Badajoz Provincial Council: HA vApp for 300 connected offices

• Name: Badajoz Provincial Council

• Sector: Public

• Employees: 4,000 approx.

• Municipalities: 180

• Remote Offices: 120

• Location: Badajoz, Extremadura (Spain)

Badajoz Provincial Council is a pioneer institution in the adoption of new technologies. With 180 municipalities and 120 remote offices spread over its more than 21,000 square kilometers, app virtualization has been its best ally for more than ten years to avoid many and long IT staff trips. “We were clear that if there was a way to install all the programs and update them centrally we were going to save many kilometers and many problems”, explained Eladio Maqueda, Head of Systems of this administration.

The introduction of this technology was an important turning point, because, among other things, “we made sure that all connected offices dependent on the Provincial Council have the same version of the applications installed and the data is stored just in one place”, said Maqueda.

But when they thought all were advantages, technical and economical handicaps aroused. “The vApp solution that we used forced us to have a load balancing tool to enable remote access and it caused many problems. Added disadvantages were the high cost of licenses“, stated the Head of Systems.

When they tried to tackle the complexity of their IT scenario, they got to know the UDS Enterprise VDI and vApp connection broker through RedIRIS forum, and “when we checked that it integrates a tunneler to allow remote access, we decided to dig deeper into the tool”, indicated Maqueda.

“We attended a presentation by Quer System and we realized that it was just what we needed. The fact of being a highly appreciated solution by RedIRIS gave us great confidence and its ease of use completely convinced us”, he mentioned.

What began as a specific implementation to face the challenge of remote access has become a solution that is being progressively deployed in the vast majority of municipalities and remote offices in Badajoz. “The solution is gaining users in a natural way, from the Systems Department we have not imposed its installation, but every day new users are registered, and user who tries it, user who stays“, stated Maqueda.

Today, Badajoz Provincial Council has two tools for application virtualization, the one they have been using for years and UDS Enterprise. “This last one makes deployments much easier, so when the IT staff from the Provincial Council or the town halls have to choose between the two solutions, they see that UDS Enterprise is easier to use and they opt for it, almost all the new implementations are been carried out with this connection broker“, said the Head of Systems.

Another reason why more and more technicians are getting to know UDS Enterprise is that “there is a cryptographic card model that is used to validate digital signatures in accounting applications that only works with this connection broker“, pointed out Maqueda.

In addition to all vApp related to accounting, municipalities use UDS Enterprise to access electronic administration applications from which they manage different areas of human resources, assets and the document manager. The Provincial Council workers access through UDS Enterprise to virtual vApp related to accounting, electronic signature and tenders. All applications are configured in high availability.

“Both the applications to manage the register of inhabitants and tenders gave us many problems depending on the version of the browser and the operating system used to access. Now, with UDS Enterprise this issue has also disappeared, since users access directly from a web browser with the default URL and with the configurations that we are sure will work smoothly“, specified Maqueda.

Easy to deploy, use and manage

The IT staff of the Badajoz Provincial Council know how to make the most of the connection broker thanks to the support they have received from UDS Enterprise and Quer System teams. “The work of the technicians is awsome, they guided us in the migration from the platform we had before and to set up the infrastructure according to our needs. With their help, we have changed the UDS Enterprise version three times in a year without any difficulty, upgrades are made in a very simple way”, outlined the Systems Manager.

The constant evolution of the software following the requests of the community of users is another aspect highlighted by Maqueda: “Being able to contribute in the development of the product is unusual and very positive; we see how our suggestions to improve the software are taken into account and lots of new functionalities are incorporated, while still being a solution very easy to implement and manage“.

After checking all the advantages of UDS Enterprise, the Systems specialist has no doubts when recommending the use of this tool. “The benefits are many and you can start with a test scenario at no cost with UDS Enterprise Free Edition. Besides, it is a really cost-effective solution, especially for environments with a large number of users, where the costs of other solutions shoot up”.

From the Systems Department of the Badajoz Provincial Council they are very satisfied with their application virtualization project with UDS Enterprise. “In one year we had to go from a 50 users subscription to one of unlimited users, which is a clear evidence of the success of the project“, valued the Systems Manager.

The optimal experience with this software has favored that this Department is interested in other functionalities of UDS Enterprise. “In the future, we may implement a “secure virtual desktops” project suggested by Quer System, which would help us control and secure the accesses of certain remote users, while it will allow us to guarantee a flawless adoption of the BYOD trend”, concluded Maqueda.

VIRTUALIZED APPLICATIONS WITH UDS ENTERPRISE

For municipalities and Provincial Council:

• Accede. Check-in / check-out management, register of inhabitants and the citizen’s portal. It is a web browser that takes to the URL of the internal server

• Sicalwin. Client server program to manage accounting, invoices, auditing…

• FirmaDoc. Documentary manager associated to Access and SicalWin, also used for electronic processing, electronic signature, file tracking…

• PLYCA. Web browser including the URL of the centralized Contracting server

Only for municipalities:

• Effective cost of services

• Asset management

vApp INFRASTRUCTURE

• Broker: UDS Enterprise

• Hypervisor: Citrix XenServer

• Connection protocol: RDS (direct and tunneled), HTML5

• Authenticator: Active Directory

• vApp OS: Windows

• Acces OS: Windows

• Hardware: Citrix XenServer virtualization environment on Dell array with 10 GB connections to central switches in Provincial Council. 4 RDS servers with 50 GB disk and 16 GB RAM each. Oracle corporate Database