Case Study: Douglas Country Libraries

The Challenges

Douglas County Libraries makes every effort to adhere to best practices guidelines for desktop management set forth by the federal government, which is important to them even as a county governmental agency. Of particular importance to them is the U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB), formerly known as the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), which continues to be one of the most successful governmental IT programs aimed at helping to increase security, reduce costs while creating a more well managed and secure desktop environment. The driving force behind these mandates is the principle of creating a least privileges environment. That is granting end users only those privileges needed to get their job done and allowing continued business productivity.

The Solution

Douglas County Libraries implemented Viewfinity’s Privilege Management solution to help with these challenges. The first challenge was to upgrade Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2010. This is a process that can typically take up to 6 weeks and was completed in merely 6 hours. The IT team created a custom setup file that allowed the complete version of Office to install and then used Viewfinity to push this out to all the computers via a silent install. Thus no interaction was required at the physical computer location or by the end user. The Office upgrade was completed overnight and staff showed up the next day with the new Office version installed. Without Viewfinity, this could have taken thousands of person-hours for IT administrators to visit each desktop individually to manually complete the upgrade.

After the upgrade, the IT team discovered that they were not able to universally activate all of the Office programs for the staff because the end users did not have local admin rights to their machines. This was resolved very quickly with Viewfinity’s Privilege Management feature, which allowed the IT group to maintain its compliance mandate for secure desktops by elevating users’ privileges only at the Office 2010 application level. The added benefit was that an expiration date could be set for the privilege elevation which allotted enough time for all end user activations to take place.

Douglas County Libraries uses Viewfinity for many other initiatives such as installing Microsoft’s BPOS software suite, and upgrading the l Horizon software which is the integrated Library System that runs the organization. Every task was completed in record time using Viewfinity.

The Results

The Viewfinity solution saved Douglas County Libraries significant time and money on IT administrative tasks and ensures that end user productivity is not hindered while creating a more secure environment. As an IT organization, Douglas County Libraries succeeded with the age-old struggle to create the appropriate balance between a secure user management environment while ensuring enough flexibility to enable end user innovation and productivity. The struggle for achieving cost efficiencies have been tightly aligned and balanced with the critical need for managing users. With Viewfinity, Douglas County Library is leveraging all the software features needed in order to achieve balanced management of their IT environment.

A typical upgrade translates to $18,000 in costs due to the temporary augmenting of the IT team to accommodate what used to be a manual upgrade process. With Viewfinity, an automated process was put in place and since implementing Viewfinity, there have been ten total upgrades which equal a savings of $180,000 and a fast return on investment. A clear validation for the decision to use Viewfinity.