Reference story - The Children's Hospital of Denver
The Children’s Hospital of Denver (Children’s) is a private, notforprofit pediatric health-care network that is 100 percent dedicated to caring for kids. It has been ranked as one of the best children’s hospitals in America by U.S. News & World Report for more than a decade. With 1,130 pediatric specialists and more than 2,300 full-time employees, Children’s is home to a number of nationally and internationally recognized medical programs.From medical breakthroughs to late-night fevers, Children’s provides complete pediatric care at its main campus and through a network that includes five community-based afterhour care nights, eight specialty-care centers, and several hundred outreach clinics held in three states each year.
Providing a central means for the geographically dispersed sites and remote employees with access to centralized data and managing the numerous associated workstations, was a daunting challenge.
The Situation
Children’s system has approximately 400 health-case provides, administrative personnel, and management. The hospital system needed a solution that would provide remote access to the main campus’ data which contains mission critical patient, accounting, and operations information. Furthermore the workstations in the field were a mix of PCs, laptops, Macs, Linux and thin-clients.
Children’s system administrators immediately looked at their system integrator, 3t systems, for a solution. 3t suggested a system based on Citrix Presentation Server which would allow all of the remote workstations real-time access to main campus applications and data needed to complete day-to-day business. Presentation Server would give each user a reliable connection and common Windows interface to the network. However, the goal of centrally managing all of the user workspaces, granting varying user rights to applications and secure data, presented another dilemma. Children’s management also required reports on user, application, and system usage.
The Solution
To enable Children’s system administrators to centrally manage the permissions and applications of all their Citrix user accounts and to easily generate usage reports, 3t immediately looked to RES PowerFuse from RES Software. RES PowerFuse user workspace management software enables IT to provide Microsoft Windows users with a consistent user workspace across multiple devices (including thin-clients), operating systems and application delivery mechanisms.
“RES PowerFuse is a very robustsolution that has added centralized configuration management and monitoring capabilities to our environment while saving us countless man-hours in the process.”
Dan King, System Administrator
The software allows administrators to centrally manage licensing, assign applications, grant access to system drives, generate usage reports on-demand, and more. Because this solution puts a “check” in every box desired, RES PowerFuse was a perfect fit for the solution. With the combination of Citrix Presentation Server and RES PowerFuse, 3t designed a solution for Children’s that would meet their needs to provide remote access to the main campus, while having the ability to centrally manage the 400 Windows user workspaces.
3t integrated Citrix Presentation Server and RES PowerFuse in three weeks. The RES PowerFuse management console was installed on the system administrator’s desktops to enable them to centrally manage the remote workstations. Citrix Presentation Server client software was installed on all of the remote workstations then RES PowerFuse was installed from the main campus using Presentation Server. After the initial installation, no other software needed to be installed on the 400 plus remote workstations. When new workstations are added, the user can simply download the latest version of Presentation Server from the web and enter the ICA connection address to start their Windows session.
Today, RES PowerFuse enables Children’s system administrators to use the RES PowerFuse management console to centrally change and assign access to applications, system drives, and security profiles. The administrator can base these assignments by individual group, geography, or by a Microsoft Active Directory Organizational Unit (OU). Furthermore, RES PowerFuse automatically populates itself with available users, applications, drives and resources enabling simple point-and click administration. All of the RES PowerFuse settings are saved to a central Microsoft SQL Server database, allowing the administrators to access and change the information from anywhere.
Children’s systems administrators refer to their new web portal environment as “MyTCH” (The Children’s Hospital). When users log on to their Citrix Presentation Server session, which is centrally managed with RES PowerFuse, the user accesses the portal via the website. The user then opens the web portal to access their applications or their desktop. The user is then able to access applications and data at the main campus in a Windows environment, requiring no end-user training.
The Benefits
Now, the systems administrators at Children’s have a complete remote access solution that is centrally managed with RES PowerFuse. IT staff can assign applications to Citrix users, grant access to system drives, and customize virtually any other settings in the Windows session. For Children’s, RES PowerFuse greatly eased the difficulty to grant access to troublesome Unixbased applications. Now, administrators are able to create the necessary drive mappings within minutes. An additional benefit to Children’s is the ability to preconfigure mail profiles using RES PowerFuse’s instant MAPI feature.
Administrators are able to point-and-click to create such items as personal mailboxes and signatures, including the use of environment variables. Without RES PowerFuse, IT staff would be required to manually con! gure or create complex scripts in order to generate these settings. As new users are added to the environment, the end-user no longer has to configure their Microsoft Outlook settings, which usually resulted in a call to the helpdesk. “Put simply, RES PowerFuse works”, said Cleveland Stewart, system administrator for Children’s “RES PowerFuse eases the daily burdens of IT management.”
As with many corporations, upper management often ask administrators for various types of reports about what is going on in their business unit or division. Producing these reports can be an overwhelming task, especially when real-time date is required. RES PowerFuse offers dynamic systems monitoring and reporting capabilities allowing administrators to produce graphical charts with a few mouse clicks. The charts can then be copied to the clipboard to insert into reports. The advanced log is very granular, containing the actual use of sessions, applications, CPU, memory, time open and time active by individual users, per application, per server, etc. “RES PowerFuse makes my job easier and alleviates many time-consuming tasks,.” Said Dan King, system administrator for Children’s. “Without RES PowerFuse, our time would be caught up in constantly producing reports containing user-specific application usage.”
Without RES PowerFuse, our time would be caught up in constantly producing reports containing user-specific application usage.
Dan King, System Administrator , US