Read how SureDeploy helped St Catherine’s roll out new Microsoft Surface devices to students in three weeks, modernising its endpoint management.
“We now rely on SureDeploy to automatically test and package all our devices, drivers and applications, so every rollout and upgrade runs smoothly. SureDeploy has considerably reduced everyday administration time and given us the ability to focus on other areas of the school’s technology infrastructure.”
SureDeploy, used to roll out and manage a fleet of 220 new Microsoft Surface devices in just two months.
St Catherine’s School Sydney is Australia’s oldest Anglican school for girls, founded in 1856.
Today, the school welcomes day students from Kindergarten to Year 12 and boarding students from Year 7 to Year 12. Technology plays an important role in helping girls reach their potential at school and beyond.
St Catherine’s is Australia’s oldest Anglican girls’ school, dedicated to developing young women of character, intellect and purpose.
The school consistently ranks among NSW’s top performers, placing 24th in the 2024 HSC.
A broad curriculum, with co-curricular programs in sport, performing arts and leadership.
A STEM and technology curriculum, including Computing Technology, Design and Technology, and Applied STEM.
A future-focused school, St Catherine’s prides itself on giving students a high-quality technology experience. Reliable, quality devices are essential to support students’ learning at school, and to give them the skills they need to thrive in their future careers.
The school’s approach to device leasing and management had grown organically with the needs of students and staff. But keeping 1,500+ devices running well and secure had become overwhelming for the internal ICT team. New devices took about six to eight weeks to provision and deploy, and ongoing maintenance tied up IT resources.
The school asked Microsoft for advice on the best technology and partner for the job, and Microsoft referred them to SureDeploy.
In keeping with the school’s focus on innovation, the ICT team wanted to roll out brand-new devices to its Year 5 and Year 7 students. They decided to wait until the Microsoft Surface Pro 8 range became available in Australia.
That happened just a few weeks before the start of the school year. With SureDeploy, the team still made it happen, rolling out the new devices to the entire cohort in three weeks. Without SureDeploy’s automation of Intune, that would have been impossible.
The school set up a new device management strategy built around the needs of each year group. From Kindergarten to Year 4, students use Surface devices that stay on campus. In Year 5, each student gets a brand-new Surface Laptop to take home and treat as their own. This device is refreshed in Year 7. Students in Years 10 to 12 can bring their own laptops.
Moving to SureDeploy gave St Catherine’s several significant benefits.
Devices now deploy faster, without overloading the ICT team, who are free to focus on other areas of the school’s technology.
Security patches can be scheduled, deployed to a pilot group, then pushed to the wider student groups. The ICT team can rest easy knowing security vulnerabilities are constantly monitored and fixed. This covers Windows devices and all of the school’s applications.
SureDeploy keeps every application in the school’s Intune environment and on its devices up to date. It automatically pushes the latest versions into Intune and out to the devices, so every student device always runs the latest version of every learning application.
If a device has a problem, it can be swapped for a new one, without the student losing any of their cloud-based files or settings.
This has greatly reduced the workload on the St Catherine’s help desk, and let the team focus on more strategic improvements.
“While St Catherine’s has always provided a very high quality technology experience to students, the benefit of SureDeploy has really been from an IT administration and security perspective. The automation and rapid deployment of applications, policies, updates and patches has been invaluable.”Brendan El-Hadi, ICT Services Manager, St Catherine’s School
Images sourced from the St Catherine’s School website.
Send through a few details and we'll come back to you, usually within one business day.