The Dutch municipalities of Oosterhout, Hilvarenbeek, Baarle-Nassau
and Oisterwijk provide services to over 100,000 citizens. These local
authorities run numerous subsidiaries, including fire stations, town
shipyards, sports centers, a sheltered workshop and a theater. Equalit,
the Shared Service Center (SSC) of the municipality of Oosterhout, is
responsible for supporting the combined IT infrastructure of these four
local authorities, totaling more than 1,000 desktops.
In 2006, SSC decided to design a new architecture that was flexible,
allowing new services to be introduced, and at the same time was very
easy for system administrators to use. This architecture solved the
often conflicting demands for flexibility and ease of administration on a
small scale. However, they wanted to upscale the concept and reuse it
within the Shared Service Center, offering it to all subsidiaries of the
participating local authorities. About two years ago, Equalit and
System Integrator Cam IT Solutions started designing a completely new
and improved architecture. Because flexibility and ease of
administration were a top priority, the search led to a combination of
innovative solutions which included RES Workspace Manager, RES
Automation Manager, Citrix XenApp and Microsoft App-V (SoftGrid).
The RES Software products offered a high level of flexibility and
cost very little system administration effort. All configuration
settings are maintained centrally from a management console that is
intuitive and easy to use. The SSC felt that without the implementation
of Workspace Manager and Automation Manager, they would have needed to
hire more system administrators to maintain the environment with the
same level of quality.
