ONGC : Remote Vista Deployment

A mammoth Windows Vista deployment at 18,000 nodes across multiple locations in India

Monday, June 01, 2009

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With more than 18,000 desktops and laptops spread across India, it was very difficult for ONGC to maintain and keep track of all the OSes, software, and devices. Inventory management and helpdesk support job was also becoming tougher by the day. The IT helpdesk was busy doing mundane activities such as deploying and fixing Operating Systems, Printer configuration, new application installation, etc. and due to this both the IT team and the users were wasting a lot of time in getting those bugs fixed. Also a lot of security and policy issues were cropping up that led to more complications essentially due to lack of standard desktop deployment on the laptops. As a matter of uniform policy, a standard Desktop was needed so that theycould have consistency in infrastructure.

The project was conceptualized to have a single desktop image that could handle all the standard operational issues. So the organization decided to deploy Windows Vista across the board to make the complete desktop fleet homogeneous. And with the help of security enhancements in Vista such as IE7 Protected mode, phishing filter, User Account control, etc the vulnerability of the machines was also reduced to a great extent. After the commencement of the project the company has been able to realize a 5 to 10 % gain in employee productivity and a reduction of calls in helpdesk issues related to OS by a whopping 50%. The only challenge faced by the company while deploying the project was the complexity and scale of the network. ONGC could now very effectively look at and inventorize the Laptops by capturing details like hard-drive, RAM, battery, and other details of the machine, so that proper maintenance could be carried out. This also helped in case of enhancement of upgrades due to changes in policy, security patch deployment, etc.

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