The City of Helsinki, in Finland, wanted to upgrade 20,000 client computers. City of Helsinki is upgrading its standardized desktop environment to the Windows® 7 operating system and is seeing a reduction in licensing costs and hardware expenses, and lower power consumption, coupled with an increase in both system and employee productivity.
Business Needs
In Helsinki, Finland, the primary governmental body is the City Council. The council is responsible for city administration, including appointing officials to administrative seats and managing the city’s annual budget.
The City Council has a central IT department that serves 38,000 city employees who use 20,000 client computers. The council used the Windows® XP operating system on its client computers, and the Windows Server® 2003 operating system on its servers, which it is upgrading to Windows Server 2008 as it refreshes its server hardware.
In this turbulent economic climate, the council is keeping a vigilant watch over its constrained budget, and the IT department wanted to find a way to better control the council’s power consumption, which could result in significant cost savings. “We needed to implement technologies that would help us manage and control our client computing environment,” says Jari Taberman, IT Specialist at the City of Helsinki. “In particular, we wanted to control how computers are powered up and down, and take advantage of power-saving features that come with a modern operating system.”
In addition, the IT department for the City of Helsinki sought to make a further positive impact on the city’s budget by raising employee productivity. Specifically, the team saw opportunities for improving operating system performance, which was lagging, resulting in incremental productivity decreases.
In order to address these issues, the IT department for the City of Helsinki decided to upgrade its client computers to the Windows 7 operating system.
Solution
In June 2009, the City of Helsinki teamed with solution provider FC Sovelto and began an upgrade to the Windows 7 Release Candidate with a pilot deployment to 20 employees throughout the City Council. The IT department tested Windows 7 on six different hardware models, including older hardware scheduled for replacement. The team found that Windows 7 performed well on low-memory computers, so it won’t need to upgrade hardware ahead of schedule specifically to support Windows 7. By October 2009, the City of Helsinki deployed the operating system to 100 employees, with plans to continue a phased rollout to city computers.
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With easy-to-deploy policies, we can have greater power management control … helping us to reduce power consumption across 20,000 computers. |
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Jari Taberman
IT Specialist,
City of Helsinki |
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To avoid potential application compatibility issues, IT staff is implementing Microsoft® Application Virtualization (App-V), part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. “Local software vendors are not always fast to adopt new technology,” explains Taberman. “To address that, we’re using App-V to virtualize multiple instances of some applications, particularly those that are Java-based.” With App-V, the IT department can deploy multiple versions of the same software on the same desktop in order to support requirements of different line of business applications.
The City of Helsinki is implementing BitLocker® Drive Encryption and BitLocker To Go™ —two security enhancements in Windows 7—for encryption of removable storage devices. The city is planning to implement DirectAccess, a feature that, when combined with Windows Server 2008 R2, enables employees to connect to the corporate network from any Internet connection.
Employees will be able to take advantage of Federated Search, a feature in Windows 7 that makes it possible to search remote repositories, including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 sites on its network, directly from their desktop.
The IT department used Windows Deployment Services and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 for its pilot deployment. When it upgrades to Windows 7 across the organization, it will use Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 for automated installation and configuration.
For the upgrade, the City of Helsinki took advantage of its Enterprise Agreement, including Windows, Microsoft Office Professional Plus, and Enterprise CAL, making it possible to start developing common IT architecture and building a role-based environment for their workers.
Benefits
As a result of upgrading to Window 7, the City of Helsinki has a modern client operating system that helps it stay within tight budget constraints. Specifically, the city will be able to reduce costs and power consumption, as well as increase employee productivity.
Reduced Costs
By implementing Windows 7, the City of Helsinki is reducing costs in a number of ways. First, by implementing the built-in security enhancements, BitLocker and BitLocker To Go, the IT department can decommission its existing third-party encryption software and eliminate those licensing costs. Second, because Windows 7 runs efficiently on lower-memory computers, the council can continue using its existing hardware and delay costly capital expenditures.
Efficient Energy Consumption
The City of Helsinki is deploying power management policies in Windows 7 that enable it to better control the power state of computers in its network. “With easy-to-deploy policies, we can have greater power management control,” says Taberman. “We can control when computer displays turn off and when computers enter sleep mode after a period of inactivity; we can also wake up computers for remote management with a simple network message—all helping us to reduce power consumption across 20,000 computers.”
Increased Employee Productivity
The IT department has heard evidence of increases in productivity thanks to increased system performance. “From the boot up sequence to launching applications and performing daily tasks, we’ve seen an overall performance improvement of 20 percent,” explains Taberman. In addition, with Federated Search, employees can extend their desktop search to the city’s internal SharePoint sites and gain quick access to critical documents and files instead of fumbling through multiple network directories.
