Hedensted Kommune
The local government authority (Kommune) for the Danish city of Hedensted has more than 45,000 citizens. In January 2007, three smaller local government authorities were merged into one, Hedensted Kommune.
The IT infrastructure used remote control as much as possible, because traveling to the geographically scattered remote locations to install or administer educational applications was very inefficient. The IT Staff began looking for a way to centralize as much of their IT infrastructure as possible, without excluding the possibility of using local applications.
After a presentation to the local school boards, ITX translated the demands into a solution and developed a new architecture. ITX, suggested including RES Workspace Manager for user workspace management and for the seamless integration of local and centralized applications (using the technology called Virtual Desktop Extender). Today employees and students use a Workspace Manager-powered virtualized desktop on terminal server from a mixture of about 900 PCs, 650 laptops and 100 thin clients. Workspace Manager enabled Hedensted Kommune to mix both centralized and decentralized applications in a completely transparent way. Workspace Manager also enables Hedensted Kommune to deploy expensive application such as Pascos DataStudio or Jascs Paint Shop Pro to one school during one week and then to another school the next week. This made the deployment and administration of applications a much more stable process.
Also, the organization could not afford to provide full technical IT expertise at all its schools, and it was very inefficient for IT staff to visit all the schools to troubleshoot or make configuration changes. With Workspace Manager, all changes are made centrally and implemented on the local systems on the fly. The implementation of RES Software was successful in that it was able to form a transparent infrastructure combining centralized and decentralized elements in a cost efficient way without even having to cut back on functionality or having to expand the IT staff.
