Case Study:

Standardisation of Desktop Environment for Medium Sized Engineering Firm

Background:

An engineering firm had a desktop software environment consisting of four different operating systems, multiple office suites and antivirus applications. This was causing issues with file exchanges, ongoing technical support of the environment, and was proving a security risk.

Requirement:

Standardise the desktop environment with minimal disruption to staff. Implement a standardised and managed antivirus system for securing environment. Place the company in a position whereby they can expand and move forward with a standard desktop platform.

Solution:

An inventory of the current environment was conducted to target areas where work was required.

One operating system, the most current from Microsoft and the focus of their future development, was used by seventy percent of staff, so it was the obvious choice to use for standardisation. This also meant fewer machines would require work by us and this meant less disruption for staff.

Some new desktops were purchased to replace older machines. Operating system licenses were purchased for the remaining machines which needed to be updated. Licenses were also purchased for office, antivirus and disk cloning products.

A standard desktop image was created used Symantec Ghost. The image was applied to a spare machine and this machine swapped out with a customer’s existing machine, and this process repeated for all customers where necessary. Existing client data and settings on each existing machine was backed up to a file share and reapplied to the new machine. This process ensured minimum downtime.

Symantec Antivirus was part of the newly deployed image. A Symantec central management console was also installed on one of the existing servers and this allowed the remote deployment of Symantec Antivirus to the remainder of the machines. This also provided one centralised view of the complete environment so that virus definitions could easily be confirmed, or virus instances automatically notified to management.

Microsoft Office was manually upgraded on any machines that were running the correct operating system but were not running the correct version of Office. This again ensured the least disruption to staff.