Established in 1974, Australia’s Deakin University has five campuses—one in Melbourne, two in Geelong, and one in Warrnambool. The fifth and fastest-growing campus is in the cloud (online). Each campus has a distinctive character, rich culture, and strong presence in its local community.

Products
Environment Manager
Benefits to Deakin University

Bridging the gap between physical and virtual
“We needed a technology that could bridge the gap between our physical environment and our Citrix VDI deployment,” recalls David Wyld, Manager of Desktop Support. “Then, of course, we wanted to address profile corruption, logon times, and an over reliance on group policy. Allowing desktop personalization was our stretch goal.”
A clearer picture on what’s going on
A proof-of-concept (POC) implementation of Ivanti Insight established a baseline to identify the processes that were causing problems and needed attention. The POC ran for three days and generated the information required. At the same time, Environment Manager was configured to replace Deakin’s roaming profiles.
Delivering a consistent logon experience
“We had no visibility into what was happening as the user logged on to the Deakin platform,” says Wyld. “In our student environment, desktop configurations were lost every time a user logged off. They had to start from scratch each time. We realised that allowing students to personalise their desktop and making that personalization persistent would be a great differentiator and selling point for Deakin.”
Granular control to solve critical issues
“Ivanti was incredibly valuable just from the standpoint of visibility,” Wyld comments. “Often you don’t know you have a problem unless you have a way to measure performance. With Insight, we had hard data about what people were experiencing, which uncovered problems we knew about—and problems we had no idea existed.”

Simplicity and ease of use
“Once we had Ivanti on some test machines, it was easy to see the difference between before and after Ivanti,” observes Wyld. “And that was very helpful for getting buy-in from our supervisors. We also loved Environment Manager’s simplicity and ease of use. Being able to make changes to things like group policy triggers with just a few clicks was a great motivator for us.”
Plummeting logon times
Initially, Deakin deployed Environment Manager to 300 machines within its IT division to gather information for a larger rollout. The results were gratifying. Logon times plummeted and users stopped experiencing profile corruption. One IT user’s logon time dropped from 15 minutes to 15 seconds.