The Provincial Agency for Economic and Fiscal Assistance (OPAEF for the Spanish initials) in the County Council of Seville (Spain) has launched a system to unify the management of computer networks and users of all their offices located throughout the province. The goal of the system is to unite the 21 geographically dispersed OPAEF offices into a single network, allowing easier network management and providing users with higher quality of service at lower cost. To meet these objectives, the OPAEF decided to implement a solution based on a Spanish open source project, eBox Platform – Linux server specially designed for network management in small and medium organizations.
“This solution has allowed OPAEF to reduce significantly the time and costs required to manage network services of their offices” said Juan José Domínguez Calvo, System Analyst at the Provincial Information Services Network (INPRO), the entity created by the County Council of Seville for the provision of IT services. Domínguez continued “As the chosen technology solution is open source, we have removed all the software licensing costs. Moreover, we got the support for the deployment, training of our staff and maintenance directly from the eBox Platform vendor, but INPRO has all the freedom to manage the solution. From our point of view, this has greatly increased the quality and speed of the service we provide to our end users.”
The implemented solution allows to connect the OPAEF offices on a single computer network where the network administrators carry out centralized management of users based on LDAP (master-slave). As eBox Platform acts as a primary domain controller (PDC) of the Windows network, it also enables data backup and printer management. Given the nature of the OPAEF offices, it is worth noting that the used configuration allows PCs continue to function normally in case of loss of connectivity between offices and the central server and once the connection is retrieved, if there were any changes in the central server, they will be synchronized.
In addition, each network user has a roaming profile that allows the users to access with their username and password to their local information on any computer in their office, with their own desktop and configuration. Besides, the system allows to establish corporate policies on client desktops, such as configure wallpaper, set proxy setting or decide which groups of users can connect USB drivers, among others.
“The use case of the OPAEF is one of the best examples of the cost savings you can achieve with eBox Platform” said Javi Vázquez, Chief Operations officer at eBox Technologies, and continued “We believe that this case can be easily applied in other organizations, especially in the public sector where the rationalization of costs and investments is now more necessary than ever.”
The detailed OPAEF-eBox Success Story is available for download in English and in Spanish.