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Network Health through Logon Scripting
Steven Brummer, Client/Server Design Engineer
Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta
Software:
ScriptLogic 3.02
Windows 2000 Professional
Windows 2000 Server
Terminal Server with Citrix MetaFrame
Microsoft Exchange 5.5
Hardware:
Compaq servers with Intel processors and Wintel PCs
Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) is dedicated to enhancing the lives of children through excellence in patient care, research and education. CHOA addresses the unique needs of sick and injured children and their families. To support the hospitals 4,000 staff members, CHOA operates approximately 100 servers and 2,500 PCs. Maintaining these PCs has been a constant strain on CHOAs IT Staff, often keeping them from more pressing tasks. The organization decided to find a solution that would standardize and enforce desktop settings from a network administration level. In addition, they wanted a solution to manage its Citrix MetaFrame/Terminal Server users.
Like many hospitals, CHOAs campus is widespread. Before, when a users roaming profile became corrupted, the employee was unable to use his or her PC until a desktop support person physically stopped by to remedy the problem. With so many users scattered across a large area, maintaining the network PCs became a tedious and timeconsuming effort for the IT staff.
"We desperately needed to free up time for our desktop support staff so we could utilize them in other IT ways," said Steven Brummer, client/server design engineer at CHOA. "One of our goals was to find a product that would assist us in supporting our network and simultaneously decrease the need for support intervention by 30% percent.
CHOA selected ScriptLogic to fulfill its network administration needs. Now, when an employee logs on any CHOA computer, ScriptLogic automatically sets drive mappings, printers, registry settings, and creates Outlook e-mail profiles for the individual during the logon process. Brummer said that ScriptLogic has eliminated the need for roaming profiles and has also alleviated many of the IT staffs "major headaches."
"I came across a demo version of ScriptLogic on the Web, downloaded it, and it was love at first sight," said Brummer. "The solution immediately exceeded our expectations. In addition to scripting user settings, we were able to automate many more network administration tasks, making our jobs more manageable."
CHOAs IT staff is also able to automatically deploy software to workstations, such as company-standard Microsoft Office templates, anti-virus updates or workstation administration functions such as Microsoft SMS jobs during the logon process. With ScriptLogic, CHOA no longer needs to have desktop engineers manually configure user settings when new computers arrive or when there is a problem on an individual PC due to a configuration change. ScriptLogic simply corrects the settings. The number of support calls has been reduced, and the IT staff has more time to focus on other tasks.
ScriptLogic has made CHOAs original goal of reducing support intervention by 30% percent a reality. "Our IT team is so much more efficient and effective now," said Brummer. "Instead of spending time running from one end of the hospital to the other to fix a problem, ScriptLogic logon scripts perform many of the jobs automatically. The solution has helped us focus on our goal of maintaining overall network health, no pun intended, instead of spending time with individual PCs."
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