The municipality of Karlshamn in southern Sweden is home to 32,000 people over a 490 sq km radius. A traditional harbour town, Karlshamn thrived on the growth of the fishing, alcohol and tobacco industries. Today, run by the Karlshamns Kommun local authority, the community’s historic town centre is popular with tourist visitors.

Improving thin client management
The Karlshamns Kommun local authority has been a convert to server-based thin client computing for the past 10 years. With the wide range of services from road maintenance to healthcare being offered by the council, its workforce is spread across the region based in a variety of distributed buildings.

The customer Karlshamns Kommun local authority Providing education, health and community services to a population of 32,000 people over 490 sq km

“We have long understood the benefits of server-based computing with thin clients but our challenge was finding the most efficient thin clients to meet our needs,” explained Einar Berntsson, IT operation manager at Karlshamns Kommun.

One of the local authority’s largest IT expenses was the time and money involved in maintaining, upgrading and repairing the 300 thin client desktops across the region.

IGEL’s remote management software - the differentiator
“We were introduced to IGEL by a local reseller and evaluated their products,” explained Einar. “The remote management capabilities made the decision easy. This was the best management software we had seen.”

Using IGEL’s Remote Management Suite (RMS), which comes bundled free with every IGEL Universal Desktop, IT administrators have a simple to use management tool which can have thin clients up and running with just a few simple mouse clicks. Intuitive to use, secure and scalable to up to 100,000 thin clients, the IGEL Remote Management Suite drastically reduces management time for IT administrators.

The challenge More efficient desktops for a Citrix-based SBC environment Better centralised management software to reduce support costs Improved environmental solution

The local authority IT team uses RMS to have their thin clients up and running in minutes without leaving their central office location. Updates can be scheduled and run centrally, timed to happen overnight.

Karlshamns Kommun has now replaced almost all of its thin clients with IGEL LX Smart and IGEL LX Compact units. The IGEL LX Compact comes with a Firefox web browser¹ and is used in buildings such as local libraries where internet access is required.

“Many of our employess work in the healthcare sector where the thin client approach also ensures data protection and security,” added Einar. “All of our information is held in one place, on central, well protected servers. As the thin clients do not hold any data, security risks are minimised. If they are stolen, they are relatively inexpensive to replace.”

The solution IGEL Remote Management Suite for standardised remote administration of all IGEL models IGEL LX Compact for web browsing capabilities IGEL LX Smart for use in the healthcare sector and in offices Proven reduced energy consumption of IGEL thin clients

Einar added that staff also like to use IGEL thin clients because they are very quiet, with no moving parts, and very energy efficient, using at least 45% less power than the average PC.

Finally, the thin clients are very cost effective for the local authority with a product life about six years compared to four years for the average PC.


¹With immediate effect, a web browser is integrated by default in all IGEL devices.