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Deakin scoops AppSense for improved desktop user experience

Deakin scoops AppSense for improved desktop user experience

Staff and students constantly access the university's network from labs, administrative workstations, and off-campus locations

Deakin University has selected AppSense Environment Manager in a bid to personalise the user desktop experience by improving the logon experience and reduce profile corruption and reliance on group policy.

The university has five campuses—one in Melbourne, two in Geelong and one in Warrnambool. With staff numbering around 4,200, the university serves a student population of around 53,000, which includes those on and off campus. Staff and students constantly access the University's network from labs, administrative workstations, and off-campus locations.

Deakin University, infrastructure service director, Craig Warren, said the technology will enable the organisation to personalise user desktops on-demand and help protect endpoints with contextual policy control while at the same time move away from a student environment where desktop configurations were lost every time a user logged off.

“We provide Deakin University students, staff, and faculty with excellent service, but the performance and corruption problems we experienced with roaming profiles was a blemish on that service. AppSense got rid of both problems, which allowed us to focus on providing advanced digital disruption technologies to our customers.”

The university will now be able to personalise user desktops on-demand and help protect endpoints with contextual policy control while at the same time move away from a student environment where desktop configurations were lost every time a user logged off.

According to the university, logon times varied from 30 to 40 seconds for users with new machines to 90 seconds and beyond for older machines or users with large roaming profiles. In extreme cases, a logon could take 10 minutes or more.

Additionally, Deakin University is also deploying AppSense Insight to collect actionable endpoint data and establish a baseline to identify the processes that were causing problems and needed attention.

The decision to select AppSense follows a proof of concept (POC) facilitated by Thomas Dureya during which time it configured AppSense Environment Manager to replace Deakin's roaming profiles.

AppSense is valuable from the standpoint of visibility, according to Deakin University desktop support manager, David Wyld. "Often you don't know you have a problem unless you have a way to measure performance. In addition, with Insight, we had hard data about what people were experiencing, which uncovered problems we knew about—and problems we had no idea existed."

The university plans to implement additional AppSense technology with the desktop infrastructure team starting to develop AppSense application templates for faculty machines and has deployed AppSense agents to 10,000 machines.

AppSense has also provided Deakin with configurations for the numerous virtual applications that students access via Citrix in the university's labs.

Additionally, Deakin is evaluating AppSense Application Manager to support an institutional security initiative. The team’s initial needs include malware protection, initially in student lab environments and privilege management for staff members.

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