Bomgar Helps University of North Dakota Centralize and Standardize Tech Support for Students, Faculty and Staff

• The University of North Dakota has centralized and standardized its remote support tools by implementing Bomgar campus-wide.
• UND selected the Bomgar remote support solution because of its reliability, ease-of-use, secure session recording and multi-device support capabilities.

Tweet This: Using the @Bomgar remote support solution @myUND provides tech support to students, faculty and staff worldwide. http://goo.gl/iQ0Ig

JACKSON, Miss.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bomgar, a leading provider of secure remote support solutions, announced today that The University of North Dakota (UND) is using the Bomgar solution to provide remote technical support to students, faculty and staff across campus and around the globe. With its central campus located in Grand Forks, North Dakota, UND enrolls more than 14,000 students and offers approximately 200 fields of study. Its online programs provide academic and degree opportunities to students that reach well beyond its campus, and the University has an international reputation for research.

“Bomgar really stood out as the right solution for us”

In 2010, UND’s president and leadership team launched an “Exceptional UND” initiative designed to advance strategic goals that included facilitating collaboration and enriching the student and faculty experience. At that time, UND had nine colleges, eight of which had their own tech support teams. These teams were using a variety of remote support tools, including Bomgar. The University’s CIO wanted to consolidate the activities and technology of the various teams to deliver a more unified experience to all of UND’s end-users.

“Our university wanted a more unified and efficient IT organization,” said Joshua Jones, associate director of user support services for UND. “We used the analogy that regardless of whether you are faculty, staff or student, or a guest of the university, when you walk into a room and flip on a light switch, you expect the light to go on. So why should it be any different when it comes to accessing technology?”

With the desire to provide the same tech support experience for everyone on the main campus, as well as those studying and working remotely, UND needed to select a remote support solution that the entire support team could share. Jones added that the University has many students in rural areas where Internet Wi-Fi connectivity is often low, so the solution needed to be reliable to reach those students and provide the same tech support experience as those on the main campus.

“Bomgar really stood out as the right solution for us,” said Jones. “The IT team liked the fact that all end-users have to do is visit a support portal and enter a session key to initiate a session. It doesn’t require them to provide administrative privileges or perform other tasks on their device. Moreover, Bomgar is an appliance, not a hosted service, so the support teams aren’t reliant on a third-party connection to establish a remote session. Additionally, Bomgar supports all of the operating systems we use, including Windows, Mac and a variety of mobile platforms, whereas some of the other tools did not.“

The support teams also appreciate Bomgar’s Jump Client technology, which enables easy access to computers within the UND network without requiring user involvement, and allows the technicians to pin sessions so that they can reconnect to the computer at a later time even if it is unattended.

Nathan McNeill, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Bomgar, noted the need to improve remote support capabilities as a trend among higher education organizations. “Not many of today’s colleges and universities operate on just one campus; they often have several campuses across the country, or even the world, and a fast-growing number of online students. With Bomgar, every tech support rep can use the same, consolidated remote support tool no matter if they’re helping an employee on campus, a faculty member overseas, or an online student studying from home.”

Looking ahead, Jones sees more ways that Bomgar will help UND achieve its mission. “The University or North Dakota is one of 11 higher education institutions in the state. UND is considered a leader when it comes to introducing new technologies. As a result of the success we’ve experienced, the university system is discussing adopting Bomgar at the state level for all 11 institutions. With students taking classes at multiple campuses within the state, this new adoption would go a long way in ensuring an exceptional tech support experience to all UND students, no matter where they are.”

For a full case study about The University of North Dakota’s use of Bomgar, please visit: http://www.bomgar.com/customers/

Bomgar will be at EDUCAUSE 2012 in Denver, Colorado November 6-9. Visit booth #527 for a demo and to hear live testimonials from Bomgar customers. For more information about Bomgar, please visit: www.bomgar.com.

About Bomgar

Bomgar provides remote support solutions for easily and securely supporting computing systems and mobile devices. The company’s appliance-based products help organizations improve tech support efficiency and performance by enabling them to securely support nearly any device or system, anywhere in the world — including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry and more. More than 6,500 organizations across 65 countries have deployed Bomgar to rapidly improve customer satisfaction while dramatically reducing costs. Bomgar is privately held with offices in Jackson, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Paris and London. You can find Bomgar on the web at www.bomgar.com, or on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google±.