Derby Homes implements NetMotion Mobility XE

Derby Homes have implemented NetMotion Mobility XE to enhance their existing Mobile Working project.

Derby Homes has approximately 300 members of staff who work over several offices and also from remote locations, such as community rooms at sheltered accommodation sites, as well as in tenants' homes and on the street during estate inspections, using a range of network types such as 3G/GPRS, Wi-Fi, the LAN when in the office etc.

Derby Homes currently uses varying forms of mobile IT, including tablet PCs running Windows XP Tablet Edition with 3G data cards and several editions of non-networked HP IPAQ Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).

Applications in use in the field include Outlook for email, Citrix XenApp, Internet Explorer, Word, Excel on the tablets, and legacy software on the PDAs.

The tablet PCs are used as normal PCs when in the office, connected to the corporate wired network (LAN) via docking stations or to corporate or home wireless networks.

Whilst working around Derby Homes' estates, the cellular 3G/GPRS card is used to support connection to a Citrix session.

Project Issues

Staff members who had been asked to use the tablet PC equipment whilst mobile or remote from the office complained that their productivity was impacted by slow logon times, dropped connections and reset Citrix sessions when a connection drops.

Tests revealed that several areas of the city have poor cellular coverage and as a result, poor applications performance when connecting through 3G along with end user interruptions and ensuing frustration.

The result of the connection being dropped has been that the end users' Citrix session has been terminated. The user then needs to re-dial their cellular connection and re-initiate the Citrix connection.

When the client finally dials back in, the Citrix session has been reset and the task the user was busy with has to be started all over again as any unsaved work is lost.

As a follow-on of the overall project, Derby Homes envisaged that new handheld devices such as Smartphones or PDAs will be deployed to some staff to replace the ageing HP IPAQs and software currently in use.

These devices are intended to run Windows Mobile and have a 3G interface to transfer data from forms-based software to Derby Homes' back office systems.

Solution

Derby Homes acquired NetMotion Mobility XE as their mobile VPN solution of choice in order to address the issues listed above with the tablet PCs and laptops, and also to potentially extend the benefit to the Smartphone deployment.

Extending to Smartphones would offer a cost effective handheld email facility, alongside the main justification, mobile working applications to run on the handsets - and from a Derby Homes perspective for their existing applications wider support exists on Windows Mobile based devices.