CDW Amplified for Education Reviews

We primarily use CDW Amplified to manage Google Workspace for Education, and we implemented the product to make management easier.

The solution saved us a lot of time on administration.

Regarding Amplified for Education for empowering our teachers, it helps ensure the process is managed, smooth, and working for them. Teachers don't have to worry about management because we take care of that for them. 

We can access North American Google Technical Collaborative with Amplified, a great resource that utilizes peer resourcing. 

Regarding the solution's tools, the most valuable feature currently is the space and storage monitoring. 

Amplified for Education's flexibility and customizability are pretty good; we can make feature requests, and they're usually very open to our suggestions.

We use the Google for Education Audit feature. We recently just completed one, and it's a beneficial service for diagnosing problems and recommending solutions. We aim to conduct an audit every two years.  

The Little SIS Premium feature is a very helpful tool for helping IT admins manage their infrastructure. It simplified the process a little and is better than relying on the admin counselor.  

We also use Little SIS to perform bulk updates with Gopher for Chrome; it's very straightforward to use, pulls excellent information, and the Gopher component is handy too.  

Overall, Amplified is a precious resource for helping us work with Google Workspace for Education. I would find it difficult to manage that without its tools and assistance.  

A web interface for some of the information stored on Sheets would be a welcome change, especially with the ability to delegate to Level 1 techs or even technical coordinators within the schools. Then they could assist in the management or see some statistics. Much of what Amplified does is Sheet driven, and I like the Sheets, but having a web GUI is better for some.

We've been using the solution for around five years.

The main products are very stable, and we rarely see serious issues. A more peripheral product I've used maybe twice has been down for a couple of weeks, but I don't know its user base.

The solution is scalable; it can handle significant loads. We're a sizeable district with roughly 15,000 end users.

The tech support is very responsive, and we've never had an issue where we needed to hound them; they generally find the problem and fix it.

Until the acquisition of Amplified IT, the CDW team's knowledge of Google Workspace for Education was likely lacking. 

CDW's ability to support and maintain Google Workspace and Chrome OS has progressed since the acquisition of Amplified IT. 

Positive

We didn't previously use a different solution. When we started using Amplified, there were very few other options available. 

The initial deployment was extremely straightforward, and I carried it out myself. Initially, I worked with the one tool I needed immediately, Gopher for Chrome. Then, I went down the line authorizing other services to talk to the domain. Amplified doesn't require any maintenance on our end. 

The solution provides an ROI, especially in terms of saved time. What now takes me five or even fifteen minutes, could previously have taken all day.

The pricing is reasonable for what we get out of it. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use the Little SIS Premium feature, though not to sync classrooms; we use it as more of a classroom management tool.

I advise those considering the product to take advantage of the complete evaluation, including all the features you're interested in. Talk to their support to help you get set up, and don't assume you can figure it out alone. It isn't difficult, but getting an idea of the support and how the tools function is reasonable.

We use them primarily for support in our use of Google Workspace. We also use them for Workspace domain audits. And they have worked with us on some integration projects as well, helping us with some user and backend management pieces.

We were really looking for someone who could give us timely and accurate support on the products that we were using. The Google pieces are great and extremely powerful, but a number of times you need to have that person that you can go to immediately to answer a question, and Amplified has been that "person" for us.

We're able to use things in a more timely fashion because we're able to get questions answered about things that would normally hold us back from doing some key tasks.

It is also empowering our teachers because it's giving us, on the IT side of the house, the tools that we need to make their lives easier. We have been able to simplify the toolset that they're being asked to use. We're able to make sure that everything is working as they need in the classroom so that they don't even have to think about it. They can just use the tools for instructional purposes and not have to worry about anything else.

Overall, for working with Google Workspace for Education, Amplified is invaluable. It's not really a question in my mind as to whether or not we are going to use it from year to year. It's more a case of thinking about what we are going to add or how we should modify the offerings we have from them to help us do our jobs better.

What we use on the most regular basis is their help desk. And something that we have used time and again is full audits because that has given us the most insights into the system as a whole. The audits have enabled us to run much more smoothly.

Also, Little SIS, for helping to roster Google Classroom classes, has been game-changing. Things like bulk updates are things that have made our lives significantly easier. It also helps IT admins manage their infrastructure. We've been able to simplify a lot of our processes and reduce duplication of efforts across systems, particularly in the areas of users and user management.

It's tough to come up with something that needs to be improved. If I had to come up with something, it might be having a single dashboard for all their different services that connect to the Workspace domain.

I have been using CDW Amplified for Education for four to five years.

There haven't been any issues with stability.

We haven't had any issues with scalability either.

They've been fabulous. They have been open to all sorts of questions and issues. They're needs-based. They look at what we need to do and go from there. They're extremely responsive and willing to help, either via support tickets or a webinar.

The CDW team's knowledge of Google Workspace for education is top-notch. Their ability to support Google Workspace is doing everything that we need done.

Positive

We used other companies for certain aspects, but no one really covered the breadth that Amplified covers for us.

The money spent is worth it.

The pricing is incredibly competitive. It's not a matter of cost, and their service offerings are fabulous. Cost is never the determining factor in what portion of their services we're going to use. It's just whether we actually need that piece for what we're doing.

Prior to getting on a call with them, outline all of your specific needs across all the different Google tools that you're using. Try to be as exhaustive as possible with that work leading into a call so that you know what questions to ask.

Amplified IT 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.

Little SIS is fantastic. Before we had Little SIS, it was problematic to find a substitute when a teacher had to go out on sick leave. We didn't even know what classes she had. Now we can go into the system to grab her schedule and assign a co-teacher for an indefinite or specified period. We can also dispatch a tech to fix a problem in the classroom so it doesn't impact the teachers. 

It allows a system admin to look at the classrooms that our teachers create. Google provides no native ability to look at these classrooms, modify them, or interact with them. They are literal black boxes we have no control over or information about. Amplified's tools give us visibility into that environment, which is critical for an educational workspace.

Without Little SIS's insights into the classrooms, we could have situations where a teacher is on leave, and no one can get into their classroom to assign a substitute. You would need to hack into the teacher's account to see the classwork, and you honestly don't want to do that. It even emails teachers to let them know this is happening and to expect the account to be there for this period.

Little SIS helps admins manage infrastructure so that we can monitor all the classes. We can watch out for student-created types and shut them down or restore classes that teachers accidentally archived. 

Their Gopher tools are pretty flexible. I have implemented them in several different situations. Gopher allows me to pull all my Chromebooks into a Google Sheet and apply mass updates. I can make several sub-forms to create the functions that I want to happen, plug that back into their form, and press the update button. It enables me to create my workflow, plug it into theirs, and update my entire fleet. It's better than having someone's proprietary solution that can't be customized where you have a limited pre-defined set of options. 

Google Sheets is like my own personal playground. I can make whatever sheets I want. I've built forms that dynamically grab a set of Chromebooks from a larger list. I can grab 30 serial numbers and tell Gopher to update only these records with these fields, etc. I can quickly organize my fleet and build a structure and workflow. 

Google for Education Audit encompasses a few things. This is a wide use case scenario. Sometimes we need to audit things coming out of Google. Password changes are an audit of that particular user event. We can use it as an investigative tool. For example, if someone accidentally sent out an email with sensitive information, we can find out who received it and pull it from those inboxes. 

I haven't used it much for diagnosing problems besides pulling back emails and identifying when password resets aren't happening because there's an issue with the sync between Active Directory and the place where our Google passwords are stored. If a password reset fails, we don't get a good warning about it, but the audit can tell us that all the passwords stopped on this day. 

I wish Amplified would develop a few more tools. There are a few functions that I want to do through an interface like Gopher. For example, I want a tool that lets me quickly browse my organization's publicly available Google documents. 

I want an administrator to be able to check which documents everyone on the internet can see with a link. It would help everyone in the organization understand what they've shared and with whom. It would also be great to have a tool to look at all the Google Drives in our district and who has access. 

More in-person training classes would be nice. They used to come to a school or organization and host seminars, but they stopped doing that. It seems to be entirely online. That provided some additional contact that people could leverage for advice after class. I miss that, but it's hard to criticize Amplified because they do everything well.

We started working with Amplified IT in 2017. 

I'm terrified that their tools might crash because I need them. I've never thought about it. They've always been there, and I've never considered being without them. Fortunately, it has never been an issue. 

We went from a couple of hundred Chromebooks to 21,000 and didn't notice a difference. Their tools just work.

I rate Amplified's support a ten out of ten. I regularly contact Amplified because they're a great source of information. Occasionally, odd things happen. It isn't daily, but fairly often. For example, they have a system to assign Google licenses to all students in specific Google groups. We have a dynamic way of adding all of our students that are current and in the correct grade levels to a group. Every morning, an Amplified process ensures that everybody in that group gets a Google Workspace for Education license. 

However, I had to pull some grade levels out of there because they didn't need it, and it shot an alert at me that was like, "Hey, we pulled out more than 75 licenses. Is everything okay?" I had to respond and tell them it was fine, and that they should run the process. Weird things often happen in the Google environment that they need to check. Sometimes a person has an email alias that causes problems because nobody knows about it. 

Some of these accounts are ancient, and a new account might not work because there is already an alias in the system. You can contact them and ask them to go through your entire structure to see which of your 16,000 users has this alias. They'll chew through it and let you know.

I work with one person the most, and I don't think I've had a question she couldn't answer. They've always fixed my problems unless they run up against one of Google's limitations, and that's as far as it can go. I can't think of a time when they could give me an answer. 

Positive

There wasn't another solution that offers what Amplified does. Yesterday, I found my former coworker from a district in Texas where I worked back in 2014. We were chatting about Google. They also use Amplified because it's the only company that knows what it's doing. I don't know of anything better. 

In theory, people could use GAM and do a whole lot of typing themselves, but I don't envy that individual. Amplified is making custom tools for all this stuff, and that isn't sustainable in an environment like ours. There's constant turnover, and it isn't going to work if we only have one guy making custom code.

I could say it's a little expensive, but there's nothing to compare it with. No one is doing anything like this, so it's difficult to say if their prices are higher or lower than they should be. Everyone wants everything to be free, but that's not the world we live in. It's invaluable because there's no other way to do it. 

I rate CDW Amplified for Education a ten out of ten. I've never met someone from Amplified who I didn't like. I've never had any problems with them. They've always gotten back to me with information. Everybody that I work with at Amplified has been amazing. If they ever offered me a job, I'd take it, but I don't think I've got the skillset they want.

Before adopting Amplified, you should consider which team members you need to train because you can't afford to train everybody at the highest levels. You also need a budget to buy tools. That's one downside. They don't offer a simple all-in-one package where you get all their tools on an annual license. That would be great. It's a la carte. I wish that all of our billing was done at the same time. It would be nice if all the enrollment and collaborative tools were in one package.

You need to get all your ducks in a row in the accounting department. Once you start using these tools, you can't live without them. They only go for a year, so you must ensure you get them yearly. Amplified will take care of you, so you don't need to do much groundwork on your own.

We use them for tech support for the Google Admin console, and as a touchpoint for the community they have, which allows us to connect with other school districts using Google across North America.

We were trying to connect with other schools that were facing similar questions to those that we would have. We were looking for a central resource, a community where we could go that provided other users' experiences with Google.

The biggest benefit has really been around the connection to other schools that have been using Google.

There are two aspects that are the most valuable to us. The first is that it's nice to have the tech support available, another set of eyes when we have a tech question. The second is their community and the things they've put together with all of the districts across North America. That has truly been a great resource for us.

I also liked the Google for Education Audit because it confirmed that we had our settings the way we should have them and it pointed out some settings that we needed to work on or have further discussions about.

It would be great if we had a central place to log in and see all the different things we have access to as a member. Currently, there's no centralized place like that. There are things that we pay for that we could easily forget. It could be that we don't need a particular feature right now, but in a year, when we need that feature, we won't even really realize that they have it. It would be nice if they had a centralized place for all the features you get with a membership, and to know how many support hours we have remaining.

We started using Amplified for Education in 2015.

There has only been one time when one of their products was not available for me to use. It's not like a specific box or something that we have physically, but anytime I have looked to use their tools they have been available, with the exception of that one time.

The scalability is fine because we can onboard other members to the community and that person has access to the various things that are available.

They've been very flexible in all the questions that we've had for them and their answers. Their knowledge of Google Workspace for Education has been great, and when they don't know, they'll reach out to more people in their department. I can always depend on at least an initial response within 24 hours.

And their ability to maintain Google Workspace and Chrome OS is definitely among the big things we use them for.

Positive

We did not have a previous service like this.

When you join up with Amplified, it's not that it's a specific product that you're going to jump into. It's more of a membership to the community or an engagement with their tech support people. It's not really a "deployment".

Something quantifiable is a little hard to specify, but the sharing of knowledge and the amount of knowledge we have been able to acquire have certainly been a return that we've seen year-over-year.

The pricing is very fair for what you get, and a good value. That's especially true given that schools are always facing budget issues. It's not a $ 10,000-a-month product, and we appreciate that.

I'm not even sure there are many other options out there. They have cornered the market pretty well, filling the need that they saw. There are a couple of free discussion boards where schools get together to talk about these things, but as a paid, closed community, I don't know that there are many others out there.

For somebody who is looking for direct support, it's great. For somebody who wants to collaborate with other schools on how they do things and get recommendations for how things are set up in the Google environment, it's absolutely something I would recommend.

The service, overall, has been great for helping us work with Google Workspace for Education. Again, the key has been the ability to connect with others through their community and have access to their tech support. That has been incredibly beneficial for us.

The main product we use is called Little SIS, but we've also used them for some technical advisement on the Google Admin console.

We use the Little SIS product to mass organize Google Classrooms. That means we can bulk-upload hundreds of users, add co-teachers, and add students on behalf of teachers and other users of Google Classrooms. It gives us administrative capabilities that we didn't have already through the Google Admin console.

The audit was also helpful, offering a detailed look at our admin setup.

I've also taken advantage of multiple webinars that they offer, where they provide opportunities to learn from their experts. They know a lot because they work with many different schools that have a variety of issues. You can definitely learn from their experiences when listening to others teach about technology. Sometimes a speaker can come across as a know-it-all, someone who makes you feel that if you don't know something you're probably not high up on the tech ladder. But I've never felt that way with regard to Amplified. They understand that everyone is coming from a different place and is at a different level, and they want to help everyone reach whatever goals they're trying to achieve.

While Amplified doesn't get to the level of teachers, it empowers tech leaders and administrators, and the people who are setting up the infrastructure for Google Workspace for Education. Consequently, it can empower teachers and students. But Amplified's audience is predominantly technical leaders and technology specialists.

The ability to bulk-upload users into Google Classrooms using Little SIS has been life-saving. Otherwise, we would have had to upload them one at a time or use a product called Gam, but the Little SIS interface is very user-friendly and allows other people on our team to assist in the process.

Rostering Google Classroom classes is one of the main reasons we have it. There may be other ways of doing it, but Little SIS does it with ease. And because we use Google Classroom for so many things now, beyond just a traditional teacher's class, such as for a counselor for a whole grade level, a club activity, or study hall teacher—which means we have some larger scale Google Classrooms in place—it makes sense to have the ability to bulk-upload students. And it makes sense that it also be done by people who wouldn't necessarily have the time or technical know-how to do it. That ability of Little SIS is very important.

We don't do much customization of the product, but it's reasonably flexible for what it is. It gives us the ability to do certain things and gives us reporting of some metrics. The flexibility is also in the ability to allow roles and users to have certain capabilities. For example, I can allow a department chair to have access to the teachers only in their department, as opposed to giving them access to the entire school. That was a feature that was very useful early on and an example of the flexibility of the product.

The Google for Education Audit feature was also pretty useful. We had them do it and we were able to have a follow-up call. They gave us some advice on best practices that they recommended for our Google Admin console. We then met as a team and discussed which ones we wanted to implement and to review the results of the audit together. Everything was very friendly and there was no pressure to buy something or consider adding more features or hours to the consulting package. It was very much: "Here is what we've seen and noticed and here are some action items for you if you'd like. And if you need additional support, let us know." It was very easygoing, without pressure to purchase anything, and has never involved a sales pitch. It feels like they are looking out for folks like me, tech directors at schools, and they really do want to try to help us make sure we have the best practices in place.

Speaking to the empowerment of teachers, and maybe this already exists, but I would like to see them develop and market more for teachers. Maybe they could hire teachers or teacher leaders to deliver the same types of programs and opportunities that Amplified seems to have been focused on with technical directors and tech leaders. They could do the same thing for the teachers. Teachers are definitely willing and interested when it comes to learning more about the technologies that they're using. That could be an area of growth for Amplified.

We have been using Amplified for Education for about five years.

The stability is very strong. It's up 99.999 percent of the time.

It's also very scalable.

I contacted their technical support once and they have a lot of knowledge of Google Workspace for Education. They're also very knowledgeable and have a strong ability in supporting and maintaining Google Workspace and Chrome OS.

Positive

We did not have a previous similar service.

The deployment was straightforward. It took an hour or two to deploy Little SIS, while for the audit there wasn't really any deployment necessary.

Our strategy with Little SIS was to check out the product and test-drive it with a small group of my team. We then rolled it out through the department chairs who were going to use it, did some training for them, and supported them as we moved forward.

We have about seven active users and there is no maintenance of it on our side.

Our ROI is from the audit results and changes we made to our Little SIS usage. For the price we paid in previous years, there was definitely a return on investment, mostly in time saved, efficiency, and the goals we were able to accomplish using it.

One of the reasons we started using Little SIS was that it was included in a bundle or we got some credits when we purchased Chromebooks. Now we've purchased it outright and continue to find value in it.

The pricing has been competitive. I have a renewal notice for next year and the prices are increasing. They're coming closer to a point where we definitely have to look into the value of Little SIS and what that product offers us.

I know that Google is working on a product that is very similar to Little SIS and that will be interesting to see when it is fully released and we can do a comparison.

Regarding the audit, some of the services are more expensive than they need to be, but I work in a place that has a pretty strong team when it comes to what we generally need help with. But for smaller institutions and departments, it makes sense to have something like Amplified to provide some additional technical support, because Amplified has the experience that a smaller school may not have access to.

My advice is to think about the typical problems you're trying to solve and if Amplified has a product or offering that addresses them, definitely consider it and weigh it against any other options, if available. Amplified is going to be a contender for many schools.

CDW Amplified for Education has definitely made a name for itself as one of the premier organizations that support Google Workspace for Education and schools that are using it. As a part of the CDW environment now, it's a pretty powerful combination in terms of purchasing, but also for support. It's very important not just to spend money on the technology, but also to make sure that the technology is going to be used and that you train successfully on it. It seems logical to have a pretty strong presence in training and support alongside purchasing.

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's Google Workspace-related tools for functionality that we don't have in Google Workspace. 

Amplified's tools really improve our processes with the extra functionality they provide. That has been the biggest benefit for us. Amplified 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 Amplified, 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.

Amplified offers add-ons in their Chrome Gopher suite that allow us to manage devices outside of Workspace in formats such as spreadsheets that we can manipulate a little bit more easily. We can do bulk updates and pull information for investigations. We now use the entire Gopher suite not only to manage our Chromebooks more efficiently and better, but to manage all our users and groups in Google. 

For me, because I'm something of a geek, the Gopher suite is the most valuable feature. Instead of modifying things one at a time in the Admin console, the fact that I can pull them into a spreadsheet and do calculations and lookups and use that spreadsheet to mass update everything saves me tons of time. You have to have a little bit of a tech side to you to do it. I use that heavily, and really heavily at the beginning of the school year because it helps us coordinate our Google Admin console with our grade levels.

For example, because we're one-to-one, district-wide, if the Chromebook is for someone in seventh grade, we have to put them in a certain OU (organizational unit) in the Google Admin console. Instead of having to do that manually for each student, we can pull them into the Chrome Gopher suite and match people up to the grade level and manually upload all that information.

The second most important tool for us is Little SIS. It helps us gain insights into how our teachers are using Google, but it also allows us to do something we call "Ninja-in", where we actually log in to a teacher's Google Classroom and see what's going on and help the teacher troubleshoot. It helps us better support our users.

Also, the training opportunities they offer are phenomenal. They do them through Google Workspace Summits and they've actually done them in person in our area. It's good to go to a nice place where they bring in experts and to sit down with them and get some hands-on training, as well as work through things with colleagues at these Summits. We find a lot of value in the training opportunities they offer. 

I believe they've really worked on this, but there could be a deeper integration of their tools within the Google Workspace platform. 

For example, for a while, we had to have our own server on our network to actually sync Little SIS with Google Workspace. They've since gotten rid of that, but there are other little nuances where it would be nice to see more integration from their tools directly with Google Workspace without a "middleman" or a "hop, skip, and a jump" process. If they can continue deeply integrating their services with Google, that would be a marginal improvement.

It's a solid product, but there is always room for improvement. Beyond the direct integration, they could make some of their interfaces and tools a little more user-friendly.

We've been using Amplified for Education for more than five years.

I don't notice any downtime. Sometimes there is a lag, not a considerable lag, but there are times when their tools are slower. It's not an unacceptable lag and I don't have any complaints about it, but sometimes it's there. If they can fine-tune their products so that they are always running at 100 percent speed, that would be great.

I haven't noticed any issue with scalability, but we haven't really had to scale because, for every tool that we implemented, we did the whole thing at once. But it has been able to meet our needs the entire time.

They've always been flexible. They really work with their customers and, in general, it seems to be a pretty flexible organization. They're very easy to work with. They're open to suggestions. A lot of the suggestions that we have made have ended up in their products.

In terms of their knowledge, there probably isn't another organization out there, other than Google, that knows more about Google Workspace than CDW Amplified. They're also the leader in the field when it comes to supporting and maintaining Google Workspace and Chrome OS.

We haven't had to call them often, but anytime we work with their team, they have legitimate experts who can help us. I know Google has them too, but sometimes it's hard to get to the Google experts. Amplified gives us a shortcut to get our problems resolved in a faster manner.

Positive

We did not use any other service.

The initial deployment of Amplified was, for the most part, straightforward. Little SIS was probably the most complex. They could improve Little SIS by simplifying it a little bit and making it more user-friendly for the people who are using it.

We have deployed several of their products but the onboarding was pretty straightforward and the documentation they provided was excellent. Little SIS was the most complex and took a few more days and a little more effort from a few people in our department to get it fully up and running. But overall, the deployment of their tools is done in a day or days, which is amazing.

For some of the tools it was just me involved and for some of them we had to involve either our network engineer or integration specialist. At most, three people were involved.

We are a single school district but we have five buildings and we have deployed it district-wide, for a total of about 3,500 people.

There's very little maintenance involved for us. Most of the tools require none at all, but Little SIS requires a bit of maintenance from year to year when doing the school year rollover.

We've seen a very high ROI in many areas, such as being able to manage our Chromebooks fleets and our Google Workspace environment more efficiently. The Amplified IT tools have cut tasks that might have taken us hours down to minutes, and that's not an exaggeration.

To be honest, I think their pricing is too cheap. I appreciate that they price their products very fairly, but compared to what we pay for other products, it seems to be a real bargain, especially for what we get out of it.

We looked for other options that do the same things that Amplified IT was offering, but there weren't any out there that we could find. They were the only player.

My advice to people, all the time, is they just need to buy it. Stop dragging your feet with the free versions of some of the tools. It's not an expensive tool in the grand scheme of things and it saves you so much time. Buy it and it's easy. Just set it up and use it. It will make your life easier.

We don't use Little SIS to roster Google Classroom classes. We find it best, and gives our teachers a little more flexibility, if we allow them to roster the classes themselves, and it's not hard to do. If we roster the classes, the teachers are hemmed in a little bit and they have to only have the students in there that we rostered. Often, our teachers want to add students into a class, or have that flexibility. But one thing Little SIS has allowed us to do, and one of the main reasons we first went with it, is actually to roster our parents into Little SIS's "guardians". That way, all students have a guardian in Google Classroom. Those guardians will receive the Google Classroom email summaries across the board, and Little SIS helps us not to miss anybody in that regard.

Overall, Amplified has been great for helping us work with Google Workspace for Education. It helps us manage our Google Workspace much better.

We mainly use them for support and all of our program updates for Google. They are a huge help with support with the Google for Education domain.

They helped us get our Google Workspace set up correctly, all the security aspects and best practices.

They have also saved us a lot of time. They do a lot of the research when new things come out and have given us products that help us to better organize our district.

The most valuable feature is the monthly Google updates.

We have also used Google for Education Audit three times and it has been very helpful for us. We've changed several things based on the audits and Amplified's security recommendations.

If they supported more products, that would improve things. Right now, they only support one classroom management product. If they could integrate with more products, rather than just one of each type, that would be helpful.

I have been using Amplified for Education since it started.

As far as I've seen, they've done nothing but grow, so they seem very stable.

As a school district, we have grown by almost 10,000 students in the last five years, and we haven't seen any difference. The programs work smoothly.

They are very helpful. I can call them for anything that I need and they point me in the right direction.

They are very knowledgeable about Google Workspace for Education. They work so closely with Google that they know what the newest updates are and the bugs that exist. I have contacted a couple of people in their support department who weren't as knowledgeable and they had to escalate it, but that's pretty common with support services.

Positive

We did not have a previous similar service.

The initial deployment was straightforward. But we've been with them for so long that we have added pieces as we go.

There were two people involved in the deployment: the person who purchased it from them and another for the implementation. There wasn't really an implementation strategy. The only features they had when we started were the audit and Google updates. Everything else has been added since then. We started with them to get the audit done and implement the changes that they suggested.

There's no maintenance involved on our side as a result of using the service.

The ROI is that it saves us a lot of time. Their Gopher tools save us a lot of configuration that we don't have to do on the back end.

The pricing is very competitive and you receive a great amount of information for the price. It is well worth the cost.

When we went with Amplified, there really wasn't anything else out there because Google Workspace was so new for education.

Go with the audit as your first step. I would suggest the first thing you do is hire Amplified for the Google domain audit. It shows the inside of the company itself and how much knowledge they have.

Overall, Amplified for Education is instrumental in helping us work with Google Workspace for Education, day to day. We use them on a daily basis.