Schools roll out hosted online storage 'lockers'

Computerworld - Monte Cassino School's decision to give its seventh and eighth grade students a new Tablet PC forced Nancy Stutsman, director of technology, to quickly tackle two issues -- tight server space and the lack of an easy way to store and retrieve files when away from the Tulsa, Okla.-based school's campus.

Stutsman selected the School Web Lockers hosted online storage system from San Diego-based Networld Solutions Inc. to provide each of the students with 100MB of storage. The service will also be used to provide Monte Cassino faculty members with and school administrators with 1GB of storage, Stutsman said. She estimated the cost of the service at $1 per user per year.

"We have server storage problems all the time, so we wanted an alternative place to [store] and back up files," said Stutsman. In the past, she said, students were only allotted 10MB of server space on the school's network.

"We knew this year [students] would be creating movies and doing other things, [so] they needed a lot more space," she said. The hosted offering "resonated with me as easy to manage," Stutsman said, adding that "we had problems with kids' files disappearing a lot last year. [The new system] would relieve a lot of that."

School Web Lockers also includes chat, calendaring and collaboration capabilities, she noted. In addition, the hosted system lets school administrators monitor and track all files uploaded to the system and enables them to lock out individuals for misuse.

The system also includes password access that students must share with their parents, she said. The system also scans all files uploaded to School Web Lockers servers for potential viruses using Sophos PLC's security software and default controls, said Kelly Agrelius, marketing associate for School Web Lockers.

Agrelius said that all School Web Lockers disk drives are mirrored and that backup tapes are filled every 24 hours or so. Currently, the online storage system is used by 25 school districts with 159 schools and over 125,000 end users.

This week, Ernie Nevares, director of instructional technology at Santee School District in Santee, Calif., plans to begin implementing the hosted service through the district's nine member schools.

Nevares said students have often voiced frustration at the district's lack of storage capacity, which forced them to finish tasks in one sitting or risk losing data.

The school system ran a pilot program using the service last year, which convinced school officials that hosted storage could be a boon for the organization. Just during the test phase, Nevares said, "it virtually eliminated the need for flash drives, disks, all of those things, which also helps security-wise to help keep bad things out of our system"