[Customer Story] Automatic Data Processing Centralizes And Stores All Of Their Customer Information With Remote Desktop Manager

“With Remote Desktop Manager, we’ve enabled our entire team to leverage all of the customer access information that everyone already has.”

Timothy Frazee, Communications Engineer

Client snapshot

Headquartered in Roseland NJ, Automatic Data Processing is one of the world’s largest providers of business outsourcing solutions. Leveraging over 60 years of experience, ADP offers a wide range of human resource, payroll, tax and benefits administration solutions from a single source. The company is also a leading provider of integrated computing solutions to auto, truck, motorcycle, marine, recreational vehicle, and heavy equipment dealers throughout the world.

Challenge: Centralize and secure customers’ equipment information

After six months of managing new sites with RoyalTS, handling feedback and inputting changes to a static configuration file, Timothy decided that his organization needed a better solution that would allow them to:

• Empower all engineers to add and update customer equipment information into a shared and scalable interface.
• Secure top-tier client information.
• Enable sales and trainers access the same information and make changes in read-only mode.
• Furthermore, Timothy realized that when its major IP Telephony product moved from a Windows platform to an ssh/http interface, RoyalTS simply couldn’t do the job anymore, as it didn’t support a centralized model, or offer anything more than RDP sessions.

Solution: Remote Desktop Manager backed with SQL Server

In 2010, Timothy selected Remote Desktop Manager to solve its important, multi-layered challenges: “Most of our install and support engineers had a copy of the data that they used before I got involved. I saw that if we combined all the per-engineer copies, we could have a much better resource. I spent most of a weekend taking the top 5 libraries and making them 1 that I then sent out on a monthly basis. Any additions, I added them to the next monthly file. As you can see, this was the start of having something like Remote Desktop Manager in ADP. To date, the following results and benefits have been achieved:

• ADP now has a centralized method of storing all of their customer information. Via the built-in logging feature, ADP now knows who has access to what, which is critical for security protection.
• With off-line support, engineers without access to ADP can now get the information they need while serving customers on-site.
• ADP can now set different rights for each security group association, such as read-only for sales, while trainers now enjoy improved access to information added by the Install and Support Group.
• Instead of ADP support engineers looking up various databases for install-related information, such information can now conveniently be stored and retrieved.
• ADP can now use the “import from Active Directory” option to** save a substantial amount of time and effort**, especially with regards to Support Desk Engineers who need to remotely control user desktops.

Here’s what Timothy has to say to other IT pros:

“When you are part of a team in IT – install, sales, support or training – you always have your own method of keeping equipment access information, such as old spreadsheets from the install, or searching through emails for IP addresses. With Remote Desktop Manager, we’ve enabled our entire team to leverage all of the customer access information that everyone already has. We’ve also integrated legacy information into an easy to use, scalable solution that increases productivity. Besides Outlook, RDM is the only application that I always have running.”

Timothy

Want to share your story with your peers? Please email me at mtrottier@devolutions.net