About City of Carlsbad
Carlsbad is a scenic coastal community located between San Diego and Los Angeles. The City's reputable schools, beautiful coastline, bustling commercial sector and low density levels have made Carlsbad one of the most desirable housing markets in the country.
Challenge
The City of Carlsbad was looking for a way to reduce the time and financial burden of managing and maintaining its desktops and IT systems across its 22 networked sites. "We were spending about 70 percent of our time on maintenance tasks and just 30 percent on new projects," said Bob Fries, information technology manager for the City of Carlsbad. "We sought to free up more time for innovation."
In addition, the City was looking for a solution to automate user provisioning and password management. IT was spending valuable time manually provisioning accounts and resetting the multiple passwords that users were forced to remember.
Novell Solution
The City deployed Novell ZENworks® Configuration Management to streamline management of its more than 1,000 PCs located across 22 sites. The IT team leverages the tool's remote control, imaging, application distribution and asset management functionality.
"The remote control functionality in Novell ZENworks Configuration Management has been a great time saver for us," said Fries. "Supporting various IT systems across more than 20 sites is a challenge. Our desktop support team can now manage these much more easily with the ability to remotely troubleshoot users' workstations."
In addition, if a user's issues can't be easily resolved, the IT staff can re-image the workstation if necessary. "Having centralized imaging is extremely valuable as we can get users back up and running much faster when a problem arises," said Fries.
The City also plans to use Novell ZENworks Asset Management to gain insight into its existing technology assets. "Having visibility into what's installed on our workstations helps us to optimize our hardware resources, and will soon enable us to manage our software licenses as well," said Fries.
The City uses Novell Identity Manager to automate user provisioning and de-provisioning, and to synchronize passwords across Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP-enabled applications—including financial and utility billing software.
Today, when HR provisions a user in the City's payroll system, Novell Identity Manager triggers the creation of an Active Directory account. Novell Identity Manager eliminates the need to change passwords in multiple systems, a great convenience to their users.
"Using Novell Identity Manager, we can now provision and de-provision users much faster and our IT support staff receives fewer requests for password resets," said Fries.
Results
By leveraging Novell solutions to streamline desktop and user management processes, the City is now realizing greater efficiencies and reduced desktop support costs and can effectively operate with a lean IT staff.
"Novell ZENworks Configuration Management has been a great benefit for us," said Fries. "It saves us a significant amount of time in application distribution as we can now push out new applications across the City within just a few hours, rather than days. Without it, we would have to expand our IT staff. We would need additional desktop support employees or have a reduced level of service."
Novell Identity Manager has also provided the organization with tremendous time and cost savings. "Novell Identity Manager has streamlined the on-boarding process and reduced the time spent on provisioning new users," said Fries. "We can also terminate accounts for departing employees immediately, which strengthens our overall security and contributes to our compliance with industry security standards."
City officials were equally pleased with Novell Consulting and Technical Services. "We had a very positive experience working with Novell Consulting. The team was very responsive in helping us resolve any challenges that we came across."