Case Study 1
Large scale MSI Packaging

Case study 2
Migration & Staff augmentation

Case Study 3
Large scale Windows 2000 Migration

Background
This government agency handles a number of insurance-related claims and cases for the state of California. As a state-wide agency, they have more than 10,000 employees in 40 office locations across California, and only one dedicated agency help desk to handle all technology-related issues that occurred. When the agency contacted Coalition Networks, there was no consistency among hardware/software platforms, even among the desktop units in a single location. Because of this disparity, distribution of applications, patches, and other software was difficult to effectively do.

Problem
When Coalition Networks was first approached, the project was focused around creating a migration solution to a single, consistent platform while maintaining existing hardware. Once this was achieved, a new problem emerged. While every computer was now on a consistent operating system, there was still the issue of restoring application usage in an efficient manner. The 10,000+ users were now uniformly running Windows 2000, and this standard opened the door to a remote distribution solution with the Active Directory feature.

Solution
The first part of the solution was to understand which applications were most critical to users. To do this, Coalition Networks worked with the agency to define and categorize various applications; applications were delineated into tiers of importance, and the appropriate work was put in to customize applications in order to ensure total compatibility across all of the 10,000+ systems running in a Windows 2000 environment.

With the scope of the necessary applications defined, the second part of the solution was creating an efficient distribution system. Thanks to the transfer capabilities of the system-wide Windows 2000 network, Coalition Networks was able to package the critical applications in a Microsoft Software Installer (MSI) format. Distribution and installation took place remotely, as the help desk used the Windows 2000 Server Active Directory software distribution policy capabilities to deploy the MSI packages.

Results
The Coalition Networks agency-wide revamping of the application distribution network offered both short-term and long-term results:

	Short term: By utilizing administrative capabilities and security settings, the agency's help desk noticed an immediate difference in how it approached problems. Since the Windows 2000 migration provided a clean slate to work with, the help desk was able to control who received what application. This gave the ability to accurately track licenses and ensure that no applications could be corrupted through any adverse effects brought upon by free user downloads. Installation and configuration became a much smoother process thanks to the MSI packaging and Windows 2000 environment. With remote access to a consistent environment across users, installation was essentially a carbon-copy process; when issues did arise, the appropriate patches and fixes could be accessed and transmitted remotely from the help desk.
	Long term: Part of the project goal was to give the help desk a tool to streamline its demands, and creating an MSI-based distribution system achieved this. By using the MSI system, the overall count of difficult (environment- and platform-specific application calls requiring a long diagnosis period) was reduced thanks to remote capabilities and consistent setup. The MSI distribution system also made it much easier to restore any wiped/corrupted hard drives, as well as provide new employees with the applications they needed to get going.

Overall, the Coalition Networks MSI solution provided this government agency with a consistency it had been sorely lacking. Today, the agency and its help desk have fewer calls and quicker response times, all leading to a more-streamlined and efficient operation.