Fontys Hogescholen is the largest provider of higher education in the
Netherlands. It offers full and part-time courses on almost every
educational topic and operates over 40 separate schools across the
Netherlands. They needed to simplify its IT infrastructure so that it
could effectively service more than 57,000 user accounts, including
37,000 students and 4,500 employees using some 9,000 workstations. To do
this, Fontys IT needed to implement a centralized management of
applications based on Microsoft Softgrid and Citrix Presentation Server.
By centralizing IT, Fontys wanted to improve end-user support and to
ensure that the deployment of new and updated educational programs was
hassle free.
At the time Fontys was managing 1,200 applications and over 9,000
workstations and this was becoming increasingly difficult to support.
The school wanted to offer a secure and stable environment and improve
manageability. Moreover, the institute wanted to be able to provide
secure access in one of its large campus areas and was also keen to
offer this in 33 of its other locations. Students need to be able to
access their applications from anywhere, in the classrooms on any public
campus, or even offsite.
Through RES Software Platinum Partner PQR, Fontys Hogescholen chose
RES Workspace Manager for its access control, security and configuration
management features. This ensured the stability of the Citrix
environment, on which the central management of applications and
improved security depended. Workspace Manager also improved management
functionality by creating better reports on user activities and by
enabling more efficient use of applications.
The most immediate benefit seen by Fontys Hogescholen was a dramatic
fall in the cost of IT maintenance which fell by 50 per cent for each
workstation. RES Workspace Manager has helped Fontys Hogescholen create a
stable yet dynamic infrastructure, enabling them to maintain
applications efficiently while offering individual users far greater
flexibility than before.
