Let's hear it for the (relatively) little guys. "I was one guy in an IT department with 200 users at the time and growing," says Tim Pierson, IT director at Apple Physical Therapy in Puyallup, Washington in a recent Enterprise Systems piece. "Most of my help desk calls were, 'It's not printing' or 'I can't get to my file share'--really basic stuff." Although user requests for help were simple, Pierson was overwhelmed by the volume, often facing a backlog of up to 50 calls. These days, that backlog is down to no more than five, he tells ES.
Rapid growth was the big inspiration to secure a new solution for managing the health care provider's users, who are spread out among 22 clinics across western Washington State. It was a no-brainer to install a suite of products from ScriptLogic for remote management and other network management chores, Pierson says. He was working with a local technical consulting company, Northwest Computer Support, for help with issues such as setting up and managing the VPN network. Northwest recommended the ScriptLogic products; Pierson reviewed their functions and found it to be a perfect fit with what he needed. "It kind of just fell into place and I stopped looking," he says--partly because he had so little time to search, and partly because the product's simplicity and feature set "just made sense for us."
Apple uses three ScriptLogic products most heavily: Desktop Authority for remote management; Secure Copy for copying files from remote systems to the main database for backup and archiving; and Active Administrator for directory management. Active Administrator builds on the tools in Microsoft's Group Policy Management console, including the same sort of easy-to-use interface.
For more on the case study:
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