Following use within several of its primary and secondary schools, Southampton City Council has purchased Parago site licenses across the board. During the trial period, this forward thinking Council ensured it was choosing the right solution by testing the system at its own ICT Training Centre.

Nik Taylor, ICT Development Manager for Childrens Services & Learning, Southampton City Council explained: ‘We wanted to provide our schools with the opportunity to effectively manage all their assets. Asset Management is a complex issue for schools, especially Software Asset Management (SAM). Parago provides that solution allowing them to have a clear view of their entire inventory and produce accurate budget forecasts.’

The use of Parago at Millbrook Community School

By Mr. Gary W. E. Knight MBCS MIET MRI
ICT Systems Technician, Millbrook Community School
May 2008

"At the request of IT Strategy we have been testing the Parago auditing system by Parago Software for a number of months now.

In my time spent in IT I have seen and used many different auditing programs and tools, however I have never seen anything like this system before. It lays out the school in visual form allowing the user to build up the school in the form or floors, classroom and other building blocks. Auditing is then performed by the use of a small package which can be deployed across the network. Here at Millbrook we do this silently through our logon script, ensuring that new computers are added quickly to the audit and updated regularly. Audited assets can then be placed in the 'visualised' school by the user.

Recently the system has expanded further to allow for the scanning off bar-codes of non-networked or non-computer equipment onto the audit through use of a PDA. Also it has the ability to take data across from several other file formats into the database, thus allowing for the migration of 'simple' audits.

Finally the real power of the software is then the ability to run reports on the assets collected and also check software licensing.

All in all Parago is a complex and yet easy to use system and I would recommend that other schools take a serious look at it for their auditing needed."