City of Lincoln Case Study
When the City of Lincoln Council needed to refresh its Citrix® environment and enable web access to its business applications, it chose ISC for its excellent knowledge and for providing the best technical response at the most competitive price.
Client
Lincoln has a population of 88,000 people. Its council employs over 800 staff and is responsible for delivering services such as local planning, schools, sheltered housing, refuse collection and leisure facilities to the people of Lincoln.
Business driver
The council had been using Citrix to deliver applications to its 800 employees for several years, owing to its easy to use centralised management functionality. However, with Citrix and Microsoft commencing the withdrawal of support for the now aged versions deployed, the council needed to migrate to newer versions. At the same time, migration would also enable the council to develop the functionality of its Citrix infrastructure and extend remote access to all of its users as Dave Wormall, Principal IT Officer of the City of Lincoln Council explains:
“We were running Citrix in a Windows 2000 environment but we wanted to refresh this to the latest version. There were a number of new applications and products that the council was interested in, but these weren’t compliant with Windows 2000. We also needed new hardware and were looking to reduce the number of servers that were being used.”
ISC had a longstanding relationship with the council and was invited to enter a competitive tender to undertake the project.
“ISC provided the better solution at the best price. We’d worked with ISC before so we knew they were reliable and although that wasn’t the deciding factor, we were reassured when they provided the best technical response to the tender at an appropriate price point,” explains Dave Wormall.
Solution
The solution entailed upgrading and developing the existing Citrix XenAppTM environment, re-using many of the council’s existing HP servers. The project also involved deploying the latest version of Windows and implementing additional business applications. As part of the project, ISC provided a custom-built login portal and implemented secure and controlled remote access with two factor authentication, for home workers and councillors.
The council was eager to be included in the deployment, so part of the solution involved ISC sharing their knowledge and capabilities with the council’s IT team.
“Although the solution was largely to update our existing Citrix environment, we were very keen to be involved. This is an area where ISC was particularly excellent and their team were very flexible in their approach to working with us. They used a model that enabled us to get our hands dirty. We had a good working relationship with them and their knowledge sharing was second to none,” explains Dave Wormall.
The first phase of the project involved ISC deploying four servers, which would later enable the council’s IT team to scale out the remaining ten servers with remote assistance where necessary. During this phase, the ISC deployment team shared its technical knowledge to enable the council’s IT team to fully understand how to install the remaining servers with remote help.
Benefits
Delivered on time and within budget, the project provided the council with a number of benefits, as Dave Wormall explains:
“It allowed us to move forward with our infrastructure, enabling us to future proof our organisation. It’s now a fully supported and more reliable system, and, as there are fewer servers to manage, our IT team can focus on other projects. From a technical viewpoint, the deployment also enabled us to push out more Windows 2003 applications using the internet, which in turn, reduced support overheads while providing a better continuity of service to our employees and councillors.”
“As the deployment relied heavily on ISC sharing their knowledge with us, we had to really trust these people. The relationship was particularly important as we needed to know that they wouldn’t add on costs at a later point. Right from the outset, ISC’s tender was clear and easy to understand. The accounts team always billed us accurately and their technical people were punctual and a real pleasure to work with.”
“They really did add value and I feel like we got our money’s worth. I can honestly say that we have an excellent working relationship, even to this day. Although you hope this will happen with all your suppliers, with ISC it was definitely the case,” he concludes.
