Docking station recommendations

[mgoller]

Hello,

Our school district has been transitioning to docking stations in preparation for Windows 11. We purchased Club3D docks through a vendor and they have begun to fail just a little over a year after purchase. 

I am wondering if anybody has any recommendations.

We would like to have a good amount of USB ports and at least 3 different display options on the dock due to a lot of classrooms having a projector and a dual monitor setup. 

[jwisniewski]

We went to Dell and had good results. Uses USB C to connect to the laptop. Has HDMI and DisplayPort, but only 4 USB A and 1 USB C port. Charging stand for a cell phone as well.

 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-dual-charge-dock-hd22q/apd/210-bexl/docks 

They have other models as well with different configurations, but this is under $100 and works well.

[MattDPenn]

I've been mostly happy with our Thinkpad docks. We have less than 20 but I'm not aware of any failing yet since we bought them several years ago.

[bethhughes]

For our Lenovo ThinkPads, I tried using a generic USB docking station. Since the laptop enduser does not have admin rights, they were not able to update the driver for the USB docking station. Each time Windows updated, the docking station would fail. I decided to use the ThinkPad docks like @MattDPenn does and I have zero problems with them. They just work.