CDW Google Workspace for Education Reviews

We're a Google Workspace for Education school and use the solution for that suite of services. We use it to conduct security audits of our Google environment and for staff development through training courses. This helps us develop a knowledge base and keeps us up to date so that we can manage our Google environment as accurately and efficiently as possible.

As a small to medium-sized school district, we don't have a large tech department full of staff, there are only two of us. CDW Amplified for Education allows us to maximize our workload. To do all the required jobs for our students, teachers, and devices, we need to work hard and know what we're doing. We found that taking the time to go through the training courses, security audits, or attend CDW Amplified learning sessions, helps us do our jobs better and more quickly than if we had to figure it out and manage it all ourselves. The product allows us to maximize our impact on our environment for our students.

Amplified is deployed across our entire environment; we have five district buildings, including our district office. We use a Google environment, so the solution supports the whole district, though we have a single domain and a single console to manage Google. We have 1,700 students and around 250 staff members, so there are approximately 2,000 end users. 

The willingness of Amplified IT to educate my small staff on a wide variety of Google-based tools is the most significant improvement to the organization. Amplified learns all the information for us and then disseminates the information in a structured package that helps us know precisely what will be addressed. The intended audience is identified for each learning webinar, which helps us focus and save time on training. For a small department carrying out various jobs across the board, the solution helps us stay sane and manage our Google environment appropriately. We could easily be overwhelmed without Amplified's support. 

The "foot in the door" that CDW Amplified for Education had was around the Google Administrator console audit for all of our settings in Google Workspace. They make sure to point out anything concerning, in every little nook and cranny, regarding how we are configured, and offer suggestions for changes or best practices.

We did the audit for the same reason that anybody else does one. You don't know what you might be missing. You don't want to find out, after you've had a breach or something bad happened, that you didn't have things configured correctly. You want to be proactive with those issues.

The result of the audit process is that it can give you quite a bit of work to accomplish, and that led to some of the more in-depth engagements that we've had with them. In responding to things from the audit, they made available some tools, like their Gopher suite, that helped our organizational units meet their recommendations to be effective.

We've also engaged with them on significant projects such as email migrations from Exchange to Gmail and the directory sync from Active Directory to Google called GCDS. They helped us optimize and manage those with automation.

We work regularly with them on a weekly, if not daily, basis. We're in touch with them on different things that we have cooking, whether it's troubleshooting and responding to customers or planning for the changes, project-based things, that we're going to put in place over the summer.

The first benefit has been a shorter time to resolution.

Also, it is said that nobody talks about security until there's a breach, but we do a lot of work to prevent any issues from happening. We've had no significant issues with abuse or breach in our Google system. No news is good news there.

We are currently applying the results of and the suggestions from the audit, and responding to support requests from 12 schools and three administrative buildings across our district's footprint. There are a handful of us who interface directly with CDW, five or six of us on the IT team, but the solutions that they have provided in response to support requests have impacted a broad range of people. Every one of our 1,500 staff members and 10,000 students has been impacted by our work with CDW.

We are always trying to put a good, powerful set of tools at our teachers' fingertips. As Google is constantly changing and evolving, we want to take advantage of the new things that are added to empower our teachers. But, we don't want to dive into the deep end of the pool without proper knowledge of how that might impact things, or what unforeseen circumstances might come up if we change a setting.

The collaborative gets us into monthly updates. I could follow the Google Workspace Updates blog, and I do, but the monthly CDW Education Collaborative applies those updates to education and provides forums and context for discussion around how other schools are doing things. That can lead to why we may or may not want to enable a feature out of the gate. Without that, we would be much slower to respond.

I first started using it to manage Chromebooks in large numbers, for doing things in batches with them. We then used CDW Amplified for Education to migrate all of our server files to the cloud, and we added Gopher for Users. The next year we added Little SIS and the year after that, Little SIS Premium with sync.

CDW Amplified for Education enables us to manage the Chromebook fleet quickly and easily, and spreadsheets give us the opportunity to use formulas too. For example, we can use index match to merge data into the Chromebook fields and use that to update. The Admin console has been awesome.

We use Workspace for Education for Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. It's also our LMS. Google Classroom is the biggest thing, and we use Google Meet for parent-teacher conferences when we can't have them in person. 

Google offered many of these services for free during the pandemic, and we wanted to continue to use them. Many of them are only available with a subscription, which also gives you the investigation tool and any other features in the admin console that the free version doesn't offer.

The platform covers about 1,000 students and 150 school employees. 

Amplified has something called the CDW Education Collaborative, which I paid to be in. They go over every new Google update in great detail multiple times over the month, and there are recorded webinars with slide decks that you can watch at your leisure. That is amazing because there are things that administrators may need to adjust. It also helps me educate my end users and show them features that they weren't aware of. 

If I can't figure something out, I go to the CDW Education Collaborative and post my question or search to see if someone else had a similar issue before contacting Google support. It's another source of information that I can go to and troubleshoot with other admins. 

Amplified is our provider of Workspace for Education Plus, and our teachers would be lost without it. 

We use them for troubleshooting purposes and we use their Little SIS product, which integrates with and builds and maintains our Google Classrooms and the students in and out of the classrooms.

The North American Google Tech Collaborative, all of the message boards and blog posts, and all of their monthly updates in the meetups, are invaluable in helping us know what's coming up with Google. That whole piece is great. If we have an issue or something we haven't seen before, there's a good possibility that either one of the Amplified staff, the developers, or one of the other members of the Collaborative has seen it before.

And our teachers benefit from the features of Amplified, such as Little SIS. They don't have to manage their classroom rosters and their classrooms are already built for them. And I manage them twice a day on a daily basis, which means they don't have to focus on that part. It just works for them and they can do other things that are more important to their teaching.

We primarily use the solution for a Google audit and for the added tools provided to integrate with the Google admin console. The first problem we tried to solve was to find a way to integrate with the Google admin console, in particular using tools that allow us to rapidly onboard and offboard Chromebooks. We had a good experience doing that, so we started to use the platform to audit for blind spots we may have had in our security settings.

We're a school district, so technically, the deployment is one district, but we have three different school buildings. We have under 1,500 end users. 

Amplified improved our organization by validating areas where we are on track and by helping us reduce our blind spots. The world is changing so fast, so it's nice to have another set of eyes, a third party outside of the district, that can tell us when we're on the right track and alert us about security risks.

We primarily use the solution to either problem-solve or streamline processes we are already doing. We've used several tools to assist in distributing Chromebooks and setting up accounts and groups. Much of our engagement with the solution has been for making our processes more efficient. 

Amplified for Education is deployed over 12 sites and is focused out of our district office. 

As well as transitioning from a Microsoft-centric district to a Google-centric one, we have almost 100% participation in our Google Classroom. We now use Gmail throughout the district, and the transition was smooth, thanks to Amplified. The initial setup went very well, and we had significant assistance along the way.