Drancy City Hall

New Solution Helps Drancy City Hall Gear Up for a Full Campaign Season

At Drancy City Hall, employees needed to communicate, share data, and create complex and attractive documents. With election season approaching, the ability to work together quickly and efficiently was critical. To help improve productivity and teamwork, Drancy rolled out a new solution based on Windows Vista®, the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

 

Business Needs

Mairie de Drancy (Drancy City Hall) has 350 workstations, with 20 of these particularly crucial to completing the work of a busy campaign season. “They belong to department heads, management assistants, and other VIPs who need to access information quickly and share it—working together without digging through menus and submenus. These needs are intensified by a busy campaign season, during which we will need to be very responsive,” explains David Larose, IT and Telecommunications Manager at Drancy City Hall.

Management staff were not content with basic productivity features—they needed to create sophisticated performance scorecards and extract data. “Our full-time trainer had a lot of questions from users who were struggling with advanced features such as creating PivotChart® reports or linking to data in Microsoft® SQL Server™,” says Larose. In addition, there were technical needs, such as customizing workstations during rollout or performance requirements for accessing files on the server from Windows® XP–based or Windows 2000–based workstations. These needs led the Drancy City Hall IT division to consider adopting the 2007 release of Microsoft Office and the Windows Vista™ operating system.

Solution

After extensive testing, David Larose and his team decided that a solution based on Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system would help Drancy City Hall employees work more quickly, produce better quality work, and collaborate more efficiently. Drancy City Hall entered the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program in June 2006.

Easy Rollout and Customization
Exakis, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, helped the Drancy City Hall IT Department deploy the Windows Vista operating system, the 2007 release of Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and it helped optimize and train users to use the new solution. Deployment went smoothly, mainly because of the ready availability of many peripheral drivers (sound card, wireless adaptor, Bluetooth, graphics card), which often are the source of problems during a migration. “For some workstations, we had to wait for a driver or two, but things went much better than during the migration to Windows XP a few years ago. We were pleasantly surprised,” says Larose. 

Deploying Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 has improved our VIP users’ productivity. We not only reached our goal, but also simplified customization and deployment. David Larose IT and Telecommunications Manager, Drancy City Hall

Customizing packages also is easier with Windows Vista than with Windows XP. “I admit that at the beginning, I wasn’t sure if Windows Vista was up to the task, but it effectively allows for completely customizing installation,” says Larose. Custom installation of the solution included disabling the CTRL+ALT+DEL key combination and preventing the installation of wallpaper, the writing of data to local disks, the installation of Microsoft Access, and, in some cases, the installation of other programs. These parameters varied from one workstation to another. For example, only employees in the Department of Culture needed Microsoft Office Publisher 2007. After two weeks of preparation, installation occurred over a weekend from a single deployment server. Monday morning, everything worked perfectly.

Benefits

User-Friendly Interface
“It’s not so much the features in the 2007 release of Microsoft Office that attracted us, but the user interface. It actually makes you want to create professional documents. The menus are very visual with quicker access to features, and the help menus have proved very effective,” says Larose, who now creates attractive tables and links to external data sources, which he had not tried on the previous system. Other users who employed these kinds of features on the previous system now find them much easier to use.

The Windows Vista operating system complements features in the 2007 release of Microsoft Office. “We quickly discovered the system’s great ease of use—to the point that we gained time from reduced training and support,” adds Larose. Two features are especially appreciated. Integrated desktop search allows quick access to files without having to navigate directories on the hard drive. Similarly, the ability to start applications by typing the application name instead of navigating menus to find individual applications saves time.

Larose also likes the Windows Aero® user interface and the many gadgets accessed by a single click on the menu bar, such as integrated RSS feeds and the image viewer for changing screen backgrounds. “The visual effects enhanced by the 3-D display of Windows Aero really make it easy to move to the new system,” says Larose, who is also eager to try the voice recognition technology that has already been tested in English. “I’m looking forward to trying the French since the English is already terrific; its integration with Windows Vista and other programs is impressive,” Larose adds.

Other features also support teamwork. Windows Vista includes a small collaborative space for simple sharing of programs or documents, as well as a joint calendar. While both the collaborative space and the joint calendar are already features of the Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client and Outlook Express, Larose appreciates the ease of using the new collaboration features as a standard feature of the operating system.

Improved Sharing and Workflow
On the server side, the integration of the 2007 Microsoft Office system programs, servers, and services allow users to create intranet applications from Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheet software or Office Word 2007. Exchange Server 2007 also was installed. The new messaging and collaboration server will allow for a new way to work, eliminating the need for installing a mail exchange client on the user’s workstation. Using Microsoft Outlook Web Access, users can access e-mail, manage contacts, and view and update the calendar via the Web, without having software installed on the client workstation. The key benefit: improved sharing and workflow and simplified information routing. “Push technology on user terminals means that users don’t have to connect several times each day or launch ActiveSync® to get to their e-mail and calendar, and they can update their calendar remotely. The project integrates perfectly with our current strategy of giving preference to full intranet applications over client applications,” concludes Larose.