Delivering a seamless experience RMIT University employs over 10,000 staff members who serve an excess of 50,000 students. As the University looks to grow student numbers across the board, the challenge is to deliver an excellent user experience for students and staff alike, allowing them to access university resources on or off campus. “Tasked with supporting the university’s strategic plan, our main goals were to deliver a seamless, anytime, anywhere student computing infrastructure.” Nicholas Harvy, ICT Team Leader, Platform Services at RMIT University. “In today’s competitive environment it is even more important to ensure we maintain a consistent computing experience as the market for the student dollar intensifies. A positive IT experience could be a factor in maintaining and growing student numbers across the University.” The IT teams aptly named MyDesktop as a service (MyDesktop), which is built on virtual desktop infrastructure, was the solution to delivering a flexible and consistent user experience that would enable students and staff to logon anywhere they had an internet connection. While MyDesktop delivered the same user experience irrespective of where the desktop was accessed, it failed to deliver on the promise of positive user experience with logon times taking up to 3-minutes, an eternity in IT time. Compounding the slow logon times, a significant increase in storage requirements and a spike in calls to the service desk resulted in MyDesktop falling short of RMIT’s expectations. Gone in 30 seconds Getting logon times down was critical in achieving their goals, but RMIT also looked for a single source solution that could address several of its pain points. After careful consideration, Ivanti was selected as a best of breed solution that could be deployed across all existing platforms (different Windows OS) whilst addressing the key issues.
Ivanti Environment Manager delivered a seamless, consistent and fast, logon experience; mitigated profile corruption and reliance on group policy; and ultimately enabled desktop personalization.
According to Nicholas Harvy, ICT Team Leader, Platform Services at RMIT University, “The Ivanti solution helped us meet our goals by reducing login times to 30 seconds, helping support a consistent and seamless experience, while reducing storage needs. It also enabled our Service Desk to fix client issues via excellent tools and products.”
Since implementation, RMIT staff and students experience better login times and have reported a better experience across the board. This seamless experience also increased student mobility as the platform can be accessed both at the University and in their personal space from their chosen device.
“Mobile access to the University’s platform has definitely become something is important for the modern university,” Harvy said. “Contemporary students expect to be able to access the University’s resources and services at their own convenience.” Through Ivanti’s solution, RMIT can transition to new platforms in a more controlled manner by allowing applications to work as designed, by being deployed on the latest and best platform level.
Since deploying Environment Manager RMIT has seen a reduction in calls to their service desk and the userfriendly management interface allows the support team to provide faster and more professional help to their end users. Looking to the future MyDesktop is now delivering on its promise. “We’re very happy with our partnership with Ivanti thus far,” Harvy said. “With such promising results, we’re working with our Technical Relationship Manager to explore upgrading our environment to include patching automation and application management offerings.”