Wayne State Uses Splashtop to Give Students and Faculty Remote Access

The computer labs at the CFPCA are a vital resource for students. The CFPCA offers courses in fields such as communications, digital music recording, media production, design, animation and more. The labs provide students with computers powerful enough to run the software they use regularly in those fields. 

Software applications on the lab computers include Avid Media Composer, Avid Pro Tools, the entire Adobe Creative Suite, Logic Pro X, Vectorworks, Autodesk and 3ds Max. 

When COVID-19 shut down the Wayne State campus, students were unable to go to the computer labs in person. 

Chris Gilbert, Application Technical Analyst at the CFPCA, said that students didn’t have computers powerful enough to run the software they needed for school. “We’re finding that a lot of students buy $200 laptops,” Gilbert said. “That’s good if you’re just writing a paper, but when you’re doing a CAD drawing, it’s not really going to work.” 

Since students couldn’t run the software on their own devices. So, Gilbert and the rest of the IT team needed to find a way to make the apps accessible to students.

VDI and VPN fail to deliver 

Gary Cendrowski, Director of Technology for the CFPCA, listed the reasons why a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) didn’t work. 

“With VDI there’s not enough GPU power,” Cendrowski said. “Between that and the lag, the bootup, and the cost, it didn’t work. And then with Adobe, you can’t run Adobe on a VDI. You can’t run (Autodesk) Maya on a VDI. You could do some vector stuff but very little.” 

Gilbert explained similar shortcomings with a virtual private network (VPN). 

“With VPN, the students don’t have a powerful enough computer to handle all the stuff we’re throwing at them,” Gilbert said, “For example, with video editing, the students are doing 4k — even up to 8k — and their MacBook Pros aren’t going to be able to handle that.” 

For now, the IT team has been rolling out Splashtop over the Spring and Summer semesters to great results. 

“We have a handful and we’ve been stress testing to see if everything works. As of right now everything’s been good,” Gilbert said. 

In addition, the IT team at the CFPCA has praised how easy it is for them to deploy, scale, and manage their users and computers with Splashtop. 

Cendrowski and Chris Scalise, Senior System Administrator, also highlighted particularly useful features. 

“The file transfer is great, the dual monitor is great, the messaging works really well,” said Cendrowski. “Those are all tools that we use.” 

“The logs have been an incredible asset for us because we can see who’s logging in, when they’re logging in, what files they transferred,” Scalise said. “It provides great information for Chris and I to see who’s using what lab and at what time. I’m sure we’ll be using that in the future to make suggestions as to which labs are heavy use and which aren’t heavy use.” 

The feedback from students was positive as well. 

“With apps like Media Composer, After Effects and Premiere Pro, there was a fear that they wouldn’t translate very well for someone working from a Chromebook and remoting in and doing heavy editing. So far the feedback from students has been great!” Scalise said.