Wright State Prints Mission Critical Documents with Thin Clients from UNIX
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LEV I , RAY & SHOUP, IN C. CASE STUDY Wright State University Raising the banner of academic document management premier state university sought Telecomm Services. With operations extend the system's usefulness into the a reliable way to manage spanning help desk services, application future - all while keeping costs at a documents generated by their development, network, desktop, and reasonable level today.” Anew UNIX-based telecomm support, the CaTS team A key member of the team was system administrative system. After carefully plays an important role in nearly all administrator Steve Wynne. “For me, considering several vendor offerings, university functions. the support and reliability of the vendor university IT staff selected the VPSX ® Until recently, most of WSU's primary are just as important as the features of solution to provide assured, encrypted applications ran in the university's IBM their software,” says Wynne. “Banner delivery of academic and administrative mainframe environment, and were documents are becoming a crucial part information. updated in the 1990s using web front- of university operations, so our output end interfaces. For budgetary reasons, management system needs to deliver ORGANIZATION however, the university decided to flexibility, responsiveness, and high replace the custom-developed availability.” Named after the world-famous Wright mainframe applications with a popular brothers, Wright State University in UNIX-based academic software suite VPSX SOLUTION SETS THE Dayton, Ohio, called Banner. continues their CURVE spirit of Several vendors responded to Wright innovation. The FINDING A UNIX OUTPUT State's output management RFP. The university serves MANAGEMENT SOLUTION team immediately began evaluating nearly 17,000 WSU's Banner implementation includes various solutions against a defined list students, offering more than 100 modules for financial aid, payroll, and of criteria. (See sidebar: “Wright State undergraduate and 50 Ph.D., graduate, student registration as well as Bursar's Wish List”). and professional degrees. office and HR functions. While these “One of the most important factors was Like all academic institutions, Wright applications could functionally replace the level of vendor support,” says State University (WSU) faces a variety many of the existing mainframe Wynne. “The VPSX references we of critical challenges. In addition to systems, the CaTS team knew that they spoke to expressed great satisfaction being a place of learning, every would need a new way to manage with the level of support they received university is a business - with suppliers, documents generated by this UNIX- from LRS. During our own trial, LRS ® employees, customers, and other based application suite. staff helped us configure the system to stakeholders whose needs must be met. The decision was made to purchase a meet our needs.” This included an on- While competitive and budgetary vendor-supported solution instead of site visit from an LRS systems engineer pressures affect all businesses, they are developing the software internally. “Our for initial setup and administrator of paramount importance in the team drew up a list of requirements and training. educational sector. prepared to issue an RFP,” explained According to Phil Neff, the CaTS team Phil Neff, Associate Director of can very quickly stage and test WSU'S CHANGING IT Systems Services at CaTS. “Looking at upgrades, then move them into ENVIRONMENT the solutions in the marketplace, there production. Adds Wynne: “If I ever is almost no end to the types of features need to call LRS support with an urgent When it comes to addressing the available. The challenge was in computing needs of the staff and service request, they usually get back to determining which functions were me with a solution in a matter of hours. student populations, WSU relies on its immediate necessities and which would CaTS team - short for Computing and Likewise, when dealing with less urgent WRIGHT STATE WISH LIST Centralized configuration “We don't have to physically visit various locations to set up queue access. With VPSX, we make one change in one place and the queues are updated or added everywhere the solution runs.” A vendor we can trust “We called multiple VPSX reference sites and talked to our own employees who had worked with other LRS products in the past. There was a strong consensus that LRS stood behind its products.” Web-based thin client “Several other solutions required installation of Windows GUI clients at individual user workstations. The VPSX solution uses a standard browser, meaning nothing to install or maintain.” Print job retention “We wanted the ability to retain documents on the spool, so that users could do reprints without re-running their jobs. VPSX supports job retention, as well as automatic or manual expiration.” System administration via web GUI or longer-term issues, the LRS support “VPSX configuration can be done 100% over the web. Other alternatives required team provides regular status updates using text editors.” regarding my request.” Instant updates on printer status “With support for SNMP, the VPSX product will let help desk staff identify printing A BANNER DAY FOR VPSX problems before users start calling.” Since the Fall 2006 semester, several Support for encryption Banner modules are running in “Many of our documents contain sensitive student information. VPSX encryption production, with VPSX providing capabilities were an important factor for us.” assured delivery of 600+ mission- Command line control over print delivery critical documents per day. As WSU “One of our criteria was command-line compatibility with UNIX (lp, lpstat, cancel, etc.). shifts additional mainframe processing to its open systems platforms, the The LRS suite comes with sample scripts that provide this capability.” scalability of the VPSX solution will be Multiple user authentication options a key factor for success. “We are “Since we have multiple UNIX-based systems, VPSX support for PAM (Pluggable confident in both the VPSX product Authentication Modules) was important.” and the people who support it,” says Ease of use Wynne. “This may be somewhat subjective, but we find that most users quickly learn to use the VPSX interface. This greatly simplifies the task of supporting the system.” LRS Offices North America United Kingdom Spain Germany Italy Australia Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. U.K. Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. 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UNIX is a registered trademark ofThe Open Group in the United States and other countries. IBM is a regi stered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and/or other countries or both. Banner is a registered trademark of SunGard SCT Inc.Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries..