Pukekohe High School standardises network operations with Microsoft

With more than 1,700 students and 200 staff, the school had already made significant investments in infrastructure, including upgraded wireless networks, virtualised servers, and backup systems. However, while these investments had extended the life of the existing environment, they did not resolve a growing structural challenge: the school’s technology stack had become fragmented, maintenance-heavy, and increasingly misaligned with the shift toward digital learning.

Rather than continuing to invest in incremental upgrades to legacy systems, school leadership made a strategic decision to move toward a standardised Microsoft cloud ecosystem. The goal was not just technical modernization, but a broader transformation of how technology was managed, accessed, and experienced across the school.

New Era Technology was engaged as a strategic partner to guide this transition because of its deep experience in education-sector cloud migration, Microsoft environments, and large-scale managed deployments during constrained school holiday windows.

Before the transformation, Pukekohe High School was operating in an environment that had evolved organically over time, resulting in a technology landscape that was functional but increasingly difficult to manage and scale effectively.

As the servers neared the end of their warranty cycle, Pukekohe High School began exploring their options for moving forward. PHS had a legacy software solution that made it difficult for students and staff to take full advantage of digital learning. In addition, their reliance on physical servers meant that upgrades and maintenance required ongoing operational management. What had worked well in the past was no longer the best option. 

While prior infrastructure investments had provided short-term capacity, they also introduced complexity that began to limit the school’s ability to support modern teaching and learning requirements.

This created a growing administrative burden and made the environment harder to maintain, troubleshoot, and upgrade consistently.

New Era did an audit, highlighting two key findings. The first was that PHS would need a major upgrade for their networking software and servers to support their growing reliance on digital learning and administration. The second was that a cloud-based Microsoft solution would give them exactly what they needed at a price they could afford."

New Era presented its findings in an interactive workshop to PHS administration and senior staff in association with Microsoft. An essential aspect of the joint Microsoft / New Era presentation was the fact that PHS could leverage Microsoft's Schools Agreement with the Ministry of Education to empower the cloud migration.

To help iron out any teething issues, New Era assigned an engineer to the school for a month. Informal workshops with staff and teachers to fully understand their requirements were also held.