ONGC : Remote Vista Deployment

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.