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.”

The Miami Marlins organization is a Major League Baseball franchise based in Miami, Florida. In 2012, the Marlins moved into its new home at Marlins Park, which provided an opportunity for the Marlins’ IT group to make some key changes to the desktop infrastructure to enable always-on system availability for the Marlins’ workforce. Additionally, the IT group wanted flexible and easy access for their workforce while centralizing and streamlining user workspace management. To maintain productivity through the move, the IT team also wanted to ensure minimal disruption and a good user experience before, during, and after the move to the new ballpark.

Situation IT identified VDI as the best solution to meet their goals and selected Citrix XenDesktop to allow the team to move end users’ workspaces quickly and efficiently to the new park. However, as IT added users, apps, and services to the infrastructure, IT began to experience performance issues managing the workspace, which inevitably led to long logon times – seven minutes or longer in some cases. While investigating the cause of those long logons, IT discovered inefficiencies in their implementation. As problems surfaced, IT was forced to build more complex environments for individual users, multiple profiles, and other workarounds that addressed the immediate problems but made end-user personalization difficult to manage and maintain and that prolonged logon times. “With Ivanti, we are able to centrally manage a single golden image yet personalize the desktop. So, IT is able to manage our enterprise environment more easily, yet users get a more personalized workspace with the right access levels.”
David Enriquez, Sr. Director, IT, Miami Marlins L.P.

Solution The Marlins’ IT team wanted to upgrade their Citrix environment and ensure fast logons and end-user personalization to improve end users’ experience, reduce service desk tickets, and cut the workload of the members of the IT team responsible for centrally managing user workspace settings. The team turned to Choice Solutions, who introduced them to Ivanti Workspace Control that allows IT to centrally manage and control the user workspace across physical, virtual, and hybrid environments. With the solution, the Marlins’ IT team enhanced user workspace management in their virtual desktops. Plans are underway to extend Workspace Control to physical desktops to unify user workspace management of all staff members, including field staff who need specific access privileges. With Ivanti, IT is able to personalize settings and have those settings move as Marlins employees move, regardless of when or where they log in from. The Marlins organization transformed its traditional desktop into a centralized and secure user workspace based on user context, providing a personalized experience for each user without scripting, plus centralized user workspace management. Post implementation, logon times dropped from seven minutes to 30 to 35 seconds, and reboots, which could normally take 15 minutes or more, are now down to 35 seconds. The positive outcomes made possible by Ivanti did not go unnoticed by Marlins’ senior management. David Enriquez, Miami Marlins Senior Director, said, “With Ivanti, the difference has been night and day. Since implementing, our IT team has received great feedback from our users.” The IT group’s future plans include implementation of a BYOD program, made possible by Workspace Control, which will enable IT to better manage a mix of devices while giving end users a great experience.

Benefits of Ivanti Workspace Control for Miami Marlins:

• Improved speed and performance of virtual environments

• Better management and scalable personalization of virtual images and user settings

• Increased overall quality of IT service delivered to the business

• Reduced logon time by over 30%

• Allowed IT to be in a position to support BYOD and other strategic initiatives

“Ivanti gives us the ability to be more dynamic. We can improve how we support our users. Printer mapping, changing signatures, and overall administration is so much easier. No one needs to log off for needed changes to be put in place.”
Alexis Farres, Network Services Manager, Miami Marlins, L.P