Oakland Community College delivers anywhere learning at scale

Oakland Community College (OCC) modernized learning at scale with Omnissa Horizon® and Omnissa Workspace ONE® Intelligent Hub, giving students and staff secure, role-based access to academic apps from anywhere. Horizon delivers consistent virtual desktops—including GPU-intensive workloads like CAD—while Intelligent Hub provides a single, branded entry point with instant access to desktop and app entitlements. The result is simpler access, lower IT overhead, faster support, and measurable gains in enrollment and completion rates.

Removing barriers to education

OCC offers in-demand certificates, degrees or transfer credits in a variety of fields, including the arts, business, sciences, criminal justice and more. It is committed both to empowering its individual students and to enhancing the quality of life, safety, and economy in the communities it serves. Businesses turn to its programs to develop a highly-skilled workforce and provide job retraining while individuals look for personal enhancement and enrichment.

For Chuck Flagg, the Executive Director of Technology Infrastructure at OCC, Michigan, a key factor in achieving this mission is accessibility—ensuring that all students get access to their classes through remote access. “We are the force multiplier for the local economy,” he says. “We help people get into work, whatever stage they’re at. My team’s job is to remove the barriers that make accessing education harder than it needs to be.”

Meeting remote learning demands at campus scale

As a multisite campus spread over a 22-mile radius, OCC has had two key focus areas for some time: centralized management of IT resources and cutting student travel time between different computer labs. 

“We wanted to support more equitable access to our lab systems and apps for all our students, which meant more online access and less emphasis on in-person attendance,” says Flagg. “My team was also keen to reduce the burden of managing endpoints. The nature of academic life and the turnover of people and devices meant we had to rebuild and re-image approximately 4,500 desktop devices in just a few weeks each summer. It was a scheduling nightmare and required a huge effort from the team.”

It became clear that a VDI solution was needed to eliminate the lab constraints and reclaim staff time, so the college piloted several platforms. OCC chose Omnissa Horizon in part because the college standardizes on Microsoft technologies, and Horizon’s Windows-native backend aligned naturally with its existing expertise.

OCC built a modest but growing VDI environment which meant that when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and emptied the college’s classrooms, it was well-placed to keep its students learning. Horizon enabled OCC to move 3,000 classes online in just two weeks and became part of the college’s mission-critical infrastructure.

When it became clear post-pandemic that many students were reluctant to return to the classroom in person, the IT team received a new mandate—to put all the college apps into the VDI and make them accessible to every student remotely. At that time, the Horizon environment excluded GPU-intensive workloads such as CAD and digital media, so OCC rapidly added GPUs, rebuilt images and app packages, and reworked provisioning workflows to ensure global access for students studying from anywhere. Despite the massive scope change, OCC launched the fully remote-capable VDI in time for the fall semester.

A unified VDI platform for modern learning

Today, remote, hybrid and global learning have become the norm at OCC, with 61% of instruction now permanently online. Horizon acts as the core virtual desktop solution to give students seamless access to the apps and resources they need from wherever they are working—even when using GPU- and compute-intensive apps like Visual Studio or CAD.

Dan Frezza, System Administrator for VDI at OCC, takes up the story. “When students sign into Horizon, their physical location is irrelevant,” he says. “They get the same virtual machines provided to them based on the groups they belong to and the courses they are signed up to.”

OCC also takes advantage of Omnissa App Volumes, a real-time app packaging and delivery tool that streams apps to virtual desktops via lightweight virtual disks. This allows the IT team to keep base images clean and standardized while delivering specialized academic software on demand.

Instead of baking every app into a single heavy image or rebuilding machines each semester, Frezza’s team packages departmental tools into modular app packages that attach dynamically based on a student’s role or course enrolment. “App Volumes is a big part of how we keep things manageable,” says Frezza. “It allows us to support OCC’s diverse range of academic programs without the image sprawl that used to slow us down.”

To automate access at scale, OCC has integrated Horizon and App Volumes directly with its ERP system. Every five minutes, the platform checks for newly registered students and updates their entitlements automatically. When a student enrolls in a class, the correct apps appear in their virtual desktop within minutes—without manual intervention or image changes. 

“Because App Volumes keeps apps modular rather than hard-coded into base images, we can instantly deliver the precise tools each student needs with no image changes and no manual work,” says Frezza.

OCC uses Omnissa Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub as a centralized, branded entry point for all users. The portal is exposed through a custom URL and provides a clean, consistent launchpad where students, faculty and administrators authenticate via Okta 2FA and immediately see the Horizon resources and entitlements assigned to them.

Finally, OCC has adopted Omnissa Dynamic Environment Manager (DEM) to ensure students and staff receive a consistent, personalized desktop experience wherever they log in. With thousands of users accessing Horizon across various networks and hardware, DEM centrally manages profiles, app settings and environment policies, automatically applying the correct configuration, drives, printers and preferences for each user.

“DEM helps speed up logins and avoids a lot of the profile issues we used to see,” says Frezza. “It has reduced the amount of time and resources dedicated to troubleshooting, and gives users a fast, predictable experience while still allowing IT teams to keep tight control over security, performance and standardization.” 

Equity, flexibility and measurable student success

OCC is proud that it has achieved true equity of access. Students do not have to travel to use course-specific software, even GPU-heavy programs that historically required students to use on-campus labs in person. It has allowed students from across Michigan to participate seamlessly, alongside students throughout the U.S and international locations. 

As for the support staff, the summer rush to image 4,500 devices has been confined to the past. Instead, real-time reprovisioning an environment is as simple as the user logging out and back in, which reduces ticket volume and immediately improves the experience. “Before Horizon, we spent weeks loading machines by hand. VDI now eliminates all that manual imaging work, and the time savings are enormous. Honestly, I can’t imagine ever going back to the old way,” says Frezza. 

When issues do arise, Horizon’s remote session access lets support staff slip into a student’s virtual desktop instantly, enabling rapid, live troubleshooting from anywhere in the world.

“Working with Omnissa has given us the ability to support OCC’s strategic goals,” says Flagg. “Enrollment rates have increased by 8–12% year over year, in direct contrast to statewide trends of declining enrollment. As studying has become more convenient for many, more students are staying enrolled, and more are completing their programs.”