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Desktop management: reeling in the great white whale

Published: 06 November 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Managing desktop computers in an academic environment has historically been like swimming with sharks in murky waters. Adding to the challenge, the sharks multiply ad nauseam while the stretching of IT budgets and support staff continues at an alarming rate. With shrinking budgets and support staff in mind, support staff at California State University, Chico embarked upon an adventure in the grand tradition of Captain Ahab, in landing the big white whale of centralized desktop management. As with all adventures, it pays to prepare and it requires three things to make a successful journey: a realistic destination, willing sponsors, and enough resources to complete the journey. With the destination of centralized desktop management firmly established by support staff, finding a willing sponsor was the next step. In this quest, support staff received aid from an unlikely source, the sharks in the murky water. Aided by recent outbreaks of viruses, increased spyware and phishing activities (the sharks), the project found willing sponsors in the campus administrators. With destination and sponsor on board, support staff began loading their tackle box with tools that would be useful in reeling in the big one. Tools like Microsoft Active Directory, LANDesk, Microsoft Systems Update Server, and some good old homegrown programming have allowed the support staff to establish desktop baselines, standardize applications, secure desktop computers and provide solid statistics to provide for future budget guidelines; successfully reeling in the big white whale.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGUCCS '05: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services
November 2005
482 pages
ISBN:1595932003
DOI:10.1145/1099435
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 November 2005

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Author Tags

  1. LANDesk
  2. SUS
  3. active directory
  4. centralized management
  5. desktop computing
  6. desktop support
  7. windows

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SIGUCCS Fall05
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Overall Acceptance Rate 123 of 170 submissions, 72%

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