The St. Louis Public School district implemented a new technology infrastructure using Windows 2000, Exchange 2000, and SQL Server to create a more robust, manageable system. Key benefits included a single email solution, easy remote access to email and files, and automated user account management. The new Active Directory structure allowed customized software and settings for different grade levels. Over time, the district plans to deploy Windows XP and additional Microsoft products to further enhance teaching and learning.

1. 1
St. Louis Public Schools
Turn to Windows 2000,
Exchange 2000 for Powerful,
Robust Infrastructure, Email
and Future Growth
The St. Louis (Mo.) Public School District was beset by high staff and student mobility and a handful
of email systems that didn't work well together. To create an infrastructure that would support its
mission to educate students, the district migrated to Windows® 2000 Server as its network operating
system and Windows 2000 Professional operating system on the desktop, along with Microsoft®
Exchange 2000 Server, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 and SMS. The result is a more robust and
available system, including a single email solution. Integration among Active Directory™, SQL Server,
Exchange Server and the district's student information database allow accounts to be created and
updated automatically, so students, faculty and staff can access their desktops and mailboxes from
wherever they are in the district. Outlook® Web Access allows them to access mail even when they're
at home or on the road. The IT staff gains easier and more powerful central management capabilities,
and the district now has its foundation for a range of new instructional and administrative solutions.
Situation
The email systems at the St. Louis (Mo.) Public Schools – a large, urban district with 110 schools, 44,000
students, and 6,000 faculty and staff – "were a mess," according to Peter Mudd, director of technology.
"We were running five different systems – including DTD1, a UNIX system, a mainframe based system, and
Novell GroupWise –the systems were not integrated and they were extremely hard to manage," recalls Mudd.
"It wasn't allowing us to do our jobs."
The technology infrastructure problems went beyond email. Fewer than 10 percent of classrooms had Internet
access. Beyond wiring, the machines themselves were problematic, a mixture of decade-old Apple computers
and early IBM machines alongside newer boxes. While some magnet schools were experimenting with broad-
PC access and Internet access at the classroom level, PCs were not generally used for classroom instruction.
Because so many machines were not networked and had been purchased independently by individual
schools, the district didn't have a firm handle on the number of PCs it owned, let alone a centralized way to
manage them. On the administrative side, desktops were running a mixture of Windows 95/98 to access SAP,
a mainframe, and email. With 128K lines running to the district's various sites, the system was "very slow,"
according to Mudd.
There was broad consensus in the district that a change was needed. Most of all, the district wanted an
infrastructure that would help staff increase the academic performance of its students. First, the district would
have to identify that infrastructure and a way to pay for it.

2. 2
E-Rate and Microsoft to the Rescue
The district had begun networking on the academic side a few years earlier, using Novell NetWare and
GroupWise. But two problems kept the district from expanding that infrastructure to the entire district,
according to Mudd. First, the district didn't see the Novell platform as sustainable over the long-term. Second,
the platform lacked the manageability and flexibility that the district was seeking, especially to handle email
and automatic software distribution and management for its 50,000 users and thousands of desktops.
"I knew that we wanted the Microsoft platform – including Windows, Exchange, Outlook, and SMS – at St.
Louis Public Schools," says Peter McGehee, executive director of IT for the district. "Especially with the
development of Active Directory, I knew that Microsoft was our solution for the long-term."
The Microsoft infrastructure would provide reliable file and print services, but it would do much more that was
of specific interest to the district: enable consistent email access from desktop clients and from remote Web
access, provide single user logon to all systems, facilitate centralized management of the infrastructure even
while providing more sophisticated management features, and ease the transfer of knowledge to the district's
IT staff so that it could ensure maximum maintenance and availability with minimum effort. To implement the
Microsoft platform at the district level, McGehee was looking for someone with Microsoft certification that had
demonstrated experience with Windows technologies. Mudd, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE),
had successfully implemented a Microsoft Windows NT® Server network at one of the district's elementary
schools in a special project two years earlier. The success of that Windows NT Server implementation led
McGehee to ask Mudd to join the district-level administration and to scale that school model district-wide.
Paying for this infrastructure was the next challenge for the district. Its solution: a phased approach in which it
first leveraged the federally funded E-Rate program to underwrite the elements that could be paid for under
that program, such as cabling, networking equipment and maintenance, Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers,
and Internet access. The district was successful in receiving a $47 million E-Rate grant – the sixth largest in
the year 2000 – for its new infrastructure design. To provide essential elements that would not be covered by
E-Rate, such as AC power upgrades to schools and classrooms, staff training, additional servers, HVAC for
electronics, PCs, telephones, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SMS, and additional technical support staff, the
district allocated $9 million from its own budget.
The last major question to be addressed before planning the new infrastructure in earnest was whether to go
it alone or find an outside partner.
"Once we decided we wanted to set up email boxes for some 40,000 users, we knew we didn't want to
implement this on our own," says Mudd. After an initial experience with a third-party consultant, St. Louis
asked Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) to be its partner for planning and implementation.
Planning the Solution
With MCS's help, the district created a domain architecture with an empty root, created for security purposes,
and a single childe domain where all student, faculty and staff accounts are hosted. The data center hosted
Active Directory, including infrastructure and schema masters, and DNS, on six servers.
Global Catalog-enabled Domain Controllers were installed in every school. The server hardware at each site
consisted of dual-processor servers with 512 MB to 1GB of RAM, so the district had the flexibility to mix

3. 3
functions on a single box without degrading performance. Ultimately, the district decided to host DNS, Active
Directory, users' home directories, SMS and DHCP on school-based servers, reserving SQL Server and
Exchange Server for the data center servers.
For its Active Directory structure, the district chose a geographically based system with "schools and offices"
as the largest organizational unit (OU) within which it created separate OUs for offices, elementary schools,
middle schools, and high schools. Within these the district created separate OUs for each facility. The district
further refined its OU structure by grade levels within sites. The geography-based structure was augmented
with a user-based OU for faculty and staff.
The Benefits of Active Directory
This structure enabled the district to implement Active Directory group policies that provided different desktop
settings for various grade levels. For example, the district could give students in grades nine and above
access to the Control Panel, while locking down that functionality for students in lower grades. And it could
use the same functionality for customized distribution of software – for example, providing Creative Writer II
as the word processor for the lowest grades, while providing Microsoft Word for all other students.
"Active Directory gives us a platform on which we can build a structure for centralized services – such as
email – as well as local services customized for each grade level and each school," says Mudd.
Ubiquitous access to email and home directories supported by Active Directory are a crucial benefit in a
school district in which student migration is high and students don't have their own, assigned, computers.
Large after-school and summer-school programs can put students in schools other than their own; large-scale
renovation projects have required students to move out of their schools for months at a time; and St. Louis is
subject to the same high student mobility rate as other urban schools – up to 47 percent of all students
change schools during the year. Even administrative mobility and turnover can be significant. All this means
it's imperative that students, faculty and staff be able to access their desktops from anywhere in the district.
With Active Directory, they can. When users move from school to school, their accounts in Active Directory
need to move to the appropriate OU, their group membership, and their home directories need to move as
well. If students are moving to new grades, their message stores on the Exchange 2000 Server also need to
be moved. To manage this, MCS consultants worked with G. A. Sullivan, a solution provider, to create a script
that initiates a nightly batch run to search the student information database – SASI – for student account
changes that may have been entered into it by school secretaries during the day. When a change is found, it
triggers an Active Directory update that moves the user to the new OU, communicates with Exchange 2000
Server to move the message store, moves the users' group membership, and initiates a group policy to move
the user's home directory.
Active Directory also gives the IT staff the flexibility to delegate account management capabilities to school-
based technology coordinators. The technology coordinators can use their privileges to create, edit or delete
accounts for users in their schools, but they do not have the ability to implement these changes in accounts
for other schools. When a coordinator creates an account for a student, the coordinator then goes to the
district's Web site, prints out permission form, and requires the student to obtain a parent's signature before
the account – which provides Internet browsing privileges – can be used.

4. 4
Exchange and Outlook Web Access for Email
A key goal of the upgrade was creating a single, robust email system for the entire district. To achieve that
goal, the district installed Exchange 2000 Server and Outlook Web Access on a cluster of six servers. Two
eight-processor, 8GB servers support the full Exchange users. To enhance reliability and availability, the
servers are clustered so that if one server fails, users can still access their email through the other server.
The majority of users – including all students and many teachers – access their mail exclusively via Outlook
Web Access, which is hosted on a four-server Web farm. Microsoft network load balancing ensures that users
experience maximum performance when accessing their mail.
The students hadn't had email boxes in the district before. To create accounts for them, Exchange Server
accessed the Active Directory user accounts, which had been created by importing data from the SASI
database.
Faculty and staff, however, did have prior mail boxes – on any of the nearly half-dozen systems the district
had been using – and hosting these users on Exchange meant migrating their mail accounts. To do this, the
district set up a Web site to which every staff member was directed to sign up for a new Exchange account.
At the Web site, the user selected his or her location and previous account from a series of drop-down boxes,
and hit a "submit" button. The action triggered creation of a new account and email address for the user, as
well as a proxy that forwarded mail intended for the former address to the new one. Because users could
have had multiple addresses under the old system, the site was set up to accommodate and migrate up to
four addresses. On the back end, integration among SQL Server, Active Directory and SASI enabled the
migration. For example, the list of locations from which users chose their site was generated in real-time from
the sites available in Active Directory.
Windows 2000 Professional a Crucial Part of the Plan
While the first phase of the district's upgrade focused on servers, it also included the addition of 2,500 PCs
running Windows 2000 Professional, modeled in part on the Missouri Department of Education's eMINTS
program, a statewide initiative offering technology professional development to teachers. The district plans to
deploy several thousand new Windows 2000 Professional PCs in the next fiscal year, as well. Windows 2000
Professional is in the process of being deployed to every school in the district, helping St. Louis to move
toward a 2-to-1 student-to-computer ratio in advanced classrooms and a 5-to-1 student-to-computer ratio
throughout the district.
"Windows 2000 Professional is a crucial part of our plan," says Mudd. "It combines the ease of use of
Windows 95/98 with the reliability of Windows NT. It's an important part of our centralized management,
which enables us to lock-down PCs based on group policies. We could do some of this with Windows NT, but
we get more reliability, more flexibility and more control, more easily, with Windows 2000 Professional on the
desktop. It's also a great boon to our help desk technicians, who can now see a user's screen remotely and
walk the user through a step-by-step repair process using SMS, rather than having to rely on guesswork and
a user's description of the problem over the phone. We can't afford a technician in every school – but with
Windows 2000 Professional on the desktop, we are able to better leverage the staff that we do have."

5. 5
That includes enabling faculty and administrative staff to help each other. The single, reliable, consistent
Windows 2000 Professional desktop, deployed throughout the district, makes it easier for faculty and staff
members to share computer skills and to provide informal support for each other, minimizing the need to
consult the help desk for many common issues.
The combination of SMS and Windows 2000 Professional also gives the district an advantage when it comes
to distributing software to the desktop, or re-establishing a desktop after a PC crash.
"With SMS and Windows 2000, we can distribute software and re-image PCs remotely, without having to
send out technicians," says McGehee. "That's a huge savings in technician time."
Looking Ahead to Windows XP
St. Louis Public Schools is already contemplating the additional benefits to be gained from a migration to
Windows XP on the desktop, including greater compatibility, performance, and a range of administrative
benefits. The district plans to deploy Windows XP next spring. Meantime, the district is also looking at ways
that Microsoft products – including SharePoint™ Portal Server and Microsoft Encarta® Class Server and
Content Management Server – can enhance the district's intranet and promote eLearning.
For More Information
G. A. Sullivan
55 West Port Plaza, Suite 100
St. Louis, MO 63146-3131
Phone: 314.213.5600
E-mail: corporate@gasullivan.com
For more information on G. A. Sullivan’s products and services, contact Bruce Hoskins at 1.314.213.5614 or
visit their Web site at http://www.gasullivan.com/
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©2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
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