From June of 2002 through October of 2002, our High School District has retained the services of NovoSoft, a multi-national high-tech network and software engineering consulting services firm, with offices in the Silicon Valley and U.S. Headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Our District is into the third year of a very ambitious 8-year new building and modernization program. We have invested a substantial amount of our bond money and budget in the design, installation and deployment of sophisticated data networks in both the new and remodeled facilities, employing state-of-the-art Level 3 switching equipment and WAN architectures.

With the infrastructure in place, we needed high-level expertise in:

1) Configuring the new routers, switches and infrastructures at each LAN to provide optimal performance, throughput and reliablity.

2) Physically bridging the District Office and the two high school sites via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to allow District-wide data services and applications.

And

3)Implementing a consistent, District-Wide approach to Active Directory schemas, authentication and file-sharing and personal shares for each District administrator, staff member and student.

Novosoft was able to provide us with two very senior engineers with all of the prerequisite skills needed to accomplish the above tasks. Prior to the actual commencement of the work, Novosoft did a thorough analysis of our requirements, and subsequently provided a detailed proposal with tasks, milestones, schedules and time estimates.

At each milestone completion date, the Novosoft engineers provided a complete summary of their work-to-date as well as specific documentation for all work completed or in progress. Throughout the course of this project, the Novosoft engineers made themselves available to our District Staff on a 24 by 7 hourly basis. Their responsiveness, professional pride in work and ability to quickly identify and troubleshoot unexpected issues allowed us to complete our project much more quickly than we had ever anticipated. We also were able to complete the project within budget because the original estimates of work provided to us were exactly the number of hours we paid for.

While our initial project is now complete, our District intends to retain Novosoft on a time and materials basis for future work. As the Director of Technology for the Los Gatos-Saratoga High School District, I would not hesitate to recommend their services to other School Districts.

Dan Cochran
Director of Technology
Los Gatos-Saratoga High School District
e-mail: dcochran@lgsuhsd.org

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