achieve
Microsoft’s Commitment to Iowa
In Iowa, a robust economy and effective education system benefit
everyone. That’s why Microsoft—in partnership with public and private
organizations, community leaders, and business partners—is striving
to foster innovation and economic development by improving access
to powerful technology. Discover some of the exciting initiatives
and investments taking place to help the people of your community
achieve their full potential.
Empowering 21st Century Learning
Education is the single most important investment in our future. At the heart of its success are the people involved—the entire learning community—from teachers and students, to parents and administrators. Our goal at Microsoft is to support these people with innovative 21st century tools that enable student-centric, individualized learning; ongoing professional development; and, above all, greater flexibility in how, where, and when we learn.
The vision for 21st century learning is not a distant reality. It’s already taking shape across the United States and within the state of Iowa where Microsoft is supporting initiatives by policy makers and individual institutions that are evolving better ways for people to manage, assess, and deliver education.
Providing the Agility to Innovate and Grow
Microsoft® platform development tools feature consistent standards and built-in
capabilities that provide an easy roadmap for introducing innovative 21st century learning applications. An adaptive platform lets you evolve solutions in step with your needs to provide continual improvements, such as adding VoIP or video, automated management, and wireless security.
Making it Simpler for People to Manage IT
When it comes to 21st century learning, simplicity is crucial. If your IT people are to deploy innovative IT solutions—such as enhanced collaboration, student portals, and help desks—they need an IT environment that is simple and cost efficient to manage. The Microsoft platform is designed with consistent standards, operating systems, and application compatibility tools to make it simple to manage and scale. Microsoft also builds security, identity, and trust into every layer of the computing environment, protecting valuable data and your IT systems themselves.
Delivering Innovative Applications
Once you have a well-managed IT infrastructure in place, you can readily put an applications layer on top that lets you merge your communications to connect students, teachers, and parents to each other and a world of resources. You can also deploy innovative applications that make learning and teaching more collaborative, timely, and relevant. Using the Microsoft Learning Gateway Framework and the Microsoft Office system, institutions can provide individualized portal sites for all stakeholders. From one location, teachers can look up student data; book facilities; see the school calendar; and enter attendance, comments, and student observations. They can also create, edit, and distribute electronic learning materials and assignments.
If 21st century learning is to be a success, then in addition to innovative products and solutions, they need support. That’s why Microsoft offers a suite of professional development programs, preferential pricing, recognition of achievement, and many industry partnerships.
Learn more about Microsoft’s vision, initiatives, and roadmap for 21st Century Learning at www.microsoft.com/education/roadmap.mspx.
Partners in Learning
Partners in Learning is Microsoft’s flagship program in education that seeks to partner with government and education leaders across the U.S. to deliver a portfolio of curricula, tools, and resources designed to advance 21st-century teaching, learning and digital inclusion. These partnerships result in exciting and impactful projects.
The Partners in Learning initiative supports Microsoft’s long-term commitment to advancing the quality of education through innovative uses of technology, helping to empower teachers and students to achieve their fullest potential.
Through these partnerships, educators, students, and communities benefit from the following programs:
• The Innovative Schools program redefines learning through educational reform and innovative technology implementations that meet the
challenges of 21st century learning.
• The Innovative Teachers program brings together communities of teachers to share their innovative ideas and best practices in teaching.
• The Innovative Students program provides affordable and reliable software to qualifying governments purchasing Windows-based PCs for primary and secondary students’ personal use at home.
For more information on Microsoft Partners in Learning, go to
www.microsoft.com/uspil.
Fresh Start for Donated
Computers Program
Fresh Start is a component of the Partners in Learning program and provides schools access to Microsoft software. Fresh Start for Donated Computers provides K-12 schools with Microsoft Windows® 2000
licenses at no charge for donated computers that lack properly installed or licensed programs. For more information, go to
www.microsoft.com/education/ FreshStart/default.aspx.
Tech Soup & Microsoft
Authorized Refurbisher
(MAR)
Microsoft’s nonprofit partner, Tech Soup, donates software products to eligible nonprofits across the U.S. In partnership with Tech Soup, the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher program provides Microsoft Windows Operating Systems to PC refurbishers—including schools— in the United States. Since 2003, TechSoup has provided more than $4.4 million in Microsoft software to nonprofits in Iowa. For more infor-mation, go to https://www.techsoup.
Located in central Iowa, Des Moines Public Schools serves 32,000 students from elementary through high school and has more than 5,000 employees. The school district enhances its curriculum by providing access to computing resources and the Internet, both from home computers and onsite at more than 60 locations.
Supporting that network access presents unique challenges, including ensuring system security. Broad access to network resources means a correspondingly broad opportunity for attack by a variety of malicious agents like computer viruses and malware. Malware is a frequent threat because the school district’s current antivirus software only protects against viruses. The school district needs a solution that can help protect against a wider variety of threats. And because virtually anyone can access the schools’ networks from any location, the school district also wants more in-depth reporting and monitoring options. With improved system visibility, the school district hopes to isolate and remove potential threats before they can affect other locations.
In the search for a more comprehensive approach to client security, Des Moines Public Schools began testing Microsoft Forefront™ Client Security in the fall of 2005. Network specialist William Fulton and his colleagues were interested in a single solution with the potential for better protection against malware and other threats. They also liked the reports that would provide real-time data, allowing them to respond quickly to emerging attacks.
Forefront has integrated well with the school district’s IT infrastructure and also the IT department’s day-to-day workflow. Des Moines Public Schools relies heavily on daily reports to assess threat levels, and Fulton checks the malware report before anything else. “I check the report summary first to see if any computers are infected and I can see immediately whether the malware has already been removed.” He also notes which computer and, if possible, which user is affected to determine if the infection is a repetitive occurrence. After that, he takes steps to remove any remaining threats and develops targeted strategies to minimize the risk of further attack.
The unified protection that Forefront delivers improves protection for Des Moines Public Schools. Integration with existing technologies like Microsoft Active Directory®
simplifies management, as does the familiar, easy-to-use interface. IT staff can perform all administrative functions from one console, including configuration, updates, alerting, and reporting. Finally, in-depth, prioritized reports delivered through the same console helps IT administrators track trends and respond appropriately to potential system threats.
“We manage a huge environment; we are open to the public and we can’t be everywhere at once,” Fulton says. “It really helps that we can see all our systems at a glance and that we will have the data we need to take effective action.”
Read the complete case study at
www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201288.
Des Moines Public Schools Improve Client Security
with an Easy-to-Administer Solution
“We are able to identify and remove most threats, including malware, before they can become a real problem. When Forefront Client Security is fully deployed, we will be a lot less vulnerable.”
William Fulton Network Specialist Des Moines Public Schools
Tri-Center Community Schools Increases
Computer Lab Performance and Reduces
Management Time
The Tri-Center Community Schools district in southwest Iowa has more than 850 students from prekindergarten through high school. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Heartland Technology Solutions, the district recently migrated its network to Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, including the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system and the included Terminal
Server and Windows SharePoint® Services
technologies, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communication and collaboration server,
Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, and Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004.
The district-wide network serves approximately 250 computers, spread throughout the 40-acre campus, in the administration office, in classrooms, and in seven computer labs. At the time the district deployed Windows Server 2003, it also deployed Terminal Server technology (included in the operating system) to two 32-bit servers to provide application access for the computer labs. The district chose Terminal Server to minimize maintenance costs and to centrally manage access to applications.
Terminal Server provides students in the labs with access to all the programs in
Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003. Other accessible applications include typing programs, library software, reading and math software, and an accelerated reading program. As the computer labs expanded use of resource-intensive applications such as [Microsoft Office] Publisher and [Microsoft Office] PowerPoint®, students in some
courses started to encounter application performance issues.
Instead of adding a third server to the two already running Terminal Server, they chose to deploy the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. While the initial hardware acquisition cost was greater for the 64-bit server, the Tri-Center school district would save management and maintenance costs by staying with two servers rather than three. Those savings made the 64-bit Terminal Server solution a more cost-effective choice.
By deploying Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition, Terminal Server in its computer labs, the Tri-Center school district made applications more responsive to
students, reduced deployment time by about 50 percent, and avoided the cost of managing a third server.
The speed and reliability of a server running the Terminal Server feature in Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition, helped reduce deployment and management time, increasing IT productivity by 50 percent, which frees up support staff for more value-added projects. “I can get a server loaded with 64-bit Terminal Server and Microsoft Office out the door in 30 minutes,” Kuhr says. “Before, loading just the operating system on the 32-bit server took 45 minutes to an hour.”
In addition, Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition, delivers the performance required in the lab, while avoiding the need to add a third server. Kuhr estimates that this saves approximately two hours a week of system administration time.
“With Windows Server 2003 x64 on 64-bit hardware, Tri-Center can scale to support more users just by adding RAM as needed,” Kuhr says. “Fewer servers to maintain reduces acquisition, management, and deployment costs.”
Even as the number of users in the Terminal Server environment continues to grow, Heartland Technology plans to keep the server count to two by replacing the 32-bit server in the cluster with another 64-bit server. “It’s a strategic move because, instead of having three 32s, we’ll have two 64s, and we’ll recycle the other servers into the network to upgrade a print server and a mail server,” Kuhr says.
Read the complete case study at
www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=53716.
Notebooks, SharePoint Boost Learning
in Iowa School District
Like schools everywhere, the North Cedar Community Schools district in Iowa works hard to ensure that its 1,000 K-12 students are getting the best education possible. So it was cause for concern when administrators noticed that students entering the North Cedar Middle School as sixth graders weren’t seeing the sort of yearly academic jump they’d experienced in their previous years as elementary school students. “They were merging in from two different schools—it’s a difficult environment, with different kids than they’d seen the previous year,” says Shawn Driscoll, Technology Coordinator for North Cedar Community Schools.
To try to jump-start student performance, district administrators decided to see if a more technology-intensive learning environment might help. Using a grant from the state of Iowa, the district purchased 66 Gateway notebook computers for use
by students. Each notebook was equipped with wireless capability and loaded with Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Office XP.
“Reading and math were our targets,” says Driscoll. “We wanted to see if we could get some growth there. At the same time, we wanted to get the kids more familiar with technology, and we thought we could get them accustomed to things like [Microsoft Office] Word and [Microsoft Office] Excel®—the sorts of things they’re going to be
using in the real world.”
North Cedar teachers assembled a specific curriculum designed to maximize the usefulness of the notebook computers. With a theme of “change,” students studied and researched topics such as changes in weather and political change, building spreadsheets, writing reports, and gathering information on the Internet. “We tried to pull technology into each area and use it,” says Driscoll. “That’s been good for the kids, to use the software and do things in PowerPoint and make a presentation to the class. And the kids love it. They are excited when they grab the laptops and excited until the last day of school.” As an adjunct to the use of notebooks, teachers developed an intranet based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and deployed a product called Microsoft Class Server with help from Microsoft partner BroadEducation. They could use the intranet and SharePoint to customize lessons and worksheets, post assignments, and work on specific student needs. Because it is Web-based, Class Server allows students and teachers to access its content from nearly any location. So students who are ill and miss a class can keep up from home. Moreover, parents can log in to check on assignments and due dates.
The system has reduced the number of lost or misplaced assignments. And teachers are more efficient because they can enter grade information digitally, rather than creating paper reports. SharePoint has proved easy for teachers to use and manage, says Driscoll. After a five-day summer session spent learning SharePoint, they easily adapted to the online and collaborative environment.
North Cedar Community Schools is extending its notebook-based program for a second year, and expects to see tangible improvements in student performance.
Microsoft Support for Iowa’s Students and
Teachers Stimulates Change in Education
Microsoft creates software and solutions that empower educators and students to do what they do best: interact, collaborate and learn. With discounts designed to provide the best software at the best prices to educational institutions, faculty, staff and students—and through special licensing programs, world class consulting services, and educational partnerships—Microsoft is enabling more Iowa students and teachers to use the latest educational software tools.
The Microsoft Campus Agreement and Microsoft School Agreement programs provide schools a flexible and affordable way to run a selection of Microsoft products on an annual subscription basis. Even if the number of computers or users
grows, the school remains fully licensed for the term. Schools also can license students for use of select products on personal or institution-owned computers checked out to a student for the school year. Plus, the school automatically receives the benefits of Microsoft Software Assurance Membership.
With Microsoft transactional licensing programs, Microsoft Academic Open License and Microsoft Academic Select License, institutions acquire perpetual licenses while eliminating the costs and packaging of retail software. They also have the option of enrolling in Software Assurance, which entitles them to product upgrades during the agreement term, E-Learning courses, and more.
Learn more about Microsoft’s licensing programs for educational institutions at
www.microsoft.com/education/howtobuyinstitution.mspx.
Microsoft Provides More Than $14.5 Million
in Cash and Software to Iowa Communities
Since 2003, Microsoft has given and matched employee gifts totaling more than $14.5 million in cash, curriculum, and software in the state of Iowa. Microsoft and its employees support community organizations, educational institutions, and human service agencies across Iowa with grants of cash, software, and curriculum, as well as employee volunteer hours.
Microsoft also gives to Iowa communities through national community partnerships. For instance, in a two-year partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor, One-Stop Career Centers around the country will receive a total of $400,000 in cash and software support.
Extending Academic Discounts to
Students and Educators
Iowa educational institutions also can use Microsoft licensing programs to provide licenses to students and educators to support technology usage from school to the home.
Institutions that participate in the Campus Agreement or School Agreement programs can include the Student Option. With the Student Option, these institutions can license students for a selection of products on an annual basis and provide usage rights to the latest releases of the software.
Another option for extending academic discounts to students and faculty is through the Microsoft Student Select program. Participating institutions can use their volume licensing discounts to acquire software licenses, and then pass on the licenses—and the savings—to students and faculty.
The Student Select program enables students (through their parents if they are a minor) and faculty to buy single Microsoft products for home use at a discount of over 85 percent*. The program makes it easy and affordable for students and faculty to work on school projects on a home computer using the same Microsoft programs used at school. To find out if your institution is participating in the Campus or School Agreement Student Option or Student Select, contact your institution’s technology administrator’s office, media library specialist, computer bookstore, or Iowa Area Education Agency (AEA).
Acquiring Software for K-12 Schools
Iowa Area Education Agencies (AEAs) are regional service agencies, which provide school improvement services for students, families, teachers, administrators, and their communities. Established by the Iowa Legislature in 1975, the AEAs partner with public and accredited private schools to help all children reach their potential.
The AEAs formed the Iowa Educators Consortium (IEC) to provide voluntary, volume purchasing for K-12 schools, bringing all statewide school purchasing programs under one legal and fiscal umbrella. Current Microsoft software licensing programs offered by IEC include School Agreement, Academic Select License, and offerings for students and teachers.
For more information about IEC, please visit www.iec-ia.org. For more information about
Iowa AEAs, please visit www.iowaaea.org.
*Stated discount based on comparison of estimated retail prices of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 full retail packaged product to estimated academic retail prices of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 CD through the Student Select program. Actual reseller prices may vary.
New Messaging System Improves Service
and Streamlines Adminstration
From constantly changing student accounts, the demands of faculty members, and the need for security and ease of use, running an on-campus IT environment challenges any university. The University of Iowa is no exception. Its 29,000 students, 1,700 faculty members, and 13,000 staff members required and expected 24x7 attention to their IT needs. To make things even more complicated, some IT tasks were handled by a central server bank, while others were handled by localized systems closer geographically or academically to their users. With all of that, the university’s IT expenses total more than $100,000,000 per year, and about 800 FTE employees perform IT-related work. So when the university began to upgrade its IT system, it searched for tools that would allow it to manage a wide range of duties—from course management to account provisioning and de-provisioning—quickly and easily.
The university had a Unix-based e-mail system, and some parts of their IT community lobbied for an open-source solution. But part of the campus already had adopted Microsoft Exchange Server to handle its e-mail and communication needs. “They really liked it,” says Guy Falsetti, the university’s Manager for Windows Services. “And people were coming to us and saying, ‘Why are you supporting two systems?’“
Now, Exchange and Microsoft Active Directory form the backbone of the university’s messaging system. In making the transition to those tools, the University of Iowa solved several problems. Previously, for instance, account authentication was scattered at several locations. “That made it hard to figure out what system a person was on,” explains Falsetti. “That was really problematic for us. But with Active Directory as the core of our authentication engine, all the accounts are in a central location and Active Directory handles the account provisioning and things like that.” Another benefit was that, oddly enough, wireless users had been unable to access their e-mail accounts from off-campus or sometimes even when they moved around on-campus. That was because the SMTP authentication for e-mail could be handled only by one mail relay, and if a user couldn’t access that relay, they had to change their SMTP protocols to a new location. Now, with Active Directory and Exchange, SMTP authentication handles all accounts regardless of the user’s location.
Users of the Exchange and Active Directory system also like the ability to use Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access for anywhere access to e-mail. And the ability to manage calendars online also has proven popular.
The use of well-tested Microsoft solutions also allowed the university to switch to its new system quickly. It began roll-out of the Exchange-based message system in January 2007, and by June already was allowing new students to register for e-mail accounts from a self-serve Web page. Falsetti says he believes the new system also will allow the IT staff to manage infrastructure and deliver services more efficiently. “We want to make sure we get the right information to the right people at the right time,” he says.
“We want to make sure we get the right information to the right people at the right time.”
Guy Falsetti Manager for Windows Services University of Iowa
Iowa Community College Links Faculty and
Students with Web Portal
Students at Iowa’s Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) have the same problem as students everywhere: When it’s time to graduate, it’s time to look for a job. It used to be that students would drop into a jobs counseling center, and an advisor would riffle through different paper file folders matched to the college’s 75 different career-oriented degree programs. It was a slow and inaccurate process.
Now, thanks to a new information system the college has implemented using tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, students can access a Web-based job list that’s fully searchable and constantly updated. They can review jobs, find application information, and more. “It’s so-o much easier for students to find job information now,” says Ann Watts, Instructional Design Coordinator for DMACC.
Across its six-campus network, which serves approximately 27,000 students in its degree programs while offering continuing education to more than 33,000, DMACC has seen big benefits from its educational portal. The portal—called “MyDMACC”—is an outgrowth of the college’s educational mobility goals. DMACC’s system-wide wireless network supports both academic and administrative needs, linking students, faculty, and administrators in a way that wasn’t formerly possible. “It’s all about making education accessible to everyone, anytime, anywhere,” says Watts.
MyDMACC is designed to help connect Des Moines Area Community College students, faculty members, and administrators to one another as well as to the outside world. In addition to the job-hunting site, for instance, MyDMACC has a portal that focuses on intramural athletics. Students can find information about various sports, including game times and locations, and complete rule books. Employees are automatically enrolled in a Recreation and Wellness portal, which has tips and advice on everything from yoga classes to heart-health diets.
West Campus math department chairperson, Dan Petrak, uses the MyDMACC portal to supply students with digitized classroom notes, lecture videos he records and uploads, links to class materials, electronic texts, and more. “Students really expect that these days,” he says. “They want to be able to access materials when it fits with their schedule.” MyDMACC has proven easy to use and to learn, both for students and his teaching colleagues, Petrak reports.
Because DMACC is part of a wider Iowa state community college system, school
administrators must stay in touch with their peers. Here a new legislative portal comes in handy, as it helps keep DMACC and the state’s other 14 community colleges up to date on legislative reports, bills status, and best practices for communicating with legislators. “When there are 15 schools that are far apart it’s hard to get together, and everyone wants to make sure they have the same information,” says Watts, who manages the portal. “[With
the Legislative Portal] all the information that used to be scattered around is in one place where everyone can see it at the same time.”
DMACC also co-sponsors two technology and educational initiatives—the Iowa SharePoint Users Group (www.sharepointia.com) for general business users, and the SharePoint Education Users Group (www.sharepointedu.com) for education users. The SharePoint Education Users group brings together Microsoft SharePoint users to discuss project-based learning, best practices for deploying technology in classrooms, educational gaming, and other subjects. Microsoft, Intel, Inetium (a Microsoft partner and SharePoint specialist), and others sponsor these programs along with DMACC.
Microsoft SharePoint Services has helped make MyDMACC effective and usable because of its ability to work with a wide range of hardware—from mobile phones to Tablet PCs to Pocket PCs—and because of its short learning curve. Most sites on MyDMACC are operated by the campus department stakeholder, and they can easily update sites as needed.
“MyDMACC opens us up to a much more collaborative way of doing business,” explains Watts. “In the educational community, we’re all about working together, and MyDMACC really helps with that.”
Iowa Department of Human Services Breaks
Up IT Silos with Data Warehouse
The objective of Iowa’s Department of Human Services (DHS) is to positively influence the individuals who come to the agency for help. Whether the constituent is the child of parents struggling with a drug addiction, a woman in need of pre-natal healthcare, or an aging man struggling to balance the need for expensive prescription drugs while affording room and board, the true mission of DHS is to meet the constituent’s most basic quality of life needs and to reverse, whenever possible, the destructive cycles of behavior that can destroy lives, families, and communities.
Like many government agencies across the United States, the IT environment at Iowa’s DHS is fragmented, disconnected, and non-interoperable. Historically, case workers’ workloads require them to log on to and off of various incompatible systems over the course of an otherwise busy day.
DHS found that most people who need the agency’s services often have multiple
challenges that other departments of the organization need to address. “DHS employees want data and information available at a moments’ notice,” says Mosena. “At the same time they also want to make sure that the data available—often very sensitive information about constituents—is kept secure.”
“In the educational community, we’re all about working together, and MyDMACC really helps with that.”
Ann Watts Instructional Design Coordinator Des Moines Area Community College
After performance testing and additional evaluation, DHS decided to deploy a data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server™ database software to break down silos of information that have historically been an obstacle to case workers doing their jobs and provide familiar browser-based user interfaces and search query capabilities.
“Here is what amazes me,” says Mosena. “This entire system—all of the equipment that we have purchased to date and the software licensing—has added up to approximately $750,000. To some folks that sounds like an enormous amount of money. But in this environment, we currently have between 40 to 45 terabytes of data capacity, a load-balanced Web application environment, a couple data staging servers, a few data mart database servers, and two SANs—with the equipment located in two separate state-run data centers for better disaster recovery planning. I don’t know of any other platform, either hardware- or software-based, where you can get that capacity for $750,000. That is phenomenal. Most companies would look for at least $1.5 million to get the same capacity. More typically you would double that to $3 million.”
The major gains for this system also play out on the operational front. “As you can tell, this is an exciting and very cost effective way of handling a large department’s data needs in which the requirements are very different for the various parts of the organization,” says Mosena. “We can put this data in one repository and we can segment it in such ways that we have enhanced security on who can access what data—even down to the data element if we want.”
This means that if a person has authority to access Medicaid data, the role-based security grants access—while also preventing the worker from accessing other areas, such as child welfare, child support, or income maintenance data.
“Our mission was clear; we had to be able to meet the individual needs of each area within DHS and create the infrastructure and processes that enabled data warehousing to become an integrated companion component of our operational systems. By having an enterprise view in a cooperative, process-oriented approach, we have eliminated technology as a barrier without upheaval of our operational systems. Our business partners have choices. There are still legal issues and policy concerns about sharing data, as there should be—but now it is a business decision,” says Mosena.
“We currently have between 40 to 45 terabytes of data capacity, a load-balanced Web application environment, a couple data staging servers, a few data mart database servers, and two SANs. I don’t know of any other platform, either hardware- or software-based, where you can get that capacity for $750,000. That is phenomenal”
Steve Mosena CIO Iowa Department of Human Services
Heartland Technology Solutions
Headquarted in Iowa, Heartland Technology Solutions (HTS) provides products, solutions, and services to many school districts and colleges throughout the state. HTS is an authorized education reseller for many different technology vendors and enjoys strong relationships with Microsoft, HP, 3Com, SonicWall, and many other key vendors providing solutions for the educational marketplace. HTS takes pride in working with schools to make technology products and solutions available, maintainable, and affordable. HTS works with Technology Coordinators, AEAs, and Schools Boards to do their part to further the educations and future careers of Iowa students. Learn more at
www.heartlandtechnologies.com.
Software Plus
Software Plus has developed and nurtured strategic partnerships with Microsoft and academic customers for more than 15 years. As an academic Large Account Reseller (LAR) since the program’s inception, their academic department is extremely well-versed in the Microsoft volume licensing programs.
Software Plus began working with the state of Iowa through the Iowa Educator’s Consortium in 2000. Since that time, they have been providing licensing information, support, and volume license pricing to all K-12 public and private schools within the state. Software Plus is headquartered in Saint Louis, MO and is a certified woman-owned corporation. Learn more at www.softwareplusonline.com.
Microsoft Services
Microsoft and our partners both support and provide integrated applications that enable staff and students to teach and learn in innovative ways, while streamlining school administration. These applications leverage the Microsoft platform, meet industry standards, and are aligned with the continually changing needs of educational institutions.
Microsoft has a world class consulting organization available to help education customers design and deploy Microsoft solutions. Through close partnerships with local expert technology partners, the Microsoft Services team ensures deep knowledge of Microsoft products and technologies. This knowledge is used to architect and deploy solutions in the most optimal manner, making them manageable for IT staff and adaptable and extensible for end users. Learn more at www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservices/.
Thousands of Microsoft Partners Build Technology Solutions in Iowa
Microsoft works with thousands of local partner companies that build technology tools and services on the Microsoft platform, including more than 50 Microsoft Authorized Education Resellers specially trained to sell Microsoft Academic Edition software solutions.
Nearly 100 Microsoft Certified Partners are working throughout Iowa, and 23 have earned the Gold certification.
Visit the Microsoft Public Sector Partner Solution MarketPlace at www.microsoft.
com/industry/publicsector/ partnersolutionmarketplace/ to
locate a Microsoft partner specializing in education and government.
© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Active Directory, Excel, Forefront, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Windows, Windows Server, Windows Server System, and Windows Vista are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
The information in this document represents the current view of Microsoft on the content. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTY, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT.
