Through the generosity of its donors and supporters, Elizabeth Finn Care helps people of all ages who struggle to cope with a life in poverty whether due to long term physical or mental illness, family breakdown, bereavement, redundancy or inadequate pensions.

The charity works to provide practical and effective solutions after listening carefully to each individual’s particular circumstances. This can include providing a weekly allowance to deal with the worry of not being able to pay the bills or buy fresh food through to providing special grants to replace essential household equipment or for building repairs.

Elizabeth Finn Care also provides care and individual attention through contact with its well-trained, understanding and experienced caseworkers and volunteer visitors. In addition, a wholly owned subsidiary of Elizabeth Finn Care, Elizabeth Finn Homes Ltd, operates a group of 10 award winning care homes in England and 10 almshouse cottages near Birmingham.

Centralisation was the key to IT success
When Murray Grainger took over as Head of Information Services at Elizabeth Finn Care it quickly became clear that centralisation of the IT infrastructure was the key to future success. “We had multiple sites including the care homes, administration offices and people working remotely from home,” said Murray. “With no technical expertise at the 11 different sites it was obvious to me that we needed a simple, centralised IT infrastructure that was easy to manage.”

Centralising the IT infrastructure also made sense for the upgrade of the resident record system at the care homes, which was the central repository for carers to record essential information on residents at the homes.

Increased reliability and manageability
Murray deployed a server-based computing environment running on a Microsoft Terminal Services operating system, using Wyse thin client terminals at the outset. But after reliability and management issues, he moved to IGEL.

“When I came across IGEL with 2100 LX Smart units at £140, the choice was fairly simple,” said Murray. “After using the IGEL units for more than a year, we have only had one issue, a motherboard failure that was dead on arrival and quickly swapped out.”

“Today, we have about 130 remote clients. Three are in kiosk mode with touch-screens. Some are home workers connected directly to our infrastructure backbone, others are home units connected via Cisco VPN tunnels using shared domestic ADSL lines and the rest are at our 10 Care Homes or on desks at headquarters.”

Elizabeth Finn has seen the simplicity of running the IGEL thin clients as the biggest advantage.

“I purposely avoided anything with Microsoft in it and used the Linux version,” said Murray. “We are not a “Linux house” and I
only have a very rudimentary knowledge of Unix and Linux but that does not seem to be an issue.”

The decision to go with Linux IGEL units also assisted Elizabeth Finn to save on security costs. “We have no virus checkers on the remote ends delivering a considerable saving on security costs,” explained Murray.

And finally, the ease of set-up and remote management was of major benefit to an organisation with a small IT team. “The remote management software is simply fantastic,” said Murray. “Easy to use with extremely granular control. I have set-up several standard profiles with different features or lockdowns. All you have to do is connect a unit out of the box, discover, drag to appropriate folder, change its name to your in-house convention and reboot. It is all done in under a minute.”

Moving forward, Elizabeth Finn is committed to extending its IGEL thin clients across the organisation through a grow and replace model. Looking back at the IGEL roll-out, Murray commented: “From an economics point of view it was very sensible but from a
management point of view it has been a revelation.”

The solution Applications accessed: Microsoft Office, Outlook, Great Plains Dynamics and a specific healthcare applications Number of Thin Client users: 130 to date IGEL model: IGEL-2110 LX Smart Terminal services OS: Microsoft Terminal Services 2003 Network used: MPLS over ADSL and VPN over ADSL