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Minnesota College Takes 'Good' Approach to Personal Device Usage for Work

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 05/29/15

A community college in Minnesota has adopted a new mobile device management solution for faculty and staff, intended to enable them to use personal devices for work. North Hennepin Community College will be using Good Enterprise Suite from Good Technology. The school has nearly 9,700 students on two campuses and about 470 staff and faculty members.

The college's IT department sought a program that would let people use their personal devices while still protecting student information and intellectual property and allowing them to separate personal data on the device from college data.

From a Web-based console, Good Enterprise Suite enables device provisioning, granular policy creation and remote wipe of enterprise data while leaving the personal data untouched. The app also encompasses Good for Enterprise, which provides proprietary programs for email, calendar, contacts and intranet access and Web browsing. IT can configure that to prevent employees from opening work files in unsecured apps, backing up business data to personal cloud-based services or copying and pasting work content into consumer apps or personal email.

The standard price of the suite is $5 per user per month. Versions are available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone and Windows 8.1 Pro.

"With so much back and forth between classrooms and meetings, higher education employees need the ability to work from their personal devices," said Kristine Boike, dean of Academic and Technology Services. "In addition to providing top security and usability, our faculty is saving hours each week through Good's efficient workflows."

The college is considering expanding its deployment to students who use college-provided tablets or laptops, specifically to enable the remote deletion of data from the device if it's lost or stolen or to prepare the device for use by the next student.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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