2 page Case Study - Posted 3/6/2008
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Magazine Publisher Streamlines Employee Access to Key Applications
Business Needs
Davler Media Group has 53 employees among its main office in midtown Manhattan and its remote offices in Westchester, Rockland, and Queens counties in New York State. Its network infrastructure consists of four servers: one running Windows® Small Business Server 2003, one that has Terminal Server enabled, and two running Windows Storage Server. All users have computers running Windows® XP with SP2 or Windows Vista®, except the editorial and art departments, which use Macintosh computers. Ten remote users employ Microsoft® Office Outlook® over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for e-mail. These remote users also use Terminal Services for access to documents and line-of-business (LOB) applications, including AdMate management software. Other technologies that the company employs include Windows SharePoint® Services 3.0 and Palm Treo 700w smartphones. Computer connectivity between locations is through T1 lines.
The use of Terminal Services as a primary desktop for remote users became problematic with frequent profile issues. This issue caused user frustration, lost productivity, and increased support costs. The company considered moving to a Citrix environment to overcome these issues—that is, using Outlook over HTTP with application publishing via Citrix.
Solution
Instead of moving to a Citrix environment, Davler Media Group decided to upgrade three of its servers from Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 to Windows Server 2008 for application publishing and file storage. To date, it has deployed the product on one server.
The company wanted to take advantage of the following features of Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services:
* Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services (TS) RemoteApp™
* Terminal Services (TS) Gateway
* Terminal Services (TS) Licensing
* Terminal Services Easy Print
* Terminal Services (TS) Web Access
Deployment was a manual process on an existing 2-gigabyte (GB) server. With the help of the company’s technology partner, Allarus Technology, the solution took only one week to implement.
Benefits
The upgrade to Windows Server 2008 at Davler Media Group has eliminated the problems that the company encountered with using Terminal Services as the desktop for remote users. Streamlined and reliable access to applications that are not Web enabled has:
* Improved productivity by enabling users to work from anywhere.
* Reduced the costs associated with user downtime.
* Reduced support issues and associated costs.
* Improved staff collaboration.
* Improved security through the features of TS Gateway.
Davler Media Group plans to use Windows Server 2008 to centralize LOB applications and remove them from computers, even in the local environment. The company expects this effort to further increase user productivity and reduce support costs.
Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2008, with built-in Web and virtualization technologies, enables you to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server infrastructure. New virtualization tools, Web resources, and security enhancements help you save time, reduce costs, and provide a platform for a dynamic and optimized datacenter. Powerful new tools like IIS 7.0, Server Manager, and Windows® PowerShell, allow you to have more control over your servers and streamline Web, configuration, and management tasks. Advanced security and reliability enhancements like Network Access Protection and the Read-Only Domain Controller option for Active Directory Domain Services harden the operating system and help protect your server environment to ensure you have a solid foundation on which to build your business.
For more information, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008
