Reference story - Agglomeration community of Pays Voironnais
In order to meet all the inhabitants’ needs (like electricity, water and sewage), the Agglomeration community of Pays Voironnais deals with many different service providers. As a consequence, many specific business applications are needed. “All in all, our portfolio contains about 70 to 80 applications", says Bruno Garguet-Duport, IT Systems Manager at Pays Voironnais. “These applications are used on remote sites and we have a small IT team. That’s why we rapidly deployed the Citrix solution in order to centralise our IT system. ”Centralizing applications on servers, with a specific remote desktop for each user, enabled the community to reduce maintenance costs, and to deploy new tools or update existing solutions more quickly. But then other problems surfaced: the combination of applications and system maintenance was hard to manage. Sometimes one or even two employees were working on it fulltime.
The Solution
In order to manage the central applications better, Pays Voironnais decided to implement RES PowerFuse two years ago. “With Citrix, all settings must be applied at server level, and scripts are necessary to manage user environments. Writing scripts takes a lot of development time, and it requires specific knowledge and skills”, Bruno Garguet-Duport says. “Three reasons convinced us to choose RES PowerFuse: first, little interface development. Second, many issues managed in a standard way. And last but not least, user instead of server focused management.”
The community proceeded step by step, applying RES PowerFuse to software shared by all community users: office automation, web browser, Acrobat reader, etc. It took only half a day to implement this first remote desktop for some 600 users. Since then, additional business applications have been added to the desktop, depending on user profiles.
“One of the main advantages of RES PowerFuse is its tremendous simplicity of use”, Bruno Garguet-Duport says. “In fact, the system only wants to know which application is used by which person. When the application is started, RES PowerFuse automatically launches a script to check the context and make sure everything runs OK. If a file is missing, RES PowerFuse can retrieve it and solve every occurring problem, enabling the user to work in the best possible conditions. It just takes three mouse clicks, and you don’t have to write a single line of code. RES PowerFuse can manage a lot of issues in a standard way.”
The Benefits
This new way of managing the applications portfolio had immediate effect on the time spent on maintenance or solving technical issues. Today, it takes only 10% of employee time. “It’s more supervision than management” says Bruno. Moreover, implementing an update or a new application takes only a few days. That used to be several weeks! With RES PowerFuse bringing an efficient solution for technical issue management, the Community doesn't need to do compatibility tests or other operations to check that existing and newly implemented applications are running well together. Moreover, RES PowerFuse is now the entry point system, simplifying the daily work of the maintenance staff considerably. “We don’t need the Citrix console anymore”, Bruno explains. “Everything goes through RES PowerFuse. We can even track problems and go back from the effect to the cause, simply by starting from the user's context. As a result, we are more reactive, user service quality has clearly improved, and our hotline gets much less calls than before.”
The Future
For the time being, the Agglomeration community of Pays Voironnais applied RES PowerFuse only to Citrix hosted applications, distributed via the remote desktop. But the IT Systems Manager has already made plans to do the same for the fat clients, taking full advantage of this simplified management using a client/server architecture.
Eventually, he wants to apply this solution to the laptops, to ensure remote management of mobile devices.
Previously, it took one or two employees several weeks to implement a new application and manage technical issues. Today, it only takes a few days. And because problems are rare, only 10% of that time is spent supervising.
Bruno Garguet-Duport, Information and Telecommunication Systems Manager, France