine, if you want to start us off on that, tell us a little bit about that process. You told us that the Department of Public Instruction had made a change that allowed you to start looking for a new solution.
Tremain McQueen
Right, absolutely, but let me step back a little bit. You said something like how directors, what everything stems off is budget. You know, you may want the bells and whistles, but budget drives every decision, almost every decision that we make, but going back to the DPI, Department of Instruction, the Department of Instruction has they have a core, what do you call it, like a core group.
They have a big brother, in other words, they have a big brother that what they do is support all of the technology directors across the board, and so they roll out, sometimes they will roll out certain programs that they will pay for. So, the Department of Instruction rolled out CrowdStrike, which is our endpoint solution for free to all of the districts. So, you know, being a conscious director, what we're looking at, oh, we can save money.
So, at that particular time, we were using a product called, what is it called, Exidium, and what this was was an endpoint as well as it was a remote system for us. So, when Department of Instruction rolled this out, we were like, okay, this will save us about 30 plus some odd thousand dollars. So, yeah, why wouldn't we jump on something that is really good that the state is pushing out?
So, in doing so, this is what made us really kind of look into possibly a remote software of something that could do something even better or almost equivalent to what we were already getting from Exidium. So, that's where we are with that.
Bill Venteicher
And JR, what kind of risk do you feel like the team would have faced if you hadn't kind of taken advantage of that cost savings and started looking for a new solution?
JR Williams
Well, to be honest, Exidium was formerly Komodo, so we had, like you said, we had our antivirus, our endpoint solution, everything that was involved in that. And when they came along and said, hey, we've got this product for you, then we're like, we, I don't necessarily say we went in panic mode, but we're like, okay, well, we've got to find a better solution or a solution that would be comparable to it. So, that's when we're kind of like take a step back and say, okay, what functions do we need?
What can we get? And what money do we have available?
Bill Venteicher
Well, I'm sure that that happens pretty often, and I'm glad to hear that, you know, as technology has changed and as the security landscape has changed, that the state has invested in tools to protect all of the technology investments that the district has. So, that's great, but it causes change for sure. So, as you started this process, I think the next thing in a playbook is, you know, you have to identify, this is what we have today.
This is what we really need this to do really well out of all of the solutions that are available out there. You know, it needs to scale across all 3,000 of these devices. We need to be able to have all 12 of our techs use it at the same time.
You know, it has to be priced right. What was some of the must-haves when you started looking for a remote support tool?
JR Williams
Our biggest thing was, can we remote into these devices without teacher intervention? Because a lot of times, a teacher would get us and remote it in and walk away, and we're like, oh no, we're stopped. So, we needed to be able to remote into the device.
We needed to be able to train help.
Tremain McQueen
We needed to be able to have a system that we can do reporting on as well. You know, we were looking for something that would give us reporting almost similar to what we used to call SCCM. You know, we needed to know what the OS was.
You know, we need to, so a remote system that would also give you the ease of use, like he was saying, and we were also price conscious. You know, something that we can really afford if we're not able to, if we don't have the funding, you know. So, and then one of the other features that we was really sold on was the ease of searching for the devices.
We can search.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah, device naming and being able to identify devices and search for devices across such a vast network. Yeah, keep telling that.
Tremain McQueen
Absolutely. So, with saying that, some of the other software, I know I'm jumping ahead, but this software that Beyond Drugs, we're able to search the devices by either username as well as computer name. Now, that is big because a lot of remote softwares do not allow you to do that.
You have to have a specific computer name, you know, so forth and so on. And I'll pause right here and let James kind of go into detail with that.
JR Williams
Our biggest issue, we wanted to be able to have techs to be able to log in at any time, whether it was one tech, five techs, 10 techs, be able to find a device based off of username, computer name, serial number of the device, and back address. That was our biggest things, issues that we were looking for. How could we find this device the quickest way?
Bill Venteicher
That's great. Well, I'm really glad that we were able to solve that issue for you. So, it's really interesting as we were talking, getting to know each other, you know, you told me a little bit about the process for how you evaluated tools that were available in the marketplace.
And you said that BeyondTrust, as an identity security company, didn't initially show up in your evaluation. And you were thinking, oh gosh, I don't know if we can even afford BeyondTrust. But you found out pretty quickly that that was not the case.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you were searching for tools and how you discovered BeyondTrust solution?
JR Williams
We actually have a group called NCT that we go out to and kind of get everybody's idea and input and what other schools are utilizing. And some names came across and we started checking those names. And we're like, well, I think you guys were originally named BombGuard.
When somebody mentioned BombGuard, they're like, oh no, we can't afford them. That's not even close to what our price range is. So, that wasn't even on the plate.
So, we started looking at all these other programs and some of their attributes and how we could implement it. And we're like, well, you know what? None of these are meeting what our needs are.
This may have this or this may have this, but nothing really had everything that we need. So, we kept looking and looking. And probably, I'd say about two, three weeks later, Chris Dith and I were looking at a program.
We're like, well, let's go check these guys out. We're like, oh, you know what? The same bad.
And we're like, okay, well, let's give them a call and see what we can do. So, we sent you guys an email and say, hey, let's do a demo. So, we did our demo and we liked it.
And we're like, okay, give us the cost. This is going to kill us. We go right back to the drawing board.
So, once you guys gave us the breakdown, we're like, hey, this might not be a bad thing. So, we got our hopes up and started talking.
Bill Venteicher
I love that. So, can you remember, think back to when you were first talking about it, maybe the first time you saw a demo, did either of you have kind of an aha moment where you were like, oh, okay, we have to have this?
JR Williams
Yeah, Chris and I both. Absolutely. I mean, there was some functionality that we didn't have, but we're like, okay, well, we don't really need that.
But there's this other stuff that really makes sense and we really need this. And nothing that we had come across even compared to it.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah, that's true. I love that. I love that.
So, when you're going through the evaluation process, did you speak with peers that also had used Bomgar or BeyondTrust in the past? Or what advice would you give to people that are on the webinar about how you get information and where you go to to learn about tools that are available and on the cutting edge and are there to help solve your problems?
JR Williams
Like I was saying earlier, we have NCT group that we kind of go out to, and there's another K-12 pro that we kind of get our information from. Get word of mouth. I mean, a lot of folks don't know about you guys, but I've been spreading the and some other folks as well.
But a simple search, you guys don't even just come up. So, I'd like to see that change because your program is really good and I'd like to get the word out to everybody.
Bill Venteicher
Well, maybe we can take that offline. As a marketer, I'd love to hear what you were searching for. We can work on that a little bit.
You know, we are very proud of our history. Bombgar and our remote support has been around since the late 80s. So, it's definitely something that's grown as technology has advanced over all this time.
Tremaine, as the CTO, how do you share information with other leaders across other districts in the state? I know, you know, JR mentioned that you have kind of a central repository of approved software, recommended software. How do you share best practices with other leaders?
Tremain McQueen
Well, we have similar, we have a similar group. It's called CCRESA. And basically, we meet once a month.
All of the directors in this region meets once a month and we have different regions across the state. And then maybe the quarterly, all of the directors across the state, we get together. But we also, we all share information with each other.
You know, when the emails go out, we have an email group that we always share information. If we got something new, somebody might ask, you know, what is a good remote system that you're using? What are the benefits?
Blah, blah, blah. So, we have a group that we talk to each other. So, we are well aware of what's in the neighboring district, districts that are hours away.
But we, that's how we get the word across. And we consult with each other to get what the next best thing.
JR Williams
Yeah, because I want to add to that. We were kind of hesitant as to just jump on the first thing that comes across the bandwagon.
Tremain McQueen
Absolutely.
JR Williams
We kind of want to do our research and our due diligence because the money that we get is such a small amount that we want to make sure we're getting our best bang for the buck.
Bill Venteicher
Yep. That's great. Yep.
That's being a responsible steward of investing in technology and software for sure. Well, thank you for sharing that background. I think that's really helpful.
So, if you had to rank the top three decision makers when it came to investing in this tool in particular, but then also just when you're going through and looking at any software for the district, I know you're very price conscious for sure. But how do you quantify the value of a remote support tool? I mean, is it the reduction in effort from your team?
Is it the time that you're saving? Was there any particular metric that you use that you show to your leadership that this is what's really moving the needle for you?
Tremain McQueen
Right. So, you said that one of the key things is time saving. One of the first things that we look at, what was going to be the ease of use?
And I will say this, but I'm going to say this. We ran a scheduled training for our staff and I did not attend any of those trainings, but I was able to use the software without having any training the first time I opened it up because it was just really easy to use. And I'm not proud of that because I always tell people they should get connected with training.
Now, one of the other things is the price that the bang for our buck. All the features that we get for what we are paying for was, that was a no-brainer. No-brainer.
Some of the features I'm talking about is the, what's that? The multi, we call it multi, what is it? Multi-interim, multi-support that you can have a particular technician to work on a problem there remote into a computer.
And if they need some assistance from anybody else, they can send an invite to other technicians or whoever, and they all can work on a problem together in a remote session. I mean, who's heard of that? At the same time.
Yeah, at the same time. I mean, so that was really good for me. Jay, anything else?
And the options of connecting to support. Some people, we can send a code or link that they can click on. Even if you haven't installed on your machine, there's still an option that we can get connected to you.
And it goes across platform, which I like that.
JR Williams
Mac, Chrome, yeah, all of it, like you were saying. The biggest part to us was the ease of implementation and the training that was needed for the techs to be able to do their jobs quickly and not mess up classroom instruction. You're right.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah, I bet. Having as little disruption to the actual classroom day has had to be one of the biggest things. What was the biggest thing, JR, that surprised you after the deployment?
JR Williams
How easy it was to implement. I mean, honestly, once we got everything implemented and we started using the program, we're like, wow, we didn't know that was included. We've got all of these more functionalities that I didn't even know was there.
There's new stuff that I'm finding daily.
Tremain McQueen
So it's such a robust program. It might not add the messaging feature. Like I was saying, we were using Xidian before.
It was a really good solution, but one thing that they lacked was a messaging feature. Because when you want to remote to a machine, you send a message, is this a good time that we can get on? And BeyondTrust has this, and it's just been incredible.
Bill Venteicher
I'm so glad that you're finding the depth of features in our platform so valuable. That's really great. I'm sure that there was a lot going into it that you didn't know what you were going to face, and there were some features, it sounds like, that you uncovered during deployment or through just the natural intuitiveness of the dashboard.
If there was another school district in your state or somewhere else in the country that was going to start with BeyondTrust Remote Support today, and you were talking to them, some of the learnings that you have, those little nuggets that you would say, these are the top three places that you should focus on to make this as smooth as possible, or don't forget to take advantage of this feature, whatever, whatever. Maybe J.R., we'll start with you this time.
Tremain McQueen
Jermaine, go ahead and start. Sure, yeah. All right.
Well, one of the things that we did implement was we had a team, we developed a team. We developed the team because I wanted everybody to have a say-so in it, and everybody to have their vision as in, will this work for our district? By implementing that team, we were able to cover all areas, just focusing on, like I was saying, the ease of use.
Are we going to be able to save time? How quick can we log in to get to a machine? What parameters do we need to know?
Those things of that sort. Onboarding is also another thing. We found that working with this team, we were able to get this thing up really quickly because we worked with the Beyond Trust team for onboarding, and they did a marvelous job.
We really felt comfortable and really felt like that this was going to be a really good relationship once we start getting set up, blah, blah, blah, but it wasn't long at all. J.R., I can keep going. What would you add?
JR Williams
I want to add that some of the functionality inside of this program, before we were using Exidium and Komodo, if we had files that we needed to copy from the technician's PC to the end user PC, it would take forever, and if you're lucky, it would never get done. This program, I can copy, I don't know, a gig in minutes. I mean, it's that fast.
I'm able to open up Command Prompt just by clicking a button from the taskbar. I mean, it's so easy. Transfer files, and we actually have some training sessions that we do where we're training the technician and all, and if they want to go back and review it, they have that functionality as well.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah, that's amazing. I imagine that you're dealing with all kinds of bandwidth limitations, from a connected device that's on one of your campuses to somebody that's trying to connect to get it fixed on whatever network they're able to connect to, right? That's one of the very light touches that is really important to being able to access and have things be responsive, even in low bandwidth environments, so I'm really glad to hear that.
Any other recommendation about how you get started and maybe your favorite feature? You've mentioned a couple already.
Tremain McQueen
I mentioned a lot of them. I think I've mentioned all my favorite features already. That's great.
JR Williams
We're coming across more and more as we do it.
Tremain McQueen
Oh, I like the feature that we have the pre-canned. You can do a pre-canned group, and then you can share that group out to who you would like, whether it's a group of people that need to have access to certain computers, and we found that that was really helpful because we have a student information coordinator, and she's over all our data managers at the schools, right? So at times, she would need to remote in to those data managers' computer to just kind of help them through some things, and she has access, but although she's not a technician, we're able to give her certain permissions and a group of people that she can connect to their devices.
So this has been very helpful to us. I mean, I'm telling you, and we even have a child nutrition technician that is solely responsible for the child nutrition computers. She does the same thing.
If she needs to remote into those machines, we created a group for, put permissions on it. She can get to any of those computers without our assistance.
JR Williams
And I want to add that we also have an API with our ticketing system, that they can actually click on a ticket and schedule a time that we can remote into as well.
Tremain McQueen
Bill, I got one more thing. One of the things that I would recommend to districts is they need to make sure that they sign up, if they have Google or whatever, if it's 365, they need to make sure that BeyondTrust uses that, what do you call it, integration. Yeah, I'm telling you, it has made our lives easier.
So you can single sign on, and then it also pulls other information, certain parameters into the program without having to do a whole bunch of setup because it uses the SAML. Yeah, just works. Yeah, that's great.
Absolutely.
Bill Venteicher
Well, I know we talked a little bit about what the day in the life is like, and what the team is facing from a challenge perspective. I'd love to hear kind of what the day in the life is like now. You know, we talked a little bit about the goals.
We talked about the past. So how does it work? You talked about, you know, there's a ticket that's opened.
Can you walk through what a tech's day is like now using our BeyondTrust remote support product? Maybe a specific story, something that you had to do when, you know, there was a system that went down or something.
Tremain McQueen
Okay. Go ahead. Okay.
Well, JR deals more to techs, but I can tell you the stories I've heard. Um, let's talk about me. Um, I don't normally do the, uh, everyday remoting and fixing computers, but like I said, without the training, I'm able to log in and, uh, fix any, uh, any, anything, because sometimes we'll get just random calls to, hey, we got something going on, blah, blah, blah.
But let me tell you what's the, I wish JR could tell you this, but, um, we sometimes have maybe testing issues that, uh, sometimes are, uh, something as simple as they, the sound can't work or printers. Yeah. I'll let you take that printer issues.
JR Williams
The technician is able to, um, log in a beyond trust remote into the desktop and take care of the printer issue instead of having to drive across County. That's simple.
Bill Venteicher
Is, is that, um, sure that that's sheer, just being able to manage things without having to swap out a device temporarily or bringing devices into your main office to work for a simple software update or, or things like that. Like that's got to be an amazing way that it's changed the team's time. You know?
Tremain McQueen
Yeah. Can I add something bill? Um, actually I know we're still talking about, uh, like what does it look like now?
Uh, we've actually saved money with this, this product. And the reason I say that, uh, let's say for example, one of our tech, some of our techs have more than one school. Okay.
We save money and we're able to close out more tickets at a, uh, at a greater time, you know what I mean? Uh, and that's because, you know, the techs can be offsite and still remote back to close out tickets, you know, which is remarkable. They were doing that before, but they were not using the program as much as they're using it now, you know, with the ease of use and all of the other, other features that it, it, it, uh, allows or, or adds to us.
Uh, we have more texts that are using the remote feature now, you know, of course we don't want them to be lazy, but it's available.
Bill Venteicher
No, I think, I think people supporting school districts are some of the hardest working people in this country. I don't think anybody would ever think that. Well, thanks for all of that background and kind of a snapshot of how things are looking today.
You know, one of the other things that I think was really amazing out of our conversation as we were getting to know each other was we talked about how powerful the recording capabilities are and how that's a brand new feature that's usable in so many different ways. Um, tell, tell us a little bit about how that has been used and kind of, I mean, there's multiple things, right? I mean, I, I'd be really curious to hear how your concerns around like protecting the data of your students and staff is helped with being able to understand who accessed what and what did they do and all of that kind of stuff too.
So either one of you that wants to start, that'd be great.
Tremain McQueen
Um, I, I, I'll start a little bit and you can jump on Jr. Um, you, you talk about the access and the permissions, what we've put in place, uh, we kind of put around, like you said, we protect, uh, student data and we also protect, uh, student and staff privacy, you know? So after a certain time, then my texts are not to, uh, use remote feature. If people are at home, you know, they, they don't use the remote features.
So we put these kinds of mechanisms and these kinds of, uh, safeguards in place so that we don't have those issues. Um, yeah. And Jr, you can add to that if we have logging enabled.
JR Williams
So we know if there's an issue, we can go back and look at the logs and troubleshoot or find out what's exactly going on occasion needs.
Bill Venteicher
And Jr, you said that there were issues that were, that would come up sometimes and, you know, the team would try several different things before they figured out the, the best way of solving a particular issue. But you said that the recording was so valuable to go back to train the team and to, and to repeat that, that final solution that worked out the best, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
JR Williams
Absolutely. Um, because we, we, we're, we go through texts, I won't say rapidly, but, um, our texts are constantly moving on better careers and all, but as we get new technicians in and they're not quite up to speed, they can actually go back and review some of this stuff, how installing a printer, how do they take care of the sound issue? How do they take care of an camera issue?
Something that they, they can quick reference instead of saying, Hey, can you take time and drive over here and show me how to do this? They can just log in and look at that video and say, Oh, there you go. That's that'll fix it.
Tremain McQueen
Mm. So it builds our knowledge base. Yeah, absolutely.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah. That's, that's really great. I mean, just being able to have a highlight reel of great troubleshooting and best practices.
Um, I thought that was really neat when you shared that and, you know, just having, um, the ability that you can secure all of those devices and meet the concerns around data privacy and student and staff privacy is really, really great. So I really appreciate you guys sharing that information. So we have a few minutes left here and I want to leave some time for some Q and a also, and for those of you tuning in, I hope that you are, um, taking a look at some of the assets that we've been sharing in the chat.
And there's a couple of poll questions that have come up also, but I think it's really important to share your expertise and maybe take five minutes or so for each of you to kind of say, you know, when you're managing remote support and trying to meet district goals and, and you have such a, a vast ramp up and ramp down and, and so many different sites to support, what's your best guidance that you would provide for effective IT and remote support for, for, for such a large district?
Tremain McQueen
That's a question for me?
Bill Venteicher
It's for both of you.
Tremain McQueen
Okay, go ahead. No, I was thinking that, uh, this was the reflection question for everybody. Um, I would say, um, like definitely having some guidelines, uh, about remote support.
Like I was just sharing, like when to, uh, remote, you know, have some kind of boundaries and, uh, some do's and don'ts, you know, uh, especially with a district this big, uh, we, like I was saying, you know, um, with a district this big, you got to have those kind of, uh, boundaries in place. Um, as far as our district goals, people think that software sometimes may not even, uh, be applicable to helping the district to get to their goals. But if the, everybody knows that the root, you know, where we are right now is the network, is the technology, you know, students are one-to-one, you know, uh, everybody is digital and COVID has changed that for everybody, right?
So, with that being said, us being able to close out tickets in a record, uh, uh, amount of time, us being able to get and, and provide support regardless of what the distance is, yeah, it does help us to, uh, get to your district goals and, uh, because if, if we're, we're good, everybody else is good because we're kind of like the, I mean, you got your instructional foundation, but your backbone technology, if you don't have that, you don't have anything, you know.
JR Williams
When it goes down, you're going to hear it. Absolutely. Right.
That's when you do hear about IT.
Bill Venteicher
Mm-hmm. How about you, J.R.? What guidance would you share with, with your peer in another school district?
JR Williams
Um, just make sure you do planning, just find out what your needs are and how you can best apply them. Like he said, get your best bang for your buck, do your, your research and, and find out what your end goal is and what you need to do. Yeah.
Bill Venteicher
That's awesome.
JR Williams
Yeah.
Bill Venteicher
All right. So, uh, for all of you who have joined us today, we really appreciate you joining. I hope that you found this, uh, this story and, and this, um, amazing feedback and, and expertise from both J.R. and Tremaine, um, useful. Um, we certainly want to answer some more questions for many of you on the call about your specific needs and how, or challenges and how this team was able to, um, tackle a couple of those things. Um, Trevor, are you seeing any questions in the chat right now?
JR Williams
There are currently no questions.
Bill Venteicher
Okay. So please definitely type your question right there in the chat and, um, and we'll get them, we'll get to them. Um, I know we had a couple of questions in the past from, uh, from these types of discussions.
And I think that one of the things that this audience would be really interested in is what kind of feedback have you gotten from the teachers and students or parents and how has this changed their day today since you rolled out, um, an advanced remote support tool like this?
JR Williams
I know the feedback we get from teachers is they're, we're able to, if they're away at a conference and they need assistance, we're able to help quicker and more reliability. They're very thankful for that.
Bill Venteicher
Well, and you have kids clicking things and changing settings and doing all kinds of stuff and there's all kinds of stuff that can get messed up, right? So being able to log in and even to a classroom setting, um, I'm sure is super helpful. Tremaine, what about you?
What have you heard?
Tremain McQueen
Um, the, the same, and a lot of people don't even, they just experienced the, uh, the result of putting such a program like this in place. They don't even, they have no idea of what the name is, but they like the, uh, accessibility that we can get to them anywhere they go. We had a, uh, just, uh, we had a, um, what's his name?
We had a principal that went to Greenland, you know, that, that needed help and we were able to do that.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah, that's great. That really expands the, the capability of the team to be able to support people anytime, anywhere. Right.
That's amazing.
JR Williams
And how easy it is. Yes. Send them a link and they can log into it or not actually log into it, but go to that link.
Give us a, we'll give them a number and we're in it. It's that easy.
Bill Venteicher
Love that. Uh, Trevor, just let me know if we have any questions that pop up.
JR Williams
Yeah, we just got one in the chat. Someone said, um, the best part is that we merge with service now tickets and also save the recordings.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah. Yeah. I love that.
It sounds like someone else that's using the tool to talk a little bit about the ticketing process. JR tickets are opened by staff. And how many tickets do you typically get a day?
JR Williams
Do you think how many tickets you get a day?
Um, 10 to 15.
We have a high school technician on the outside desk and he gets 10, 15 tickets a day. Um, what it is, is the teachers will log that ticket into incident IQ, whether it's the teacher does it or the media center person does it. Um, they will review it and then it will be assigned to the technician for that school.
The technician will then take a look and see what issues they can take care of quickly. And if remotely that'll, um, be taken care of as well. But they'll look, take a look at all those tickets and prioritize from the latest one to earliest one.
Bill Venteicher
That's awesome.
It looks like here we have another question. What quick win did you see early on that made you confident that this was the right decision? We've talked about this a little bit.
Go ahead.
JR Williams
Me personally was the cost. When we started looking at other central programs, team viewers, simply, I mean, seeing some of the things that they had versus what you guys had, some of these other programs did this, but didn't do this. Some of the other programs did this, but didn't do this.
And once we kind of touched on your program, we're like, wow. Okay. Well, does it do this?
Yeah. Does it do this? Yeah.
But there, there may be one or two things that it didn't do, but we're like, overall, this beats it. And then we're like, like I said before, when we started noticing that the more pros than cons, we're like, okay, now let's not get our hopes up. Let's go look at the cost because that's what stops us before.
You know? And once we got a view of the cost, we're like, why haven't we done this sooner? Honestly, we're like, we had no idea we could afford this.
Tremain McQueen
Right. And we also, we almost just gave up, you know, cause JR, he really worked hard. Like I said, he created the team and they decided what features we needed.
And they evaluated each of this, all those softwares and the remote softwares. And we almost gave up. We, and we almost chose one that we've like, okay, well it has the best, but it's, we're not really happy until we got to you guys.
And we were like, you know what? This is it. It's a wrap.
Let's go. Yep. Let's do it.
We were happy at that point. I didn't have, I can stop looking.
JR Williams
Yep.
Bill Venteicher
I love that. Well, Trevor, just checking to see on, I don't see any more on my side. Do you see any more questions on your side?
JR Williams
Not at the moment.
Bill Venteicher
Okay. So I think in the chat, we've shared a little bit more around the details of what is possible with the OnTrust remote support. And I certainly want to thank you both again, JR and Tremaine for joining us and sharing your experience.
Maybe I'll give you both an opportunity just to leave a closing thought with our audience.
Tremain McQueen
I'll start, as I said before, I really think that this is a extraordinary software. I think this is really changed our lives. Like I said, it saved in cost, saved in time.
One of the recommendations that I said before, just making sure that you create a team and you guys look at all the features of any software that you're evaluating, making sure that it's the best bank for your buck. But what is good for me may not be good for you, but we're just sharing with you that how it has really changed our life and impacted us. And we didn't even mention a lot more features that we use like the deployment, the exchanging files from one computer to another.
It's just beyond. So once you get in, I think you will really enjoy this program. And also, the customer service plays a really big part in this.
We have experienced that onboarding team was so good to us, I'm telling you. And even when we call with problems, things that we needed, they were right on tags and they was right on it. So we really appreciate the customer service piece of it.
And so if I had to recommend this program to anyone, I would give it two thumbs up, probably three if I had it. Yeah.
JR Williams
Yeah. I would definitely say, definitely recommend this product. If they give you guys a demo, do your full demo and do everything, ask every question.
These guys are there to help you. And the onboard team was very, very supportive. If they didn't have the answer, they would get the answer.
Right. I think we used the full 30 days, I think it was. But yeah, we used to fold it 30 days.
And again, we were still trying to get over that hump. And we're like, these guys have really come through it for us. So do your due diligence and check the program out because it does a lot.
Bill Venteicher
Yeah. Well, that's amazing. Well, I know if you're anything like us down here in the South, you are all preparing for some crazy weather coming up again.
I'm again, super appreciative of you sharing your story with our audience. We'll give you the time back to go to supporting your staff and to preparing for the weekend. Stay warm.
And thank you for all of you that joined us today on this webinar. And thank you to both J.R. and Tremayne. Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Anthony Jimenez
Thanks for listening. And thank you to our guests, Tremayne McQueen, CTO of Nash County Public Schools, J.R. Williams, Senior Network Engineer of Nash County Public Schools, and moderator, Bill Ventiger, Director of Public Sector Marketing at Beyond Trust. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to Caracast and be sure to listen to our other discussions.
If you'd like more information on how Beyond Trust can assist your organization, please visit www.carasoft.com or email us at beyondtrustmarketingatcarasoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.