Santa Barbara Police Department

Police Boost PC Management, Security, User Productivity with Optimized PC Desktop

The Santa Barbara Police Department relies heavily on PC technology to serve residents of Santa Barbara, California. The IT department wanted to upgrade to an optimized desktop that could ease administrative tasks, improve data security, and help increase the productivity of users. To accomplish these goals, the department deployed Windows Vista® Enterprise and other Microsoft® software, including Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, Microsoft Forefront™ client security products, and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. The result is cost and time savings due to an easy-to-administer IT environment, along with greater productivity for police officers and increased safety for the department’s data and IT assets.

Situation

The Santa Barbara Police Department provides community policing and outreach for about 100,000 residents of Santa Barbara, located 70 miles north of Los Angeles. The city is spread out over an area of about 43 square miles and is served by a department of 216 employees, including 140 police officers.

With Windows Vista on our PCs, users are more productive, we can deploy our PC assets faster, and we have new management tools that make it easier for the IT department to do its job.  David Straede Network Administrator Santa Barbara Police Department

The police department relies on computer technology to perform tasks such as dispatching officers, filing incident reports, looking up data on court cases, and retrieving information about crime scenes and criminals. To perform these tasks, the department has 145 desktop PCs and 35 mobile devices, which include HP desktop and portable PC hardware, and dashboard-mounted devices made by Data911 that are used in police cars. The department has 20 servers running the Windows Server® 2003 and 2008 operating systems and a wide range of peripherals, including scanners, cameras, plotters, and printers.

In 2007, the department began evaluating its options for upgrading its PCs, which at the time were running the Windows® XP Professional operating system. David Straede, Network Administrator for the Santa Barbara Police Department, says the Windows Vista® operating system was clearly the next logical step. The department wanted to make some changes to its PCs, and Straede and his colleagues believed those could be provided with Windows Vista.

“We wanted to enhance our PC security to protect against Internet-based threats and potential theft of our mobile devices,” he says. “We already had good security in place, but software viruses are a constant threat. Plus, we have a lot of highly confidential information on our portable PCs. Additionally, we wanted to deliver better productivity tools to our staff, particularly officers out on patrol, and deploy technologies that could provide tighter integration all around while helping reduce the workload on our IT department.”

The IT department evaluated Windows Vista from several different perspectives, including manageability, ease of deployment, business benefits, and compliance with the city’s “green” initiatives.

Manageability: “With Windows XP Professional, a fair amount of time was needed to set up new users, even requiring an IT staff member to log on for initial configurations. Also, we needed greater efficiency in setting up roaming profiles. This is an important issue because we have personnel working around-the-clock on different shifts, and they may be logging on to various PCs. We were constantly fielding support calls for help on the roaming profiles,” Straede says. “So from an IT perspective, we were looking to gain more automation when setting up new users.”
 
Ease of deployment: The IT department was looking for ways to reduce the time of deploying a PC. “With Windows XP, we took about 60 minutes on average to configure a new PC,” says Straede. “We were hoping to reduce that time so we could have more resources to devote to other IT tasks.”

Business benefits: The department is under a clear mandate from the city to maximize its annual funding. The city was already operating under a Microsoft® Enterprise Agreement, and Windows Vista was part of that agreement. “A lot of organizations do not take full advantage of all the products and benefits available under an Enterprise Agreement,” says Straede. “We felt that it made sense both from a budget and a technology standpoint to maximize the availability of everything covered. Why not take advantage of Windows Vista now instead of waiting?”

Energy conservation: With its energy-saving options, Windows Vista could help the police department comply more fully with city mandates to use “green” technology whenever possible. “Windows Vista can help us achieve lower energy consumption and better recovery from sleep states on our PCs,” says Straede.

To enhance the security of its PCs and to help officers do their work more efficiently, the department decided to deploy Windows Vista Enterprise concurrently with Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and Microsoft Forefront™ client security products. The department also needed to be sure that specific applications, including a line-of-business application used for dispatching and records management, would run properly under Windows Vista.

We were hoping to reduce [PC configuration] time so we could have more resources to devote to other IT tasks.  David Straede Network Administrator Santa Barbara Police Department

Solution

The agency’s IT department decided to do a phased rollout of Windows Vista in late 2007, starting with a pilot program running the first release of Windows Vista on seven desktop computers in the 911 dispatch center. Soon afterward, the department decided to take advantage of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was released in February 2008.

Deployments of new PCs began in March 2008, with the IT department setting up between five and 10 PCs a week. By the end of September 2008, the department had about 95 percent of departmental PCs running on Windows Vista, including all of the mounted devices in the department’s 35 patrol cars.

The IT department initially deployed Windows Vista SP1 on 18 PCs in two high-visibility areas—in the main entry area where officers come into headquarters, and in the Records department. The IT department used Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to deploy Windows Vista, Office Enterprise 2007, and all of the agency’s line-of-business applications. System Center Configuration Manager is used by organizations to assess, deploy, and update servers and PCs across physical, distributed, and mobile environments.

“The initial deployment went very quickly, in part due to Configuration Manager, which greatly expedites the process,” says Straede.

The department also used the Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment Toolkit—the predecessor to the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit—for guidelines on configuring the new PCs and deploying them using System Center Configuration Manager.

Focusing on New Hardware

The IT department decided to proceed with the remainder of the deployment by installing Windows Vista on new PCs as they were acquired.

“One of the lessons we quickly learned is that, from a user’s perspective, Windows Vista is going to operate much better overall and perform much more efficiently on new hardware,” Straede says. “We decided not to upgrade older hardware because we determined that the upgrade process might not completely eliminate older drivers and other components that could affect the performance of Windows Vista. For the few units of older hardware that we did keep and load with Windows Vista, we reformatted the drives and did clean installations, and then added memory to boost performance.” 

On one desktop computer, the Santa Barbara Police Department ran Virtual PC, a virtualization solution that allows the agency to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. In this way, the department could continue using an old, unsupported application that could not be upgraded. “We didn’t want one user to have a different set of features,” Straede says, “and the age of the computer prevented us from keeping it. Virtual PC was an easy fix.”

One of the lessons we quickly learned is that, from a user’s perspective, Windows Vista is going to operate much better overall and perform much more efficiently on new hardware.  David Straede Network Administrator Santa Barbara Police Department

Ensuring Software Compatibility

The IT department’s main concern about software compatibility was the proper functioning of the line-of-business application used for dispatching officers and records management.

“This was the most significant piece of planning that we had to do. It involved a lot of coordination and testing with the software vendor,” says Straede. “This mission-critical application controls the flow of data beginning with a 911 call, through the dispatching of units, to the processing and distribution of reports.”

The testing uncovered two significant issues of running the application on Windows Vista. With one, the application would continually change printers when a user tried to print a barcode, which is put on physical evidence to keep track of it. To diagnose the problem, the IT team used Process Monitor, a Microsoft monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, registry, and process/thread activity.

“When we fired up Process Monitor, we discovered that the application was trying to change an initialization (.ini) file in a folder that did not exist,” says Straede. “It turned out to be a programming error. While the vendor assured us this worked at other customer sites, it turned out to be unrelated to the version of the operating system.”

The other major issue involved importing overhead satellite photos, which are used by officers to better understand the layout of locations when they respond to a call. When the photos were loaded, the dispatch application would crash. 

“Using detailed logs from Process Monitor, we worked with our vendor to analyze what the application was doing when it crashed,” explains Straede. “It ended up being an unsupported map file format. After images were supplied in the recommended format, the application worked perfectly.”

Configuring PCs with Windows Vista

To use System Center Configuration Manager to set up Windows Vista on its PCs, the department created a fully patched Windows Vista–based desktop, removing games and adding the simple network management protocol—used for monitoring PCs when they are attached to the network. The department then captured the operating system image with System Center Configuration Manager, and additional hardware drivers were added for each type of desktop or mobile hardware that the department uses. “With Windows XP, it was always a challenge to obtain the drivers needed to boot and install the operating system,” Straede says. “Configuration Manager makes adding drivers as simple as pointing to the folder with driver files.”

A tool used extensively by the IT department for configuring Windows Vista on PCs is Group Policy objects (GPOs), part of the Group Policy technology in the Active Directory® service. GPOs are collections of settings that define how the PC systems will look and how they will behave for defined groups of users in the department.

Configuration Manager makes adding drivers as simple as pointing to the folder with driver files.  David Straede Network Administrator Santa Barbara Police Department

The department created more than 100 GPOs to define a broad array of features and functionality for the PCs. These included:

• Adding specific printers to the PC desktop for particular groups so users would not have to figure out which printer to use.
• Removing unused menu items and adding frequently used options such as printers. 
• Establishing default energy-use policies for PC-hibernation mode.
• Enhancing productivity on mobile devices. Because all mobile devices are full members of the department domain, GPOs are used to direct documents to a default file server at headquarters. Additionally, any documents created or modified in patrol cars are automatically synchronized with copies on the main network.
• Scheduling automatic security updates.
• Setting up roaming policies to ensure that any user can log on to any PC with all their settings.
• Locking down PCs to prevent the addition of any applications or other code that could affect performance.

All of the departmental PCs make use of the elevated privileges functionality in Windows Vista, which allows department IT staff members to control individual PCs remotely as administrators without logging off users to add features as needed. For example, if an officer is taking a training course that requires the installation of an ActiveX® technology to view the course, an IT staff member can easily make the change without physically touching the PC.

The department also uses Windows Vista with Windows BitLocker™ Drive Encryption, a data-protection feature that provides enhanced security measures against data theft or exposure on PCs that are lost or stolen.

Getting Assistance Online

In addition to guidance from local Microsoft representatives on the deployment, the Santa Barbara Police Department’s IT staff benefitted from the Microsoft Software Assurance provision in the department’s Enterprise Agreement and the Microsoft TechNet online support site for assistance in configuring and deploying Windows Vista.

“For instance, we took advantage of Software Assurance to figure out an issue we had deploying Windows Vista to the mobile devices in patrol cars,” Straede says. “It was initially submitted as a Web request; then we got a phone call from a support person, who helped us determine that the problem was related to how the system BIOS was managed in the hardware. We also contacted Microsoft a few times with questions about specific features of System Center Configuration Manager.”

Assisting User Adoption

Straede notes that after employees began using the new Windows Vista–equipped PCs, his team fielded a lot of calls with questions and some complaints. The IT department soon determined that the issues had nothing to do with Windows Vista or its performance.

For all intents and purposes, Windows Vista has been transparent to users, requiring little or no training.  David Straede Network Administrator Santa Barbara Police Department

Straede says, “When we started getting a lot of calls for help, we realized they were due to the new Microsoft Office Fluent™ interface, including the Ribbon, and many thought it was a feature of Windows Vista. In retrospect, it would have helped if we had spent more time educating users about the new Office 2007 interface. But for all intents and purposes, Windows Vista has been transparent to users, requiring little or no training.”

Benefits

By deploying Windows Vista Enterprise to achieve an optimized desktop, the Santa Barbara Police Department has received a number of benefits that are helping both the IT department and end users. The IT department has an easier time deploying and managing its desktop and portable PCs, and has reduced the amount of time needed to configure and deploy a PC by about 25 percent. “That translates to more time we can spend training users on new features,” say Straede.

The IT department has enhanced the security of its systems by using Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption in conjunction with the Forefront security products. Moving to Windows Vista is also helping the department increase the efficiency of its staff, which has resulted in the agency increasing the presence of officers on the streets of the city.

“The decision to move our PC platform to Windows Vista has delivered an optimized desktop environment that provides tighter integration, better security, and simplified deployment and management of all of our desktops,” says Straede.

Easier PC Deployment and Management

The combination of Group Policy objects used with Windows Vista makes it easier for the police department’s IT team to deploy its PCs.

“Group Policy objects make the job of configuring PCs easier and faster,” says Straede. “With Windows XP, we would typically spend 45 minutes or more configuring a PC and would need to be physically present when a user first logged on to make sure the initial logon went smoothly. With all the things we can now customize, new employees no longer need to visit IT. We have reduced the time it takes to configure each machine by at least 15 minutes. That gives us more time in the long run to focus on other tasks.”

Management of the PCs is also simpler. Straede says it is easy to remotely manage and protect all of the department’s PCs, including the devices located in patrol cars.

The group policies available with Windows Vista make the job of configuring PCs easier and faster.  David Straede Network Administrator Santa Barbara Police Department

Equally important is the enhanced stability of Windows Vista. “The Windows Vista operating system has proved to be very reliable and stable,” says Straede. “We don’t see crashes anymore, and our initial efforts on software compatibility have paid off. All of our applications are very stable on Windows Vista.”

Enhanced Security

The tight integration of Windows Vista with the Forefront client security products is helping the department reduce the level of risk posed by Internet-based threats that could infect PCs. “In the past, maintaining the health of our PCs in a secure environment was a real challenge,” says Straede. “Security is critical for our operations, and we feel that by deploying Windows Vista, we now have the most secure client operating system available.”

He notes another feature in Windows Vista that is especially valuable to security efforts for PCs. “Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption provides an added element of protection against theft or loss of PCs, as well as for decommissioning computers. This is an added element of security for us,” Straede says. “When we put our patrol cars in bad places, it is good to know that the computer in the car—and all the sensitive information that it contains—will be protected if someone tries to access the hard drive.”

Improved User Experience and Productivity

Windows Vista, combined with the 2007 Microsoft Office system, gives employees—especially officers out in patrol cars—a way to work more efficiently. It is now easy for officers to securely create and file reports while sitting in their patrol cars. The reports are then sent wirelessly to the department’s Records department. The police department estimates that this in-car reporting saves about 60 minutes per officer per day, adding up to about U.S.$250,000 in annual savings. This also adds up to a better law enforcement presence throughout the city.

“By implementing Windows Vista and Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 in our patrol cars, officers can avoid time-consuming trips to the station to fill out paperwork,” says Straede. “This puts the equivalent of two extra officers on the street every day. Plus, having the identical computing environment in the patrol cars and back in our offices provides complete transparency, making it easy for officers to move from one location to another.”

This reflects the overall improvements to the department’s operations that are delivered by Windows Vista. “With Windows Vista on our PCs, users are more productive, we can deploy our PC assets faster, and we have new management tools that make it easier for the IT department to do its job,” Straede says.

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:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Santa Barbara Police Department products and services, call (805) 897-2300 or visit the Web site at:
www.santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/police

Windows Vista

Windows Vista can help your organization use information technology to gain a competitive advantage in today’s new world of work. Your people will be able to find and use information more effectively. You will be able to support your mobile work force with better access to shared data and collaboration tools. And your IT staff will have better tools and technologies to enhance corporate IT security, data protection, and more efficient deployment and management.

For more information about Windows Vista, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsvista

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published December 2008