Colorado School Finds Great Benefits in Microboards USB Towers

How do you support 30,000 students using 16,000 computers across the Colorado Springs School
District? Just ask Bill Fisher.

This summer alone, 2,200 of those computers will be replaced with new models, and each 
needs to be loaded with the materials used in meeting the district's education and technology goals.
Simultaneously, the rest of the computers will still have diagnostic and update needs. So when Bill
sends his team of field technicians out he’ll be sure they each carry the latest materials in the easiest
format possible: a USB thumb drive.

To copy the materials, Bill recently acquired a 7-target USB copier through Adorama, a long-time value-
added reseller of solutions from Microboards Technology. The CFD-USB-07 from Microboards costs
$895 and requires no computer to make copies; a drive with the materials already loaded is placed in
one slot, and the remaining 7 slots receive an exact copy at the push of a button.

That means that in a matter of minutes, each field technician is equipped with the latest and greatest,
whether it is a software update or a troubleshooting tool. “We use flash drives for anything and
everything”, says Bill. In fact, thanks to his former background in law enforcement, flash drives are even
used for security issues. ISO images are captured on the drives as part of the first response to a threat
and Bill writes custom routines for assessing issues that are distributed on the drives.

Is Bill happy with the solution? Absolutely. He has even enjoyed working with technical support; when
a supplier of blank flash drives began providing a thumb drive that didn’t handle bootable files well,
Microboards’ technical support jumped in right away to enlist support from the supplier and start
working toward a solution. “There’s such a wide range of flash drives out there, and compatibility is
very important to what we are doing,” said Bill Fisher.