The Challenge
Ashton Park School is one of the 141 schools in Bristol, UK, to be declared as a Specialist Sports College. Its growing IT environment was managed by loosely coupled Microsoft Outlook task system for request handling and used a Microsoft Access based application to track IT assets. All user requests were tracked using Microsoft Outlook and tasks were created accordingly. When a request came in, the Help Desk staff had to query the Microsoft Access databases to pull out the workstation details associated to the requestor. In such an environment, even a simple requirement to find all requests from a particular workstation was complex. This drastically increased the request response time and reduced the quality of service.