Case Study   Jordan School District (USA)   Versatile 3Com® Solution Bolsters Student Safety for Utah School District Customer Profile: Jordan School District No. of Users: 81,000 Location: Sandy, UT Sites: 82 Vertical Industry: Education Value Added Reseller: Valcomm Implemented: August 2002 Win over: Cisco, Lucent, Avaya The Challenge Jordan School District is the largest in Utah, with 6,000 employees at 82 schools scattered across eight municipalities and unincorporated areas south of Salt Lake City. Parents of the fast-growing district's 75,000 students expect and demand schools that keep their children safe while delivering a 21st century education. Previously, however, elementary school teachers had no way to summon help to their classrooms in an emergency, compromising the district's ability to guarantee student safety. The cutting-edge media and technology centers in each school were unprotected against hackers, forcing the district's eight IT staffers to routinely drive from school to school to remove viruses and repair damaged files. Moreover, most of the district's classrooms had only one Ethernet jack, limiting students' ability to access the Internet and the district's academic network. With enrollment expected to top 100,000 by 2012, Jordan Schools urgently needed a cost-effective, scalable way to improve classroom safety, secure its network, and increase network access across its 250-square mile service area. The Solution: After examining systems from a wide range of vendors, Jordan School District met its safety, security, and access needs with a combination of simple, powerful 3Com solutions: 3Com® NBX® 100 Communications System provides elementary schools with reliable, easy to own telephone service and advanced features over the district's existing data infrastructure. 3Com NJ100 Network Jack quadruples network connectivity by transforming a single wall-mounted RJ-45 Ethernet jack into four ports, each delivering 10/100 megabits per second (Mbps) switched Ethernet connections. 3Com Embedded Firewall Solution extends firewall protection to at-risk desktops, servers and notebooks.. 3Com Firewall Server PCI cards installed on servers district-wide are managed from the district's data center using 3Com Embedded Firewall Policy Server software. This unique combination of centralized policy management and embedded firewall hardware provides more robust protection than a software-based firewall. Type II and Type III Firewall PC Cards may also be used to protect remote and mobile employees. Benefits: Chosen for their superior performance and value, 3Com solutions bring significant safety, savings, and productivity to Jordan's elementary school classrooms while protecting its district-wide network from both internal and external threats. Two thousand NJ100 Network Jacks, products unique to 3Com, quadruple the number of available Ethernet ports installed at Jordan Schools' 52 elementary schools, providing ample connectivity to support an NBX phone in every K-6 classroom, plus additional computers and printers. The NBX phones connect to a total of 52 NBX 100 systems — one in each elementary school — over the district's 10/100 Ethernet network, delivering advanced phone features without the need or expense of installing a separate telephone infrastructure. Funded in part by a 3Com Urban Challenge grant, each NBX 100 system includes a one-button speed-dial connection to the front office, allowing teachers to obtain help in an emergency directly from their desks. They also have their own voice mailboxes for the first time — a feature that dramatically improves parent/teacher communication by allowing parents to leave messages at any time without interrupting lessons. Moreover, by using hunt groups and automated attendants to field incoming calls, the district has dropped several phone lines at each school, eliminating almost $44,000 a year in line usage fees and local phone charges. The NBX systems and all other network applications district-wide, from email to student records, are safe from both internal and external intrusions thanks to 100 3Com Embedded Firewall Server PCI Cards installed in servers throughout the district and Embedded Firewall Policy Server software at Jordan School District's data center. The PCI cards determine at login the applications that users can access -- keeping students from files they shouldn't tamper with as well as blocking outsiders from accessing the network. The Policy Server management console lets IT staff configure multiple PCI Cards at once and create groups of PCI Cards with specific filtering requirements, all from a single central location — thus freeing them to focus on other projects. The combination of the firewall hardware and centralized policy management is unique to 3Com. "Thanks to 3Com, we've maximized our students' safety and access to the technology they need to further their education, " said Max Mulliner, technology and data communication specialist for the Jordan School District. "What's more, we have greater control over our network operations and have significantly lowered our IT budget. Few investments have done so much to help our children."