Deakin University in Victoria is deploying AppSense environment manager to deliver improvements to desktop user experiences on its system and help significantly reduce profile corruption problems and reliance on group policy.
The university has five campuses — one in Melbourne, two in Geelong and one in Warrnambool — and staff numbering about 4200. Staff and students constantly access the university's network from labs, administrative workstations, and off-campus locations.
Craig Warren, infrastructure service director, Deakin University, said: “We provide Deakin University students, staff, and faculty with excellent service, but the performance and corruption problems we experienced with roaming profiles was a blemish on that service. AppSense got rid of both problems, which allowed us to focus on providing advanced digital disruption technologies to our customers.”
AppSense says the university will now be able to personalise user desktops on demand and help protect endpoints with contextual policy control, while at the same time moving away from a student environment where desktop configurations were lost every time a user logged off.
{loadposition peter}Jim Zelener, public sector engagement manager for AppSense Go+ Platinum partner Thomas Dureyea, says the help desk for Deakin’s desktop infrastructure support team “logged over 600 calls annually for profile corruption”.
“University staff were inconvenienced — often repeatedly — by not being able to log in due to profile corruption. On the IT side, a corrupt profile typically required an hour to resolve, costing the team 600 man-hours per year.”
“We appreciate the value that Environment Manager’s simplicity and ease of use will provide to the university,” said David Wyld, desktop support manager, Deakin University. “Being able to make changes to things like group policy triggers with just a few clicks is a great motivator for us.”
At the same time, Deakin University is also deploying AppSense Insight to collect actionable endpoint data and establish a baseline to identify the processes that were causing problems and needed attention.
The decision to select AppSense follows a proof of concept (PoC) facilitated by Thomas Dureya, during which time it configured AppSense Environment Manager to replace Deakin's roaming profiles.
"AppSense is incredibly valuable just from the standpoint of visibility," said DavidWyld, senior desktop infrastructure manager at Deakin.
"Often you don't know you have a problem unless you have a way to measure performance. In addition, with Insight, we had hard data about what people were experiencing, which uncovered problems we knew about – and problems we had no idea existed."
Initially, Deakin University has deployed Environment Manager to 300 machines within its IT division and Wyld says logon times have “plummetted and users have stopped experiencing profile corruption”.