IT Pro Momentum Program Results – Anon Company 7

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IT Pro Momentum

Public disclosure of your name and company name allowed? (No at present; maybe Yes after PR/Legal verify)

Objectives of the project: What problem did you set out to solve?   We currently use DeepFreeze to protect our Student Desktops however this causes issues with patching, AV updates and software deployment. We wanted to remove DeepFreeze and use Group Policy and Mandatory Profiles, WSUS or SCCM for patching and Windows Server 2008 (upgraded our 2003 DC’s). We have also decided to implement Office 2007 and are working with local MS to provide a more robust toolbar. (Windows 7 will be deployed to Staff first (we bypassed Vista) and the students may receive W7 in the second semester)

Are you piloting or deploying the products?   We are piloting now and over the next 8 weeks; if the pilot is successful we will roll out to all student desktops for semester 1.

Products used in the project (all that apply):   Windows XP (if W7 was ready for semester 1 we may reconsider?), Office 2007, WSUS at present hopefully moving to SCCM, Windows Server 2008 (upgrading DC’s from 2003),  Exchange Labs, Skydrive (I wish we could mount the drive locally).

Project description:   By using DeepFreeze (which is a good product – does as it says on the tin) we were restricted in what we can include in our common desktop; labs had to be reimaged with new applications which means extra work and long hours. Our pilot of group policy lockdowns (and login scripts) and mandatory profiles takes us a huge step closer to a fully managed desktop. Our issue at present is patching out of hours; our Learning Resource Centre (Library) PC’s all shutdown for 10pm and as the PC’s are 3 years old some of them don’t have wake on lan. We are actively looking at thin clients but Web 2.0 services with audio and video can be choppy which means waiting until either Windows Server 2008 R2 or VMware View 3.x (sorry for the vmware comment but I’m trying to be honest).

Keith.Combs – Honesty is good. I like to keep it real. Competition is good and we need to earn your business.

Were the objective stated at the beginning satisfied? Did you solve the problem? Still testing but yes I do believe we have satisfied our current problem.

Are you going to save money? How much over how many years?   Yes, our main ROI will be on time and man/woman hours. No actual figures as of yet.

What do you think about the IT Pro Momentum program?   Would you have done this project without the IT Pro Momentum program?  Yes, we would have done the project anyway, but the program did assist. I would have liked for the program to provide more information on W7 and W2K8R2 as we could have used these applications as our base rather than XP/W2K8.