2 page Case Study - Posted 1/18/2007

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Citrix Systems

Technology Company Boosts User Productivity and Reduces Support Calls by 10 Percent

Citrix Systems provides more than 180,000 customers with application delivery infrastructure solutions for providing secure, on-demand access to any enterprise resource from any location. The Florida-based company deployed Microsoft® Office Professional 2007 on Citrix Presentation Server and expects the software to boost the productivity of its 3,700 employees by 10 percent and reduce help-desk calls by 10 percent.

Business Needs

Citrix Systems is an application delivery infrastructure company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, whose products enable organizations to provide secure access to applications and content through a range of client environments. Citrix Presentation Server is an application virtualization solution that allows organizations to centrally deliver and manage software, such as Microsoft® operating systems and programs, and provide users with secure, on-demand access to those networked resources anywhere, from any device or network. Founded in 1989, Citrix has more than 3,700 employees in 35 countries.

The ability to preview documents, document changes, and attachments in e-mail messages … will [contribute to making] employees at least 10 percent more productive. Peter Savino Enterprise Systems Architect, Citrix Systems

Also, the company anticipated that user interface improvements in Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and better integration among the Microsoft Office programs would simplify use and boost the productivity of its own staff. “Currently, our information workers open multiple programs and documents to complete some tasks,” says Peter Savino, Enterprise Systems Architect at Citrix Systems. “The application integration improvements in Office Professional 2007 reduce the time spent switching between applications. We’d like to be able to streamline such steps as much as possible, because the time adds up when multiplied by days, weeks, and years, across thousands of employees.”

Solution

In a matter of hours after downloading the software, the Citrix IT staff deployed Office Professional 2007 on Citrix Presentation Server and made it available to a pilot group of users in multiple departments throughout the enterprise. Idea Integration, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Jacksonville, Florida, helped document the pilot and test compatibility processes between Office Professional 2007 and Citrix Presentation Server.

“Citrix Presentation Server allowed us to make the software available to many users in a quick, controlled, and secure environment,” Savino says. “Office Professional 2007 installed on Citrix Presentation Server with no problems, and most of the Microsoft tools and add-in programs worked right away, with no configuration needed.”

Pilot users have enjoyed the ability to preview formatting changes made in Microsoft Office Word 2007, the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007 presentation graphics program, and other programs in the 2007 Office release. Also, using predefined style galleries in the programs, Citrix users have been able to eliminate many formatting steps and create professional-looking documents.

“All Citrix employees should benefit greatly and improve their productivity using these features,” Savino says. “Context-driven functionality will be a tremendous benefit; users won’t have to fumble around for next steps. The program is smart enough to notice that you just inserted a table and offers the appropriate formatting tab.”

The Real Estate, Network Services, and Facilities Management groups at Citrix currently use Microsoft Office Visio® 2003 drawing and diagramming software to create flowcharts, network design topologies, and maps. These groups will be able to work more productively using Microsoft Office Visio 2007, which will make their work more productive with features such as thumbnail previews, SmartShapes® symbols, and Recent Templates views.

Benefits

Its early use of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 will help Citrix better help customers with their own rollouts of the programs. Mostly, the many new features will enable Citrix to boost employee productivity and reduce help-desk calls.

• Expected 10 percent boost in user productivity. “The ability to preview documents, document changes, and attachments in e mail messages will be huge timesavers for Citrix,” Savino says. “These efficiencies, combined with avoiding delays from having to open a new document or start a program, will make employees at least 10 percent more productive.”
  
  Simplified language pack installation in Office Professional 2007 will help Citrix to quickly deploy the programs in multiple languages, speeding adoption of the software by users around the world.
  
  
• Expected 10 percent reduction in help-desk calls. The level of support requests for Microsoft Office programs should diminish, too. “I expect at least a 10 percent reduction in user support requests, thanks to the revamped interface and better cross-program integration within Microsoft Office Professional 2007,” Savino says. “I’ll be able to focus more on our system architecture and on figuring out how we’ll use the suite’s new capabilities.”