Self-Serve Laptop Lending for Higher Ed: The SUNY Fredonia Model

At ForwardPass, we build smart lockers that turn everyday device exchanges into fast, policy-aligned handoffs — with a clean audit trail for IT.

ForwardPass is a LocknCharge brand, built on the same heritage of secure charging, storage, and device management innovation.

Below is a real-world example of what that looks like on a university campus.

The challenge: Laptop access shouldn’t require time-consuming travel and paperwork

SUNY Fredonia is a small university in Western New York with roughly 4,000 students, where reliable technology access supports coursework, collaboration, and research. But students without a personal laptop didn’t always have an easy path to one.

The campus computer lab offered 30 desktop machines. For laptop borrowing, students had to travel to an IT location on the outskirts of campus, complete paperwork, and wait while staff processed the request — an approach that didn’t scale well in practice.

When the university redesigned its Innovation Lab, the IT team saw a chance to improve access. Mark Mackey, IT Service Delivery Manager at SUNY Fredonia, introduced a laptop checkout program designed to make borrowing simpler.

That introduced a new constraint: how do you run a laptop lending program without adding ongoing work for IT? Manual tracking of checkouts and returns wouldn’t keep up, and leaving devices out for self-serve use created security concerns. SUNY Fredonia needed a solution that was automated, trackable, and straightforward for students — without increasing IT workload.

The solution: Self-serve laptop lending, secured and logged

To enable self-service, SUNY Fredonia installed a ForwardPass Smart Locker in the Innovation Lab — bringing secure, self-authenticated access to laptops without requiring IT staff to be involved in each transaction.

Instead of requesting a device at a counter, students now:

• Sign in with their email and password
• Take a fully charged laptop from the locker tower
• Return it after use

The outcome is simple: students borrow laptops more easily, while IT is removed from the day-to-day checkout process. Devices stay secured, charged, and available — with no need for manual checkouts or spreadsheets.

SUNY Fredonia’s intent was short-term access: students can walk in during the day, take what they need, do their work, and put it back — without turning the program into long-term lending by default.

And once students adopted the system, the Innovation Lab naturally evolved. The same self-serve model that made laptop lending easy also supported broader access to technology — expanding into offerings like drones, cameras, podcasting rooms, and 3D printers.

The results: Automation for IT, visibility for accountability

For SUNY Fredonia’s IT team, the biggest shift was moving from staff-processed loans to an automated checkout model. With thousands of students on campus, manually handling each lending event was costly in time and attention; now the process runs without individual staff intervention.

Just as important: the locker records who checked out each laptop and when it was returned. That visibility creates a clear chain of custody — so if a laptop isn’t returned, IT has the information needed to follow up without manual record-keeping.

The move from desktops to laptops also changed how the Innovation Lab could use space. SUNY Fredonia reduced fixed desktop stations from 30 to 14, opening room for more flexible work areas while maintaining access to the technology students rely on.

This is the core promise ForwardPass is built around: self-serve access for users, and accountability for IT — without adding more tickets, more lines, or more manual work.

Looking ahead: Expanding access without expanding workload

With the short-term loan program working well, SUNY Fredonia is planning to extend the smart locker system into the library. The goal: give students the ability to borrow laptops for up to a week — without requiring a trip across campus to the IT office.

That expansion keeps the same operational principles intact: a self-serve experience for students, and a trackable system for IT that scales across campus.

What this means for campus IT teams

If your team is trying to modernise laptop lending while reducing IT overhead, the model SUNY Fredonia implemented is a practical blueprint: secure self-service access, policy-aligned lending, and an audit-ready record of who has what — without tying device availability to staffing hours.

ForwardPass smart lockers bring that same approach to device handoffs — built for the systems IT already trusts, and designed to keep learning and work moving.

Get a tailored recommendation for your lending program — book a discovery call.