Background

Thompson Rivers University (TRU) is a public teaching and research university offering undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as vocational training. Its main campus is in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, but the university also has a satellite campus in Williams Lake, British Columbia and a distance education division called TRU-Open Learning. As of the 2021-2022 school year, TRU had nearly 28,000 enrolled students with around 500 faculty teaching them.

Challenges

Providing IT support for around 13,000 on-campus students, 15,000 “Open Learning” remote students and roughly 500 faculty members is not an easy task. With a student body and faculty that’s distributed across British Columbia, TRU was challenged with giving a secure support experience to its remote students and faculty.

IT issues are especially pronounced at certain times of the school year, particularly during the start of the year, midterms, and finals when TRU deals with a larger call volume than usual. Time is of the essence in getting staff and students and their devices and systems up and running in real-time.

TeamViewer Tensor enabled TRU service deck comprising of just 5 people provide remote access, support to the entire body of teaching staff, students since depending on phone, email or chat assistance was no longer an option considering these channels are time consuming and not as intuitive as real-time support.

Solution

In order to resolve issues quickly and avoid dispatching IT personnel, TRU turned to TeamViewer Tensor. Like most every university, the pandemic dealt TRU a number of challenges. For instance, there were several TRU applications that had always been based on-premises and were never tested against the university’s VPN. In some cases, TRU had people from their international department functioning with their on-campus computers using these applications while they connected in with TeamViewer.

“I probably spent a month licensing and configuring peoples’ machines so their home computer could connect back to the office,” added Hobbs. “TeamViewer’s ease-of-use allowed our non-IT people to operate seamlessly. We even started using TeamViewer features we had never used before.”

In the fall 2023 semester, TRU plans to roll out a hybrid work model that would see around 150-200 of their staff work two to three days a week at home, further putting TeamViewer’s remote capabilities to test.

TeamViewer also helps TRU reduce their carbon footprint as the university positions itself as a leader in its sustainability commitments. “When we move to a hybrid work model, that means less cars that will have to come to campus. TeamViewer will help us to transition to this hybrid model and ensure it is a success,” added Hobbs.

Outcome

TeamViewer has been crucial to supporting Thompson Rivers University with its disparate staff, student body and faculty. Thanks to TeamViewer, TRU can save time and money, and also reduce its carbon footprint by limiting the need for travel to and from campus for resolving IT issues. TeamViewer will also prove vital to supporting TRU’s hybrid model plans in the fall of 2023.