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
Insight
Ivanti Insight forms the foundation for making targeted, effective changes to the desktop environment that lower TCO and boost employee satisfaction and productivity. You gain data-driven visibility into what your users experience every day—and why. Discover the types, sizes, and overall health of user profiles. Gain a granular understanding of the individual components of logons, including group policy, ActiveSetup, printer and drive mapping, scripts, and post-logon actions. View which applications require administrative privileges, how often they are used, by whom, and on which endpoints.
Environment Manager
Ivanti Environment Manager decouples user settings and manages them separately from the desktop, allowing portability across devices. The result? Faster logons and personalised workspaces that users love, with less work for IT.
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Profile corruption and excessive logon times
As with many organisations that support large desktop environments—physical and virtual—profile corruption and excessive logon times plagued users, especially long-time Deakin University staff. The help desk for the school’s desktop infrastructure support team logged over 600 calls annually for profile corruption. Yet fixing a corrupted profile was no guarantee it would stay fixed. Logon times varied from 30 to 40 seconds for users with new machines to 90 seconds and beyond for older machines or users with large roaming profiles. In extreme cases, a logon might take 10 minutes or more.
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.
No regrets after implementation
Concludes David Wyld, “We didn’t plan to purchase Insight and Environment Manager. But the great results from the proof of concepts drove us to adjust our budget to make the funds available. And, after implementation, we have no regrets. We can’t wait to see what additional benefits Ivanti technology can deliver for Deakin.”