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. 

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

CDW Amplified for Education provides Google support for those tough questions that don't have a straightforward answer. They offer training and tools to enhance the Google Workspace environment for our district. We also purchase licenses through them. Amplified provides user training and third-party tools for the Google environment that Google doesn't provide.

Amplified's training is top-notch. They offer certifications and run admin boot camps, which are fantastic for getting my team up to date. Their training team does an excellent job of getting us educated. Though I've already taken the class, I go back periodically because Google constantly changes features. 

There are significant changes every month or so, so you need to pop back into their training. They will go over what's new. You need to attend these training sessions because Google has a business mentality instead of an education mindset. When you go through their training, they'll tell you about all the stumbling blocks or hazards you may encounter because Google made some changes. 

Chrome Gopher is the primary way you will handle your Chromebook infrastructure. It allows you to make mass changes to descriptions and asset tags in your organizational units. You can do everything that will enable you to make these gigantic fleet moves and keep your Chromebooks where they should be. It's a fantastic tool that Google does not provide. Google only allows you to modify one Chromebook at a time, but it's different when you have 21,000 and need to change 4,000. There is much to maintain, and you can't manage Chromebooks without tools like Gopher. 

Gopher allows us to put all our users on a nice little list and look at the attributes of their accounts, such as passwords, associated email addresses, etc. You can reset passwords or configure the account to reset on the next login. Gopher lets you reassign Chromebooks to organizational units as your students move through grade levels. 

When students leave your district in June, you can build a customized Google Sheet of all users and compare that with a list of seniors to suspend all the accounts that have graduated. Your console doesn't have a way to do this, so you need to go through every senior and manually move each account one by one. It isn't feasible to manage people like that. These tools are essential for a K-12 environment. You simply can't run a Google Workspace environment for education without a product like this. 

Amplified allows you to structure your users and Chromebooks with Gopher tools, providing instant infrastructure that can be properly managed. You also need a content filter that adjusts to the student's grade level. My elementary school students need different rules than high school students. High school kids can view sexual education materials but not kindergarteners. It empowers the teachers by creating an infrastructure that they can count on and don't have to worry about. Everything is built on that.

The first problem we were trying to solve was how to better manage our Chromebooks within the Google Admin console. We use a lot of Amplified for Education's Google Workspace-related tools for functionality that we don't have in Google Workspace. 

CDW's tools really improve our processes with the extra functionality they provide. That has been the biggest benefit for us. CDW has identified areas where Google has not been able to offer functionality to school districts, things that we really need to manage the Google Workspace, and they've developed their own add-ons to it. And they really do a great job of supporting our use cases for those tools. We subscribe to about every tool they have because they add value and make my job easier.

They also improve our efficiency and insight. That's the bottom line. Those are the two main things that we don't really have a good way to accomplish without their tools. We can use Little SIS tools to turn a lot of processes that might be manual or one-offs into bulk updates. And both the Little SIS and Chrome Gopher packages give us insight into what students or teachers might be doing, and that helps us support them.

The main benefits were pretty much immediate after we went with CDW, and then we found little tidbits over time by exploring the tools and working with the Amplified IT support staff. But we knew what we were purchasing and what the benefits were and are happy with our purchase and the product.