Reference story - Taylor Vinters
Taylor Vinters is a law firm based in Cambridge close to the prestigious Science Park. The firm was created in 1987 when Taylors and Vinters merged to become one organisation. Today, the company employ's clients range from the individual requiring legal advice on family, wealth and work matters to multi-national corporations, global brands, start-ups and sole traders to not-for-profit organisations such as charities, trusts, public bodies and research institutes. Steve Sumner, Director of IT, is responsible for ensuring IT delivers what the business requires and has been using RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom in his Windows and Citrix environments since June 2008.
"I was totally blown away by RES Software's PowerFuse and Wisdom products, I just could not believe that so much functionality was being presented in a single management interface, it was a breath of fresh air to see that a software vendor had fully considered the management tasks that an IT team has to use when supporting a Windows and Citrix environment and created something that put them all together. It was visually easy to use too. What a time saver. We are now far more efficient and in better control of our desktop environments than we ever thought we could be."
The challenge
The use of Citrix was a key component to the firm’s remote working and disaster recovery provision and being able to effectively manage the environment was seen as key to a successful deployment and present the same experience for users as they experienced on their desktops.
Steve and his team have in the past spent much time refining various login scripts and group policies to deliver the flexibility that was needed for managing the desktop environment of their users. The restrictive way in which those scripts and group policies had to be constructed and the perils of an incorrect comma here or there were challenging limitations for them.
With a view to taking away the need for "programming" knowledge and at the same time providing a more visual, robust and flexible way of managing the user environment, Steve was looking for a GUI-driven solution, and one whereby he could manage his Windows and Citrix environment through one management user interface and, at the same time, optimize the use of resources by each of these environments.
Increasingly, the need to audit and control the use of local disk storage and removable USB storage devices was showing on Steve's priority list, and this was something else that Steve was looking for a product to deliver to the firm.
Optimizing the use of resources on each person's PC has also been a challenge for the team. Modern application software works best with an increasing level of memory and processor resource. Typically the solution has been to add more physical memory to each PC within the firm, but this has a great time cost to undertake and, although memory cost has reduced, still a cost to the firm. Of greater concern, the physical limitation of many PCs with the amount of supported memory that could be added. This was another area of concern for Steve, and on the table was a replacement of a good number of PCs for future IT spending plans.
The solution
Having looked at the solutions available in the market, Steve evaluated the RES Software products against a number of other solutions. He decided upon RES PowerFuse for managing his Citrix environment and RES Wisdom for managing his Windows environments due to RES Software having more comprehensive functionality, as well as being easier to use. “I found with RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom I was getting everything I wanted. The challenging requirements we had were met and exceeded by the RES products, it all seemed too good to be true!” stated Steve Sumner, Director of IT, Taylor Vinters.
The combination of RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom provides Steve with peace of mind. “I no longer have to worry about my Citrix environment not working! As an added bonus, I get to manage my Citrix users, both local and remote and Windows through a single GUI,” commented Steve. “By providing me with a complete solution to administer group policies for desktop management and control, along with automating the delivery of changes to our Windows environment, RES Software enables me to optimize the resources I have, both on the PCs as well as human, to ensure things run as and when required.”
RES PowerFuse: delivers a personalized, secure and reliable workspace to any desktop, thereby increasing user productivity. Its extensive set of features means it is not only a personalization tool, but a truly revolutionary approach to managing your Microsoft Windows environment.
RES Wisdom: Run Book automation for Windows enables IT professionals to deliver any set of changes to Microsoft windows environment and automates the provisioning of IT resources. RES Wisdom makes changes easy, offering a uniform solution to routine but complex tasks. Labor intensive changes than normally take hours are completed in seconds.
The benefit
From an IT perspective RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom provide Steve with the assurance that his Citrix environment is always optimized and manageable to ensure user satisfaction. “Prior to RES, if we had to introduce a new printer, I had to change the script and group policy and ran the risk that, if the script didn’t run, it affected everyone in the firm, a serious impact issue. Whereas now that is not likely at all, and I no longer need to worry about it not working. Switching to different printers in the event of a failure situation was a nightmare. RES gives us secondary printers to use in the event of the primary ones not being available. Brilliant” concluded Steve.
Control over printer lists, application publishing and logons are significantly optimized using RES PowerFuse and are saving Steve and his team many man hours a month, which enables them to focus on more important aspects of running IT within Taylor Vinters.
Finally, the extensive reporting within PowerFuse enables Steve to understand what is happening on the system at any one time. "Reporting is very useful when it tells you what you want to know, otherwise it is of no value. With RES I can run an 'Instant Report' that lists all the configuration settings in the one report. Fantastic. Before it was a matter of printing several different documents and manually updating them as any changes were applied."
I just could not believe that so much functionality was being presented in a single management interface. It was a breath of fresh air.
Steve Sumner, Director of IT, United Kingdom