Derby Public Schools, in Derby, Kansas, a city of 25,000 people, has over 6,000 students, 1,400 employees, and a daily average of 7,000 users on desktops, laptops, PCs, and Macs in four support buildings, and nine elementary and three secondary schools. Derby had an outdated, expensive, and inefficient infrastructure of different kinds of old and new desktops, many underutilized physical servers, and applications loaded onto the hard drives of desktops located in many different buildings. It was difficult for Derby Schools’ small IT department to meet curriculum goals for technology and education, and maintain the complex distributed computing environment in good times. The situation became even more daunting when the economy slowed and state education funding was scaled back.

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