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AppSense helps McHenry County College scale IT smoothly to meet increased growth
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Device Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Facility Management
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Remote Collaboration
- Remote Control
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
As Project Analyst in the End User Services Department of Information Technology for McHenry County College (MCC), Allen Vaughn and his colleagues are responsible for ensuring that faculty, staff, and students have access to the College’s applications and data in an easy and convenient manner. However, the rapid growth in student enrollment and use of technology at MCC in recent years pushed the limits of the college’s IT systems, resulting in reduced performance of its Microsoft Active Directory roaming profile environment. This environment is used to manage individual user accounts and deliver script-based drive mappings, printer mappings, and large numbers of Microsoft AD Group policies. This methodology resulted in typical login times for a Microsoft XP-based system ranging from two to five minutes, with more extreme cases exceeding the 10-minute range. In 2010, MCC spent 550 man-hours addressing various issues related to the Active Directory roaming profile environment, including corrupted profiles, mapping printers, and repairing favorites among other problems. With over 1,000 employee accounts and close to 10,000 student accounts, MCC had simply outgrown the capabilities of the Microsoft solution.
About The Customer
McHenry County College (MCC) offers a wide range of high-quality learning opportunities, enabling both traditional and adult students to meet their educational, career, and personal goals close to home and at an affordable price. The College was founded in 1967, just two years after the community college system was established in Illinois in 1965. MCC provides both credit and non-credit educational, professional, and training opportunities, as well as special events for close to 60,000 participants annually. The College serves one of the most rapidly growing counties in Illinois and offers six associate’s degrees and 17 Associate of Applied Science degrees. MCC also offers free adult education (including ESL and literacy classes) and free GED and Spanish GED classes. MCC’s main campus is located in Crystal Lake, IL, and also has a satellite location center for corporate training and development located in McHenry, IL.
The Solution
To address the challenges, MCC turned to RKON Technologies, an IT service provider, which identified AppSense as a major part of the solution. AppSense user virtualization manages the entire user experience across all desktop platforms, allowing the IT team to standardize the build, automate desktop delivery, and easily migrate users to new desktops and Windows 7 while ensuring they receive a seamless, personalized, and predictable experience. The End User Services team was in the midst of a 3-year hardware refresh and was also facing a migration to Windows 7. They were beginning a desktop virtualization project as well, so the timing seemed right to combine these initiatives to deliver a higher quality experience for MCC users with minimal disruption. Among the objectives they set out to accomplish were to reduce the reliance on the Active Directory roaming profile environment, improve the overall user experience, and provide a customizable, consistent, and efficient user experience that could be delivered anytime and anywhere across supported platforms regardless of type: smartphone, tablet, laptop, thin client, or traditional fat client. MCC timed the operational deployment of AppSense to coincide with its Windows 7 migration, which was a major part of Vaughn’s plan for user acceptance. One of the major benefits of this strategy was that the IT team could reestablish group policies within AppSense, since Windows 7 requires a new set of policies anyway, to create the most productive end-user experience possible. This ensured a faster, more efficient, and flexible rollout by managing both the computer and user configuration attributes from one central management console.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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