4-page Case Study - Posted 11/6/2006
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University Simplifies IT Management, Speeds Up File Search Time with Desktop Tool
Syddansk Universitet (the University of Southern Denmark) is a leading research school with four campuses located in Denmark. University administrators at each campus need to update student information, work on research projects, and perform other administrative duties. However, they had been spending many hours each week searching through the hundreds of e-mail messages and other files on their computers. To address this issue, they requested a search tool that would help them reduce search times while reaching their goals. To accommodate this request, the university installed the Windows® Desktop Search tool, which enables users to easily and quickly find computer files. The school’s IT staff members now have a search tool that is easy to install and simple to manage. In addition, administrative employees can now find the information they need in seconds.
Situation
Founded in 1966, Syddansk Universitet (the University of Southern Denmark) is one the leading research universities in Denmark. With 2,000 instructors and administrators and more than 16,000 students, Syddansk specializes in research in the health sciences, science, engineering, social sciences, and humanities fields. The school has campuses in Odense, Kolding, Esbjerg, and Sønderborg. Each of these locations contains its own IT staff, and all four IT centers are managed by a central IT division based in Odense.
University administrators in particular rely heavily on e-mail to communicate with instructors and each other. They use e-mail to update and store student records, to help instructors with research, and to perform other administrative functions. In fact, Bo Dreier, IT Coordinator, Syddansk Universitet, estimates that the university’s total volume of stored digital information easily exceeds one terabyte of memory. He says that school administrative employees have an average of 250 megabytes in e-mails alone on their computers at any given time. “The main problem is certainly e-mail,” he says. “People are using their Inbox as an archive, so the mailboxes are frightfully large and often contain e-mails from several years back. A ton of information is coming in, and it grows every year. I have 64,000 e-mails in my ‘delete mail’ folder just from this year.”
As a result, administrative employees of Syddansk Universitet had been spending hours each day searching their computers for important work files. Because they wanted to reduce that time, they recently asked IT to give them an easy-to-use search tool that they could use to find files quickly and efficiently.
The IT environment at Syddansk Universitet is based on the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 operating system. IT personnel wanted to offer a search tool that would function within the Microsoft Windows® environment and would give administrative staff members the ability to quickly retrieve deleted e-mails and misplaced files.
In addition, university administrators requested a search tool that would make it easy to find file types other than e-mails. The IT department also needed to make sure that the chosen search tool would not contain peer-to-peer file sharing functionality that might compromise data security.
Solution
Syddansk Universitet recently deployed the Windows Desktop Search (WDS) tool, a free search tool that uses a Windows interface to enable users to quickly find and retrieve e-mail messages, documents, photos, calendar appointments, and important files. Windows Desktop Search creates a detailed index of files and folders on a user’s computer and displays search results on-screen.
Windows Desktop Search searches the content of e-mails and other documents (even when included as an e-mail attachment) as well as the metadata information within the titles of music, image, and video files. The WDS index is always kept updated because it edits or deletes new e-mail messages or other files as they are received or changed.
IT managers at the university deployed and managed installation of WDS across all the school’s computers by using Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003. WDS also is one of the first programs that are being tried for expansion to the entire IT administrative organization of Syddansk Universitet.
Benefits
With the Windows Desktop Search tool, IT administrators at Syddansk Universitet now have an easy-to-install search tool that offers simplified IT management capabilities. In addition, school administrators using WDS have greatly improved their productivity by reducing the time they spend searching for e-mails and other important files.
Easy Installation
Syddansk Universitet had already been using SMS 2003 to manage the large number of Windows-based PCs at the university. Because WDS can be quickly installed using SMS, university IT administrators were able to deploy the search tool easily. With SMS, administrators at all four campus IT offices could install the program on all user PCs at the same time. Administrative employees did not have to install or approve anything on their computers. Because of that, the easy installation process did not put a noticeable load on individual computers where employees might have been in the process of performing important work.
Simplified IT Management
WDS also simplifies IT management for IT personnel at Syddansk Universitet. For example, they can simultaneously customize the setup of WDS to a standardized version for university users via Windows Group Policy software. I-Filters can also be included, which makes it possible to index a certain number of file types, such as PDF files, other than those that are standard in the WDS tool. “We then allocate them to the user groups that need them,” explains Dreier.
He adds that, in addition to using the various I-Filters that are currently available from Microsoft, it is easy for an IT administrator to write new ones to suit the needs of the individual department. “Just think of the researchers who have incredible amounts of data and thousands of articles in their archives. We could also make I-Filters for them, which could be suited for searches in their exact types of data,” he says. The advantages, in his opinion, will only grow when Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is released in early 2007. It will then be possible to perform indexing on the e-mail server, and it will no longer be necessary to index the volume of information locally on an individual’s computer.
Reduced File Search Time
In the short time that Syddansk Universitet employees have been using WDS, they have been able to greatly reduce time spent searching for e-mail and files. “It is an ingenious tool and I am already using it several times a day, even though I am actually pretty good at cleaning up my Inbox,” says Martin Månsson, an employee who works with the university’s IT help desk. “I can now quickly perform a free text search in e-mails. WDS is also integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, giving us the ability to search at the file level. So, for example, when I have to find an installation guide for a program we have not installed recently, I can find it very quickly.”
Similarly, administrative employees at the university have cut down their research time, because WDS combines their searches for e-mails, Web files, and other computer files into one function.
It also performs indexing upon installation for the entire volume of information that the individual user has access to, automatically adding new information as it comes in. This method shortens search time, says Dreier, because indexing does not start over for each new search. “The users would previously use the entire day to organize, if that was what was required of them,” he says. “Important e-mails are hidden in stacks of unimportant e-mails, but they now appear very quickly with this tool. With WDS, employees can find one e-mail among 100,000 others in less than half a second,” says Dreier.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Syddansk Universitet products and services, call (45) 6550 1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.sdu.dk
Windows Desktop Search
Windows Desktop Search enables users to easily search their PCs to find files and e-mail messages. Search results are displayed in a familiar Windows interface, so users can quickly preview, filter, and act on them. With the rich “search as you type” functionality, users see results instantaneously and with one click they can act on the information found. The software is extensible, so you can choose to install available add-ins or write your own I-filters and protocol handlers. Windows Desktop Search is enterprise friendly and easily deployed and managed across all computers in an organization using Microsoft Systems Management Server, Group Policy, or third-party deployment software.
For more information about Windows Desktop Search for the enterprise, please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published October 2006
