London borough extends PC tool use

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The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has continued to expand the long term use of PC lifecycle management tools, to grow the cost and resource benefits it had consistently delivered in managing its 4,000-strong PC estate.

The council has been a user of Attachmate WinINSTALL PC lifecycle management tool for some ten years now. But recent extensions in the use of the tool beyond its original scope are adding additional value to its ongoing use.

Barry Goodall, support unit manager at the borough, told IT PRO that the growing knowledge of the tool is helping the IT team improve its use of time and resources required to maintain, repair and upgrade its Microsoft Windows-based PCs.

"By knowing the tool well - and almost growing up with it - we have been able to think about different things we could do with the tool," he said. "And we've come up with some clever uses for it that it was not necessarily designed for."

He said that initially the tool was bought to simplify PC management and enable remote maintenance: "I can't think how many man-hours the tool has saved us over the years. But without it we certainly couldn't cope without a team of five to 10 people dedicated to these tasks."

A key component of the increased need for remote maintenance has been the growth of software patches needed to keep the PC systems and applications up to date. "We now use the product to deploy patching seamlessly," he said.

Maintaining its version of WinINSTALL over the years has also given the borough access to additional functionality such as granular inventory management reporting and control.

He explained: "The inventory tool allows us to very easily select all the PCs with a particular application that an update needs applying to. I can then simply drop the update onto just those PCs."

In addition, an inventory check of machines logged onto the network in the early morning hours demonstrated that hundreds of PCs were being left on overnight, resulting in wasted energy and higher energy consumption costs. Goodall said the organisation was able to encourage users to power down their PCs at night, saving the group more than 30 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Most recently, he added: "We have streamlined procurement of new memory and PCs after a new integrated children's application was developed on Microsoft .NET but needed 512MB memory or more to run smoothly."

"By query the inventory tool, we were pretty instantly able to come up with a list of PCs by department that needed the new application but that would struggle because they didn't have sufficient memory."

From this, the said the borough was able to establish which PCs just needed upgrading or replacing wholesale, so making the IT procurement process as cost-effective as possible.

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