Halton Catholic District School Board

Background
The Halton Catholic District School Board is comprised of 35 elementary schools, 7 secondary schools, 1 education center and 2 continuing education centers. They work with over 3000+ computers, 9,500 user accounts 1,500 email accounts and cover an area which includes the towns of Burlington, Oakville, Georgetown, Milton and Acton.

Problem
The School Boards Information Technology department is responsible for all technical support through the board. Due to the Boards large service area and multiple locations it was having problems with it's after hours management, including upgrades, response and travel time. When a call came in after hours, a staff member would be paged and have to travel from their home to the crisis location. Depending on where the problem location was, this could take some time. There was also the over time cost associated with getting staff to respond in off hours and on weekends. This over-time really came into play whenever the department need to upgrade information on the system. To perform this task and not interrupt students and faculty they needed upgrade on weekends.

Solution
The best way to overcome their problems was to centralize management. The most effective way they found to do this, was to use Digital V6's Kaveman. Kaveman allows them remote access to any of their servers at any time from anywhere with full KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) control via a web browser or VNC. The benefits of having Kaveman spilled over to all areas, like allowing staff to perform upgrades and solve after hour problems from home, reducing server downtime throughout the working day, saving space in the server room, reducing travel time to problem sites, and much faster disaster recovery time. Now if there is trouble, they connect to the problem server using Kaveman. Kaveman also proved to be a cost effective solution because overtime pay and travel time was reduced with the ability of home access.

Comments
"Being able to manage all our servers from anywhere has given us more control than we have ever had." stated Bill Cripps, Manager Technical Services for the Halton Catholic District School Board. "Since we started using Kaveman we are able to cut costs and response time, while raising our level of efficiency."



Redstone Software, Inc.

Background
Redstone Software has created an easy-to-use, cross-platform automated testing tool called Eggplant. Eggplant controls a computer the same way a person does-reading the video screen and controlling the keyboard and mouse. What makes Eggplant unique is that it can automate any user action through simple English-like scripts. When you test software, you would normally perform a sequence of manual actions to test user functions. Eggplant can perform these actions to test any computer, as the system is independent of the computer it is controlling.

Problem
Eggplant relies on VNC (Virtual Network Computing) being loaded on the system being tested in order to control the user interface. One of their prospects has a need to test Intel computers at the BIOS level when the operating system has not been loaded. Redstone wanted to find a solution to this problem.

Solution
Digital V6's Kaveman was the perfect complement to Eggplant to solve the prospect's need. Kaveman attaches via standard hardware interfaces to the computer's KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) and converts it to the VNC protocol, then sends it to Eggplant via TCP/IP. The Eggplant / Kaveman combination allow users to automate or control remote system operations anywhere in the world with no software installed on the remote system.

Comments
President of Redstone Software, Inc. commented, "In our tests, Kaveman performed flawlessly by accurately capturing the server's video, keyboard and mouse characteristics without tainting the host server. This unique capability opens new markets to us and will be the basis of exciting, cost-effective solutions for many industry segments."