City of Grand Junction, Colorado

Success Story

City governments have limited budgets, but require increasing efficiency to serve their citizens. Novell® ZENworks® automated desktop management for the City of Grand Junction, increasing the IT team's ability to deliver applications, respond to users and manage its assets.

Overview

The City of Grand Junction, Colorado provides municipal services for 50,000 citizens, as well as regional support for western Colorado and eastern Utah. The city has nearly 600 employees who work across more than 20 locations.

Challenge

The City of Grand Junction supports many departments, including fire and police, which have a wide range of security regulations. One of the biggest challenges for the city IT staff is to provide appropriate services and security for each of its users. Providing identity-based access ensures that users see information based on their roles and responsibilities in the organization.

The city's small IT staff was also struggling to manage and track software on more than 500 workstations and laptops. Knowing what is installed and actually used on each machine is important for the city to not only maintain security, but also to comply properly with licensing agreements.

Novell solution

"ZENworks Asset Management gives us confidence that we are legitimately using our assets and keeps us prepared for an audit at any time. We are also helping our users be fiscally responsible by not buying more than they need."

Richard White
Interim IS Manager
City of Grand Junction

The City of Grand Junction evaluated desktop management solutions, including Altiris, before selecting Novell ZENworks. The city uses Novell ZENworks to manage 200 different applications across a mixed environment including NetWare®, Microsoft Window*s, Linux* and UNIX* servers.

"We saw Novell ZENworks at BrainShare® and immediately saw how it was the right fit for our heterogeneous environment," said Richard White, interim IS manager at the City of Grand Junction, Colorado. "ZENworks was superior to the other solutions we considered and the cost was right in line with our budget."

The city now uses ZENworks to distribute new applications and patches from a centralized location. In the past, an upgrade to Microsoft Office could take several months and required a visit to every workstation. Now the IT staff can distribute a similar upgrade in less than a week, rolling it out site by site.

"We did sporadic patches in the past because it was impossible for a small IT team to regularly patch individual workstations," said White. "With ZENworks Patch Management, we have mandatory patching and often have our systems patched weeks or months before we receive notifications about hacking problems."

Imaging new desktops with ZENworks now takes just a few hours, rather than a few days, which saves considerable time as the staff updates 25 percent of its machines each year in its four-year PC lifecycle. With remote control functionality, the IT staff can troubleshoot workstations without leaving their desks.

"Because our IT team is no longer traveling to different locations, our users can actually reach a live person, rather than voicemail," said White. "They love getting same-day resolution of their problems, without having to wait for us to drive to their site."

The IT staff uses ZENworks Asset Management to track exactly what hardware and software is being used across all city offices. The ability to quickly run reports, without having to visit every workstation, helps the city track usage and comply with software licensing. The city has also identified areas where users can save money by eliminating unused licenses.

"ZENworks Asset Management gives us confidence that we are legitimately using our assets and keeps us prepared for an audit at any time," said White. "We are also helping our users be fiscally responsible by not buying more than they need."

The city also runs Open Enterprise Server and plans to move many of its servers to Linux to take advantage of greater security, performance and the ability to use open source software such as Apache and my SQL.

"As a tax-based organization, we don't have unlimited resources," said White. "Having an open enterprise allows us to find software and services for our users at a much lower cost. We're confident in moving to Linux with Novell's support and training services behind it."

Results

"Our users are extremely happy with our service and we can attribute much of that satisfaction to ZENworks. Without ZENworks, I would need to at least double my staff and they still would not be as happy and productive. ZENworks really helps us stretch our budget."

Richard White
Interim IS Manager
City of Grand Junction

Novell ZENworks has automated desktop management for the city of Grand Junction, reducing the time to deliver applications and patches by more than 90 percent. The IT team has reduced its travel time by 70 percent, keeping them available to respond promptly to user requests.

ZENworks Asset Management helps the city effectively manage its licensing costs and generate savings by purchasing only needed hardware and software. Overall efficiency from ZENworks helps the IT staff maintain a high level of service, moving IT from being one of the lowest to one of the highest-rated divisions in the city's user satisfaction surveys.

"Our users are extremely happy with our service and we can attribute much of that satisfaction to ZENworks," said White. "Without ZENworks, I would need to at least double my staff and they still would not be as happy and productive. ZENworks really helps us stretch our budget."