THE CHALLENGE
A Savvy, Short-Staffed IT Team with Hundreds of New MacBooks
LHPS needed to re-deploy 300 Apple MacBooks in the summer before the 2021 school season. The school’s IT team is talented and tech-savvy, but was unexpectedly short staffed for the deployment. After a day of work, the team manually provisioned just two devices. With 298 more to go and only a few weeks before teachers started arriving, LHPS was out of time. And after a previous experience working with a different service provider, the team was wary of slow turnaround times, finite service hours, and excuses.
Over the summer, we experienced some unexpected staffing issues. I ultimately only had two team members getting devices ready. It took us all day to do two machines—we had too many projects and not enough people. We needed help.”
Jennifer Baselice, Director of IT, Lake Highland Preparatory School
THE SOLUTION
Flexible Deployment Services From A Trustworthy Partner
Jennifer Baselice, IT Director for Lake Highland Preparatory School, began searching for new solutions. She was referred to Black Glove, the IT managed services provider known for their Apple expertise and dependable deployment, management, and sustainment services. Black Glove set up a provisioning line on the LHPS campus and performed full deployment services for the devices in just 2 days, including unboxing, case removal and re-casing, sterilization, asset tagging, device enrollment, content installation, and ongoing support.
I had so many people speak very highly about the Black Glove team. Beyond just deployment services, they really can handle it all, so they brought in the expertise and confidence we needed.
Jennifer Baselice, Director of IT, Lake Highland Preparatory School
THE RESULTS
Provisioned and Ready in 2 days: A Swift and Seamless deployment
In total, the Black Glove team provisioned, cased, and tagged 300 devices in just 2 days, saving the LHPS team time, frustrations, and cycles.
- Leadership peace-of-mind. Jennifer completely trusted that the project was going to get done swiftly and at the level of expertise needed to make sure the Apple devices were ready for her school.
- Time savings and freed up IT cycles. The weeks saved were put to good use, allowing the IT team to focus on other pertinent back-to-school initiatives and student programs.
- Professional development. By nature of Black Glove’s hands-on philosophy, the LHPS IT team and Black Glove’s provisioning technicians worked side-by-side on the project, providing advice and best practices the internal IT team still uses today.
- A partner for the process. In addition to manual provisioning, Black Glove joined the LHPS team in their existing collaboration space to mitigate deployment blockers and alleviate challenges like prior device ownership personalization, activation lock, and firmware passwords in real time.
- Student success. The most important result of all: Students and teachers were ready for the new school year and empowered with incredible technology for learning, growing, and preparing for the future.
Black Glove’s approach to the problem was collaborative, efficient, and powerful. Nothing got in the way of the ultimate goal. We collaborated and worked together to solve it. I felt very comfortable putting all of my trust in the Black Glove team.
Jennifer Baselice, Director of IT, Lake Highland Preparatory School
What’s next?
After partnering on the full deployment, the conversation turned to efficient workflow support. The Apple-experienced IT team at LHPS is small and mighty, and they’re looking to lean on Black Glove’s full IT expertise and comprehensive services to optimize the full life of their devices—from deployment through ongoing management, and eventually, the buyback and resell process.
Ready to see what Black Glove can do for you?
Explore our IT services for schools, from full deployment and provisioning to ongoing IT management.
About Lake Highland Preparatory School
Lake Highland Preparatory School (LHPS) is the 10th largest independent school in the nation serving 2,000 students with 300 faculty and staff members.
A world-class independent school in Orlando, Florida, the LHPS staff is committed to sustaining excellence in all endeavors. The school uses cutting-edge technology and innovative classroom design to inspire creativity and invention. Their MacBook program began in 2020 (just before the COVID-19 accelerated remote learning), and continued to scale in 2021.
About Black Glove
Black Glove makes it easy to add, manage, and sustain Apple products to businesses and schools. With flexible subscription deployment and management tiers that meet teams where they are, Black Glove provides IT teams a helping hand, hands-on management, or all-hands-on deck for your full device lifecycle—from architecture and deployment to security, networking, and end-of-life transitioning.