Desktop Deployment Strategy for North West Hospital
17 Sep 2008
A leading North-West of England Hospital NHS Foundation Trust recognise that the quality and availability of Information and Communication (ICT) systems is paramount to the delivery of effective patient care. The Trust operates a complex and distributed IT environment which is evolving and expanding rapidly, often without a parallel increase in technical staffing resources. The Hospital Trusts ICT department is responsible for the provision, maintenance and support of core ICT infrastructure, both locally for the Trust and at various neighbouring NHS organisations.
The Trust recognises the importance of the quality of desktop operating environment used by some 4000 desktop computers; it needed to adopt an approach to the management and deployment of these computers and the associated software packages in order to improve quality of service and reduce total cost of ownership of the desktop estate. In addition to this, the Trust must look to utilise a newer version of the Microsoft Windows operating system used in order to provide new features, services and security that is built into these newer versions. Many applications that the Trust have a requirement to use are no longer supported by the current version of the Windows operating system used by the Trust.
BDS Solutions were engaged to provide a pilot deployment of a standard desktop computing environment to a department consisting of 125 computers. This pilot included the dynamic deployment of applications on demand using Systems Management Server as well as the virtualisation of applications using Microsoft Application Virtualisation (previously known as SoftGrid). Management and support of these workstations would be achieved using various native support tools such as Remote Assistance and Group Policies, which includes best practice recommendations provided by NHS Connecting for Health as well as locally identified requirements.
This pilot will form the basis of a wider rollout of the standard desktop computing environment to other business areas in line with the Trust's Desktop Strategy.
For further information refer to the Desktop Strategy page or contact our Sales Department on 01884 33440.