City of Orlando
Located in the heart of the Florida high technology corridor, Metro Orlando is rich with technology education programs, leading-edge research initiatives and vocational training efforts. In this environment Orlando Public Safety is charged with the protection and security of some 185,000 citizens and the countless tourists who flock to the area’s year-around attractions. They’re well equipped and well supported to meet the demands of their mission. And they take every advantage of Orlando’s reservoir of technological savvy, including the City of Orlando’s IT specialists who ensure communications and integrity for the city’s 900 police and 400 fire personnel.
About the Deployment
City of Orlando is responsible for 500 police vehicle installations, 70 fire vehicles, 60 building and code enforcement inspectors, and 15 support personnel that are fully mobile clients. AT&T brought Mobility XE to the table as a solution for the City's connectivity issues. After downloading a free trial, the City of Orlando's IT department knew their wireless clients could be fully functioning members of the network community rather than second class citizens with access to only a very few resources.
About the Results
City of Orlando discovered that being able to log into the domain with Mobility is a big plus, because domain policies can be easily deployed to the remote units. Prior to the Mobility XE deployment, City of Orlando used to have local user accounts with no passwords on their machines. That is gone now, and a network account is needed to log in—security is greatly enhanced. Mobility XE also provided session persistence, especially with the AS400, their host CAD and records server for the Police Department, which wasn’t really designed for mobile functionality. Now the remote clients don’t have dropped connections and IT can map drives to remote units and fix problems in the field instead of calling them in.
"As expected, our data speed increased when we upgraded to GPRS. But we were also happily surprised at the number of applications—which were never designed with mobility in mind—that worked flawlessly. Internet users saw a big difference," explained Mark Crain, Sr. Manager for Systems and Networks for City of Orlando, Florida. "We installed Mobility on a few inspectors’ vehicles. They saw higher speed and increased functionality of applications. Some of the other benefits included the deployment of virus definitions and domain policies. Prior to NetMotion Mobility, a major configuration change meant recalling and manually updating or re-imaging 500+ machines. Many of those types of changes can now be done by just changing a domain policy and sitting back. It had always been virtually impossible for a client to obtain virus definitions without coming in to the station and plugging into the network and re-booting. That all happens in real time now, without any user involvement!"