Australian insurance provider, CCI, achieves seamless migration and consistent end user experience with AppSense

Catholic Church Insurance (CCI) is owned by The Catholic Dioceses and Religious Institutes of Australia, and, as a church-owned business, it aims to look beyond profits and focus on people. CCI is committed to ethically and compassionately supporting its members in times of need. The organization is one of the oldest insurance companies in Australia and first opened for business in 1911, providing fire insurance for Church properties. Since then it has grown into a diversified general insurance and financial services provider working with Church institutions throughout Australia.

CCI has approximately 260 employees working across the company’s offices in Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. With many employees regularly working from home and travelling between CCI’s offices, the company’s IT department struggled to deliver a consistent desktop experience across the different locations and devices. The user base also experienced lengthy Windows logon times, with user profiles generally taking up to 15 minutes to load, which affected the productivity employees. Commenting on the problem, Trevor Walter, Team Leader of Technology Services at CCI, said: “The slow logon times, which could range anywhere from between 10 to 15 minutes and, on occasion, up to 45 minutes due to profiling issues with the previous solution, were a source of frustration for employees as well as a headache for our IT department. Simply put, every minute spent waiting by an employee to gain access to their computer was another minute lost in productivity. We were also struggling to deliver a consistent and personalized user experience for our staff, which we needed to change.” In addition, the organization was due to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 and wanted to minimize user disruption and the impact of a migration project on IT resources.

CCI approached AppSense to support its Windows 7 migration and Citrix upgrade and to deliver an improved and consistent end user experience. AppSense’s abilities to not only support a seamless migration, but also help with profile management, policy management and logon times led to the purchase of AppSense’s Environment Manager. AppSense Environment Manager enables IT to deliver a personalized desktop experience to any desktop, physical or virtual - on any Windows OS, regardless of how the desktop and applications are delivered. The solution provides precise user control with a powerful user-based policy and personalization engine that delivers user and application settings on-demand to any desktop, on any device based on the context of the user, location, time, device and many other granular options. When disconnected, user policy and personalization settings persist off-line, then ‘sync’ with the corporate network next time they reconnect. Not only does this provide centralized user management, but it also enables user personas to be dynamically applied to any desktop environment providing a consistent, personalized experience for the employee. Partnering with AppSense Trevor was pleased with how easy it was to work AppSense: “The AppSense deployment was a simple, three-stage process, and I was impressed with how smoothly and quickly everything ran.” CCI began the implementation and within a few weeks, had migrated all of the organization’s SOE polices over to AppSense Environment Manager, allowing the IT team to better administer policies and users. The IT team rolled out individual profile capturing in preparation for the upcoming migration. When the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 was complete, the personalization and policy settings were delivered to the new environment, ensuring minimal user disruption and eliminating the need to reconfigure the desktop.

• Trevor Walter continued: “We worked closely with AppSense throughout the entire implementation and took advantage of their support, resources and training, which was always provided to us. The AppSense team regularly checks in to make sure the system is running smoothly and to understand how they can help us address the next business challenge we need to resolve through technology.”
• As far as Trevor Walter is concerned, the business benefits CCI has received from implementation speak for themselves: “To begin with, not only is policy management extremely straight-forward and more granular now, but AppSense’s Environment Manager has also addressed the main concerns of our workforce. Now when people login from home, for example, they know that their desktop display, individual user settings and preferences will all load exactly how they like them – replicating the experience they have grown accustomed to when in the office.”
• In addition, Trevor and his team managed to save the organization money by reducing the overhead costs associated with IT and significantly decreasing the downtime that was the result of long logon times. Logon times at CCI are greatly improved, now requiring between 2 to 3 minutes to logon instead of the 10 to 15 minutes users experienced before the organization partnered with AppSense. It was not a surprise then, to Trevor and his team, when the large number of helpdesk incidents, a consequence of the poor user experience in the old environment, stopped pouring in. Because of this, IT at CCI can now focus on delivering other, proactive IT services rather than reacting to user complaints.
• “And last, but certainly not least, managing and maintaining the entire ecosystem of desktops and laptops can now be done with ease. Issues that used to cause the internal IT department headaches, such as patch management and enforcing routine software or security updates, are now automated freeing up our limited internal team to work on more interesting business critical IT projects,” commented Walter.

• Significantly reduced logon times from 10-15 minutes to 2-3 minutes.
• Eliminated profile related support calls.
• Reduction in IT operational costs.