Computer network security software

Imagine receiving a support call from a sales representative. She can't get her spreadsheets to run properly, so you dispatch someone to take a closer look.

It's a routine scenario for most IS shops. But when there's only a handful of support staff to call on and when they're regularly criss-crossing a building the size of seven football fields and responding to up to 40 calls each day, the situation can quickly get out of hand.

For Monique St-Jean, MIS director at the Anna Laberge Hospital Centre in Chateauguay, Que., it was a fact of life. St-Jean is responsible for managing a wide variety of applications running on the hospital's 550 desktops -- word processors to highly specialized medical software -- and do so with shrinking budgets. It makes for a time-consuming task.

"Now we're down to 15 support calls a day," she said.

That's because St-Jean decided several months ago to solve the PC support problem, after she saw the amount of work awaiting her over the next several years.

"In the next 18 to 24 months we will be changing 200 PCs and when we install PCs, people ask for more software, which means they will . . . call our department for more software support," St-Jean said.

Some of the hospital's clinical software is running on dumb terminals. But the manufacturer told St-Jean they would only support that particular version for another 12 months. They would have to migrate to the PC-friendly version.

St-Jean is also in the midst of implementing a dictation system for doctors, comprised of software that integrates with the mainframe and features voice capability.

So with the help of integrator MediSolution, she decided to install ZenWorks for Desktops version 3 and Novell Single Sign-on from Novell Corp.

ZenWorks is a centralized administration tool that lets IT managers design PC software images and roll out and manage them from a single location.

"This will give us an an easy way to push the applications without going (to the user's desk). All of the images of the software have been installed at the network," St-Jean said.

Yves Morin, executive director of the public sector with Novell Canada in Quebec, said PC support is an ongoing problem. He estimated the average cost per user of managing a PC is $3,200.

"That's one of the main drivers," Morin said. "The cost of rolling out the infrastructure is very high right now."

Single Sign-on, which works in conjunction with Novell Directory Services, let St-Jean consolidate multiple user log-in passwords (as many as six or seven, in some cases) into one. She can also restrict a user's access to applications depending on their job requirements.

St-Jean said the biggest challenge in rolling out the products was posed by the age of some of Anna Laberge's equipment. "With the Pentium 75s, it was longer. Instead of taking 20 minutes to install, it took up to two hours sometimes," she said.

Then there were "soft" issues -- not all the users were happy with the upgrades. "Some people were afraid. They thought we would check out what they were doing," St-Jean said. There was also concern that people had potential access to sensitive human resource files, or that medical files could be compromised. She explained to them that such fears were unfounded.

Now, St-Jean said 80 per cent of help desk calls can now be completed from the administrator's desk. And work requests, which used to have a two to three month waiting time, are now completed within two weeks.