Reference story - La France Mutualiste
As early as 2004, La France Mutualiste opted for a centralized architecture based on Citrix technology in order to simplify its infrastructure administration and provide high-quality service to its users. All the user-based applications are now grouped in a personalized workspace on the client desktop, depending on each user profiles and rights. The 53 delegations and the 5 regional sub-offices present in all France access to the head-office to use the computer tools they need in their daily work. “The fact we also have a lot of mobile users adds new complications in terms of administration”, explains Oifik Taleb, technical service manager of La France Mutualiste. While this centralization rapidly brought benefits, on the other hand La France Mutualiste realized that recurrent problems of administration still persisted. “There are just some things that can't be done with Citrix and other things which are too fastidious and time-consuming” says Oifik Taleb. In 2007, that was about three years later, we looked for a solution in order to optimize our administration.
We conducted a market study and finally opted for RES PowerFuse for two evident reasons: RES PowerFuse is the only product that is both technically comprehensive and easy to use and to implement”.
The Solution
RES PowerFuse was deployed in January 2008. All in all, it only took three weeks to one person to complete installation and settings. La France Mutualiste has named a RES PowerFuse agent responsible for the 18 Citrix servers and has defined the different workspaces. “In fact, the task is very simple. It consists in specifying for each workspace an application pool, data sources and the strategies related to the people connecting to the specific workspace, etc. Then, you must specify which users are entitled to connect to the different workspaces and the setting of RES PowerFuse is done”, explains La France Mutualiste technical service manager.
"Each client is created dynamically. Generally speaking, it’s much more complicated to manage with Citrix. Thanks to RES PowerFuse, we can create users pools and thus simplify management. We are not obliged anymore to define rights for each user but for a group of users. This is really time-saving as far as the administration is concerned.” Moreover, RES PowerFuse was perfectly integrated to Citrix solutions and could manage a lot of problems already identified by La France Mutualiste. This too has contributed to the rapid implementation of the solution.
The Benefits
Since the implementation of RES PowerFuse, La France Mutualiste has noticed an enormous simplification of administration tasks in addition to the considerable amount of time saved on maintenance. The mutual insurance company can now perform tasks that were difficult if not impossible to manage in the past, such as remote printer management or database access. In fact, the company’s programms access to the database via ODBC Before, the connections between the databases and the applications had to be set for each user, adding more workload to the database administrator. Today La France Mutualiste can manage pools and doesn’t need a user-specific configuration anymore. All these advantages are now obvious for the employees themselves. Before the implementation of RES PowerFuse, the insurance company had to reduce the functionalities available on virtual desktops for security reasons. RES PowerFuse is now the entrance point system, which improves considerably the overall infrastructure security. As a result, more functions are available to users who can now have their own personalized workspace. All these improvements have given the employees a much appreciated increase in flexibility. Moreover, RES PowerFuse makes it possible to block access to an application during the maintenance process, which was not the case before. Additionnaly, the mutual insurance company has optimized its infrastructure security, the users being automatically informed when an application is not available for maintenance reasons.
The Future
La France Mutualiste is very satisfied with this first step and intends to pursue its infrastructure stabilization process. “However, we are planning solutions to improve remote access, especially for VPN used by our mobile users”, the technical service manager says. Once again, RES PowerFuse should play a major part in the management of users rights and profiles.
RES PowerFuse enabled us to simplify our infrastructure administration and to strengthen global security.
Oifik Taleb, Technical Service Manager, France