The National Institute for Educational Measurements needed to assess more than 3500 primary and secondary schools and determine the number of computers and their configurations in order to evaluate their usability for the e-Test project. For each computer it was necessary to obtain its HW configuration, type and model of the CPU, its performance, GPU model, RAM size, number and capacity of HDDs, Internet connection bandwidth (download, upload, ping time) and state of SW, like version and architecture of the operating system, Microsoft Office package, DirectX version and more than 40 parameters. All collected information should then had been analyzed, so it could be evaluated which schools should be provided with new computers suitable for use in the e-Test project.
Since it was necessary to determine the state of HW and SW configuration of a huge number of various PCs, it was clear to us that we had to come up with an automated solution that would require only minimal effort from school IT staff. We knew that school computers ran Microsoft Windows OS in various versions, ranging from Windows 98 to the then latest version - Windows 8, and that is why the solution had to be very flexible.
Our solution consisted of two parts: a Windows application that automatically collected HW and SW configuration of computers and backend server where the results were automatically uploaded. The backend system had a REST API for communication with fat clients and a web application to work with collected results.
Within two months of delivering the solution, The National Institute for Educational Measurements has collected configurations of over 150000 computers in more than 3500 schools, only with minimal effort from school staff. The results of this survey made it possible to identify schools that needed to be equipped with new computers to be able to participate in the e-Test project.