|
Scottish Police College
An innovative solution from Novell and Citrix has allowed the Scottish Police College to standardise applications while keeping costs down by retaining much of the original hardware.
When Andrew Bowie, Head of IT, took over the IT management role at the Scottish Police College in Kincardine, he inherited a proliferation of servers and workstations from different vendors, diverse applications and no cohesive IT strategy. "One of my first tasks was to identify an appropriate strategy that could work within the confines of the organisation", says Bowie. "There was no standardisation of simple office applications and certainly no budget to replace desktops. We had super users with low end PCs and managers with over-specified state-of-the-art machines." In addition there were three separate email systems in use running over a creaking network topology and infrastructure.
The Scottish Police College is an internationally recognised training establishment for serving police officers and support staff. "Every police officer comes through the College as a probationer," explains Bowie, "and then they may return for specialist training later in their careers - crime management, traffic training or management development." At any one time there are more than 500 students on the campus including many from overseas. "We have a diverse range of students, not just from the Scottish forces, who come here to be trained as we are recognised as a centre of excellence."
Keeping costs down while delivering higher levels of service and reducing administration effort was the driving factors for Bowie and his team. "In the world of IT where technology advances daily, a computer which previously had a five year life span may be redundant within two years or less," says Bowie. "This presents a dilemma in the business justification for future IT investment in terms of best value."
Citrix is a branded solution designed to give organisations the ability to reduce the total cost of ownership by curtailing the need to constantly upgrade end users with new hardware, operating systems and application software. "Citrix takes all the processing effort and software away from the desktop computer and places all the hard work on one, or a group of servers running user applications", explains Bowie. This ability to extend the lifespan of existing, previously redundant PCs was one of the great attractions to the College. "It means that we can put our investment into servers, which by design then have a longer life span," says Bowie.
Combining the thin client ability of Citrix with the power of NetWare and versatility offered by NDS gave Bowie the ultimate in management and control for minimum effort. "It's this combination of Novell and Citrix technology that makes it such a winning solution for us. We get the cost saving benefits of thin client technology coupled with the state of the art management functionality from NetWare, NDS and tools like ZenWorks", says Bowie.
In order to speed up the implementation time, the consultancy expertise of Gate Computer Systems was called in. "We could have done it ourselves, but it would have taken us longer to do", says Bowie. "Gate gave us the short cut and skills set we needed to get everything up and running in a short time. NDS for NT was key, plus it also allowed the Citrix desktop users to be managed using ZenWorks - another major advantage." At the same time local printers, which were costly to run and difficult to support, were replaced with networked Xerox digital copiers integrated into the NDS management scheme. "Putting printers directly on the network changes the whole technical management perspective for managing them - they are no longer burdensome entities but easily configurable and supportable under NDS."
Customer Value
In addition to NetWare 5, NDS for NT (now NDS corporate editions) to manage the NT domains, the college uses GroupWise 5.5 for all messaging and ZenWorks for desktops to deliver applications to the PC desktops.
"The technical challenge to make the management of the network as efficient as possible in order to effect the best use of our limited support team has been more than met," says Bowie. "The college's primary business is to deliver training and our job in IT support is to assist that process by developing the IT systems to support that process - technology based training systems and self assessment projects. Our new network has allowed us to release valuable technical expertise and time, as well as provide more training facilities for the college."
The new network supports both administrative and academic functions, which are kept separate by the use of a Enterasys (Cabletron) network solution. The benefits of the solutions include a reduction in administration and security costs, while allowing the user to login at any Citrix configured device. Single sign on also is administered through NDS. Users have the added benefit of being able to use a variety of software to fulfil their business function without the overhead of managing their own computer system.
"The cost savings achieved through the use of the new Novell and Citrix solution, even taking into account hardware, software, licences and consultancy are in the order of £30,000 against a more traditional offering", says Bowie. "Novell and Citrix technology provides a centralised solution to rising IT expenditure, and one that is cost effective and simple to manage, but also allows the integration of new technologies focused on the organisation's business needs."
|
