Reference story - Gouden Gids / Truvo
The Situation
Truvo Nederland, a subsidiary of Truvo, has published the Dutch Gouden Gids (Golden Pages) in the Netherlands since 1964. The Truvo Gouden Gids contains the listings of more than 700.000 companies, organisations and individuals and is available as a book, on the internet and to mobile phones via MS service 5511 and Truvo Mobiel, a service Truvo released in September 2007. The company employs about 650 people, including around 350 telesales and field sales employees. Headquartered in Amsterdam, it has five regional offices throughout the Netherlands.
Their IT infrastructure consists of Citrix Presentation Server, running on 14 dual processor HP Blade Servers, 2 Citrix Access Gateway appliances, Microsoft Windows® 2003 Server and Dell laptops and HP desktops. Some of the applications that are deployed by Truvo are Microsoft Office 2000 Professional, BusinessObjects business intelligence and sales reporting and SAP 6.4 Financial, Purchase and Billing. “Users are automatically connected to the local printers with no need to change anything when they move around, or visit a regional office. The system is foolproof."
The Challenge
Truvo Netherlands deployed laptop computers to its entire field sales force in 2003. "The Citrix solution we wanted had to be unbreakable", says Fred Overduin, IT operations manager. However, it was a lot harder than Truvo Netherlands IT staff had anticipated. "It was really difficult to manage. Each and every change to the configuration required a lot of preparation and intensive testing. After nearly a year,we realised something just had to change."
Overduin and his colleagues wanted a user workspace management solution that would be instantly deployable. They also needed to guarantee the Terminal Services they offer were secure. "It had to be flexible and scalable. Our field sales force needed both secure and easy access to our applications, whether working from home, on the
road or in the office.”
The Solution
The company turned to RES PowerFuse to provide Truvo Netherlands with both these solutions. "We had experienced RES PowerFuse before and we liked the interface. So, we tried it out on a number of our laptops. It took just a couple of weeks to realise this was it."
RES PowerFuse managed both the many notebooks in the system and stabilised the Terminal Server environment serving them. Updates could now be done centrally without users noticing.
Truvo Netherlands deploys about 400 RES PowerFuse licenses to manage their Citrix Presentation Servers and about 250 RES PowerFuse licenses to manage the laptops of their field sales employees. The implementation was done by PQR, Platinum Partner of RES Software. RES PowerFuse enabled the central administrators to streamline, configure, secure and monitor the laptops, regardless of where they were connected to the network.
They finally could straighten out the configuration of their desktops. This resulted in a uniform and more secure desktop for all users that also increased performance of the IT infrastructure, making it more stable and reliable.
RES PowerFuse’s user-friendly management console centralised the many default settings in the environment. Laptop or user specific modifications, privileges and preferences became easy to configure and maintain.
The benefits
Before implementing the RES PowerFuse solution IT staff needed to configure and test their desktop management packages. These were distributed using Microsoft's SMS. "In the past, we could only hope that the changes would arrive on each of the laptops. With RES PowerFuse this has become very easy, even if we need to make an urgent change to the notebook settings." The deployment of RES PowerFuse allows IT staff to easily deny or allow access to applications on an individual or group level. "Before using RES PowerFuse, this was a very tough task." RES PowerFuse also enables the Truvo Netherlands mobile staff to easily connect to the printers in the network. This used to be something every user had to do manually by selecting the nearest printer or printer server available.
Overduin is particularly pleased how RES PowerFuse perfected this. "Users are automatically connected to the local printers with no need to change anything when they move around, or visit a regional office. The system is foolproof."
The best thing is, adds Overduin: "Using RES PowerFuse requires no training and we now have a very good control over our IT resources." RES PowerFuse means that the Truvo Netherlands can now manage all their workspaces with only three desktop engineers. That is an impressive saving in terms of costs and man power.
Overduin: "I immediately recommend RES PowerFuse to any organisation struggling with user workspace management like printer management or application deployment." Application deployment had previously been very time-consuming, says Overduin. The company had recently started using a new major application which required either a complete installation or incremental updates, six to eight times a year. "Each of these would take some 30 minutes and with all these laptops requiring updates in six offices with a slow WAN connection, 20 per cent of these remote installations would just fail and had to be done manually."
The IT Operations Manager concludes that employing RES PowerFuse has had a significant impact on the organisation. "Our aim is to be the leader in local search and local advertising. Applying technologies like RES PowerFuse in our IT infrastructure, is helping to make this a reality and freeing up our resources for our core business both financially and time wise."
Users are automatically connected to the local printers with no need to change anything when they move around. The system is foolproof.
Fred Overduin, IT Operations Manager, Netherlands