The Managed Workstation service is an excellent option to provide customers with well-managed computer and user benefits without significant technical burden for local IT groups. The Managed Workstation service provides a number of mechanisms to keep workstations updated, functioning, and useful. In the event that a customer makes unintentional changes to the workstation state, we can either help reset your workstation to fresh or help troubleshoot the problems. Workstations are purchased by customers, however we provide the management structure to keep them functioning and usable.
You can also use your managed workstation with other services, but the Managed Workstation service does not always provide support for those services.
The design and approach to the managed workstation service is focused on keeping your computer updated and in good working order. Though the design is not individualized, we aim to provide excellent customer support and constantly seek ways our design can improve to meet everyone’s needs. Additional consulting services are also available to meet your individual needs.
We often make changes at scale, across thousands of managed workstations, and you will occasionally have less-than-desirable experiences. We try to avoid significant impact to customers, but occasionally it is unavoidable. If we do know about an impact, we notify customers via an opt-in mailing list: mws-announce@uw.edu.
Managed Workstation is a cost-recovery service, so:
- We only charge what it costs to provide the service
- The service design includes commonly valuable services, not services which are only valuable for a small subset of customers
- We try to minimize the costs
If you’re interested in learning more about our rates or would like to join the Managed Workstation service you’ll find that information on our UW-IT Service Catalog entry.