Starting point.
Several professions work side-by-side at Hospice Général and need to be able to access data during the working day, at any time from any location, which is why the management wanted a VDI solution to cover all social services. The ultimate goal was to provide the admin staff at the Hospice Général and their beneficiaries with simplified access.
Project objectives.
The project goal was to be able to create a mobile, agile and flexible IT, setting the hospice up for the future.
Challenge.
Before the start of the project, Hospice Général’s IT comprised of 90% fixed workstations which made it extremely complex and time-consuming to be able to work in other locations. The hospice wanted to be able to provide its teams with flexible access so that they could carry out their tasks more easily. The AMIG-ASOC (Immigration office/welfare authorities) employees some 800 people who work on behalf of both offices. Every employee in a group might suddenly have to stand in for a colleague—even if they are in another department—and therefore need to have easy access to data. In the long-term, Hospice Général would like this internal mobility to be expanded to home offices.
We are very pleased that we chose to put our faith in the team from Bechtle. Their integration and interaction with our own IT team was exemplary. We really appreciated their quick response times both in terms of sales business relations and project implementation. All in all, we have only positive experiences of working with Bechtle.
Sébastien Monnaert, Head of Infrastructure and Production, Hospice Général
Solution.
The Bechtle team were asked to take part in the tendering process and were able to demonstrate their ability to realise a project of this size and scope. They also set up a communication channel between the hospice and a previous public sector customer in Geneva. For this project, Bechtle followed its best practices: Assessment – Plan – Build – Run.
The assessment phase was carried out by our experts, enabling them to factor in the existing infrastructure, how the transformation would take shape and the technology required. On the basis of these assessments, a rollout of Citrix XenApp for all workstations was recommended. This rollout was to be implemented at a new location in several stages.
Hospice Général already had a modern infrastructure which would be able to handle the demands of the transformation, and so no further steps needed to be taken in this regard, but the Bechtle experts did write documentation for it. In a final step, the assessment results, our analyses and recommendations, a detailed explanation of the rollout process for each single users’ virtual environment as well as the target and expected benefits were presented to the Institute of Social Security management.
Within the framework of this project, Bechtle provided two services. Firstly, they were the experts who, thanks to their technical skills, were responsible for configuring the existing servers and creating the image and methodological documentation to support the existing IT team in future updates. Secondly, Bechtle took on the role of project leader for the implementation of a virtualisation solution and was therefore in permanent contact with management and the users.
Our expert was involved in project implementation, both in terms of the existing scalable infrastructure and with the firewalls. “With this project, we were able to demonstrate that we have the capacities to set up a test location for 50 users, which is a great foundation for everything that’s to come. The feedback has been extremely positive and the solution is completely stable. The next step is to roll it out to 54 locations for a total of 1,100 people.
Currently, 150 users are benefiting from the solution, which we were able to recommend to 50 managers across various locations after the successful test phase. The existing images are changing as at the moment, there are 2 in parallel with a shared base, but somewhat different applications. Our teams were very well trained and the documentation has been created well and is proving very useful in supporting us and our IT team to independently bring this project to a close”, explains Mr Monnaert, RUN Team leader.
Business benefits.
“We have benefitted in many ways. Thanks to the shared platform, each user’s profile is available everywhere—in any location, internally or externally. This means extremely high levels of flexibility and fast reaction times which is immeasurably valuable to us. Instead of 10 minutes, we only need 30 seconds to boot a PC!
Another plus is that problem solution management has become a lot easier and the centralised management and, therefore, the rollout of new images is child’s play. We no longer have to change each workplace individually, just the overall image. The same is true of recovery as we only have to deploy the last image! And if it should happen that one of our thin clients stops working, the user can simply move to the next desk and carry on working.
And let’s not forget that licensing management is now much more efficient as the process has been simplified and optimised”, says Sébastien Monnaert.
Partners.
