Making everyday life easier with small IT investments

Big and complex IT projects are not always necessary to improve daily life at school. A webbased workstation monitoring system developed by Opinsys is a good example. Based on uptodate information delivered by the system the school can see the real utilisation rate of all the computers any given day. This allows the school to target both investment and development to the areas that are most important.

The service has an interface with a graphic description of all the devices in use. “We can already see the benefits. It is great to see at a glance that all 400 workstations are turned off at the end of the day” says Hannu Särkkä who leads the communications and networking unit at Kasavuori School. The development is ongoing and one of the upcoming features is the possibility to recognise workstations that are not effectively used. “The usage will be more effective when we can place less used workstations in locations where they will be used more.” says Särkkä.

Opinsys and the city of Kauniainen have been partners for a long time. Opinsys has carried out workstation maintenance as a service to Kauniainen Finnish school authority since 2007. The cooperation has become deeper over the years. Since the basic IT has worked extremely well, the school has been able to allocate resources for development. “Teachers have been able to focus on teaching and these small, but important development projects make a big difference in smooth running of the daily life at school.” notes Särkkä.

The companies benefit from good cooperation as well. “Working in collaboration with an active school is very rewarding. We can be a part of creating something new when our partner has the role of a frontrunner.” says Jouni Korhonen from Opinsys about the many years of co operation with the city of Kauniainen schools.

Open source technologies occupy an important role in both city of Kauniainen and Opinsys solutions development. Development projects from both entities are also published as open source code. As this is the case, all products of this development project will also be public and free to be developed further. The interface has been published as part of the Dream School Services which is financed by the Finnish Board of Education.

Project page and source codes: https://github.com/opinsys/school-status/
Kauniainen Dream School view: https://status.opinsys.fi/kauniainen/desktop/widget/historygraph