Solution Provider Helps Customers Manage Remote PCs Using ...



|Overview | | |“The software-plus-services approach has opened new lines of businesses for us and a scale of |

|Country or Region: United States | | |customers that we've never had before.” |

| | | |Danny Kim, Chief Technology Officer, FullArmor |

|Industry: Professional services - Software | | | |

|engineering | | | |

| | | | |

|Customer Profile | | | |

|FullArmor is a Boston-based solution provider| | | |

|that uses Microsoft technologies to provide | | | |

|organizations with enterprise-level policy | | | |

|and security solutions. The company has 30 | | | |

|employees. | | | |

| | | | |

|Business Situation | | | |

|FullArmor needed a new technology approach | | | |

|that could help it expand the market reach of| | | |

|PolicyPortal, a product that helps | | | |

|organizations manage PCs that reside both | | | |

|inside and outside of domains. | | | |

| | | | |

|Solution | | | |

|The company redesigned PolicyPortal using a | | | |

|plus-services approach based on Microsoft | | | |

|products and technologies. | | | |

| | | | |

|Benefits | | | |

|Opens new markets | | | |

|Flexible and scalable | | | |

|Provides familiar tools, reusable code | | | |

| | | |FullArmor, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, provides managed IT service solutions that help |

| | | |organizations manage policies and security for dispersed populations of PCs. Faced with difficulties |

| | | |in marketing an initial version of its flagship product, called PolicyPortal, FullArmor adopted a |

| | | |software-plus-services approach using Microsoft® technologies. The result is a highly flexible, |

| | | |scalable product that is attractive to customers, delivering flexibility and control that results |

| | | |from the use of locally installed software and Web-based computer services. FullArmor is attracting a|

| | | |wide range of customers, helping small businesses to large government agencies with outsourced IT |

| | | |support. In addition, they are working on a project in Ethiopia that will help that nation’s |

| | | |government securely distribute standardized applications and communications on PCs used by teachers |

| | | |across the country. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

FullArmor is a Boston-based solutions provider that helps large organizations manage their IT user policies and security for PCs, laptops, and other endpoint devices. The company specializes in solutions built on Microsoft® products and technologies, including the Active Directory® service, Group Policy, and the Windows PowerShell™ command-line interface. FullArmor, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has a customer base of more than 5 million users and 1,500 organizations worldwide, including large corporations such as Wal-Mart, Shell, Lands’ End, Eli Lilly, and Bank of America.

One of the company’s solutions is PolicyPortal. Originally developed in 2005, it generated a lot of interest among potential customers because it could help them manage and protect PCs both inside and outside Active Directory domains, including PCs dispersed over large geographical areas.

However, the solution was designed to be hosted, so it required extensive work to set up with hosting service providers. This led to long periods before FullArmor could close agreements with customers.

“We did not want to get into the hosting business ourselves, and there were elements of the solution that were just too complex to deliver to generic hosting providers,” says Danny Kim, Chief Technology Officer for FullArmor.

“As a traditional hosted IT application, it would require a lot of resources to install and manage. What we really needed was a platform that would simplify application delivery yet still provide the scalability and manageability required for large, dispersed organizations with a lot of PCs.”

Solution

FullArmor moved forward on its vision for PolicyPortal after adopting a software-plus-services approach based on Microsoft products and technologies. These include the Microsoft .NET Framework, , Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Windows Azure Storage data management tools, the Windows PowerShell, and Group Policy Objects (GPOs), which are used to establish policy settings for users, organizational groups, and domains.

PolicyPortal lets organizations maintain network security by extending their directory-based policies over the Internet. A small, easily installed piece of software resides on the client PC to communicate with the PolicyPortal application. Then, from a central location, administrators can manage PCs, set up user policies, distribute applications and updates, monitor the health of specific PCs, and manage PC inventories. They can also perform security procedures such as remote data wipes in the event that a PC is lost or stolen. Through the use of .NET Workflow Services and .NET Service Bus, administrative tasks are performed automatically, thus minimizing or eliminating the need for intervention by the users of the targeted PCs.

FullArmor began work on the new version of PolicyPortal in mid-2008, taking less than two months to migrate its existing application to the new platform. “We moved the application over quickly because about 80 percent of the code could be migrated without any changes in order to work in the new software-plus-services environment,” says Kim.

Benefits

Selecting the software-plus-services approach helped FullArmor and its customers in a number of important ways. With the updated PolicyPortal, FullArmor has broadened its market reach, including projects that are helping emerging nations in Africa. The flexibility and scalability of the software-plus-services approach allows FullArmor to quickly and easily modify PolicyPortal to meet the needs of specific clients, and to take advantage of new technologies as they arrive on the market. It also provides the FullArmor development staff with familiar tools and reusable code, allowing the company to move faster so it can compete more effectively.

Opens Up New Markets

After the initial development of PolicyPortal, FullArmor faced challenges in marketing it because of the technical difficulties associated with outsourced hosting and the related installation and management issues. Using the software-plus-services approach, however, has delivered enormous flexibility for the solution, which in turn is opening up new markets for FullArmor.

In addition to attracting traditional enterprise customers, FullArmor has been able to promote PolicyPortal to other kinds of organizations. One example is the government of Ethiopia, which is which is working with FullArmor and SQLSoft+, another Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to provide about 250,000 portable PCs to teachers across the country. The PCs are configured with a small piece of software that allows the Ethiopian education ministry to use PolicyPortal to centrally manage the remote computers, performing tasks such as distributing antivirus software, application updates, and managing PC inventories.

During discussions on the project, Ethiopian officials had concerns about security. FullArmor addressed these concerns using Microsoft technologies such as Windows CardSpace™ identity selectors, which will be used to authenticate individual teachers.

“The software-plus-services approach based on Microsoft technologies allowed us to adapt to the customer’s needs because it does not require a large IT infrastructure,” Kim says. “Instead, we can use small pieces of locally installed software that work in tandem with Internet services.”

With PolicyPortal, Ethiopian government administrators can authenticate users and then securely deliver sensitive documents and data throughout the country. Mark Gantar, Chief Executive Officer of SQLSoft+, which has worked for several years with the Ethiopian government and which brought FullArmor into the project, adds that the software-plus-services approach was critical in helping make the solution work.

“The key benefits for using the software-plus-services approach in this project revolve around being able to provide educational services in remote areas where people can use a combination of offline and online capabilities,” says Gantar. “Even if the Internet infrastructure in a region is not that good, that’s OK, because teachers can still function in an offline mode for long periods of time. When they connect, new and updated data is transferred to their PCs seamlessly without any manual intervention required by the user.”

That kind of flexibility is opening doors in other developing nations, including Nigeria, which is interested in developing a similar initiative for teachers.

“The software-plus-services approach has opened new lines of businesses for us and a scale of customers that we've never had before,” says Kim. “Traditionally, our customer base has been very large IT organizations. Now we can address customers in the small and medium sized business markets, the consumer market, and in government organization markets—market segments that we could not reach before. And so the amount and types of revenues have changed. This is a great addition for our company because of the new and different lines of revenue. It’s a huge benefit for us.”

Flexible and Scalable

As its new clients demonstrate, building PolicyPortal with the software-plus-services approach provided FullArmor with enormous flexibility and scalability that can help the solutions provider adjust and adapt to various customer needs.

“A big reason why we embraced the software-plus-services approach was the scalability that it supports for solutions that we weren’t able to achieve in the past,” Kim says. “Today we can go after the consumer market, the commercial market, government agencies, and even the small business market. With Microsoft products and the software-plus-services approach, we can easily deliver solutions to customers in new markets without having to build up a large organization.”

The software-plus-services approach has also been integral in the flexibility and scalability of PolicyPortal.

“The fact that our solution uses the Microsoft .NET Framework gives us a huge advantage,” says Kim. “Any application or device that can communicate with a Web service can be supported, which means that we can also deploy PolicyPortal in mixed enterprise environments.”

The flexibility of the software-plus-services model helps FullArmor adapt to and incorporate new technologies as they emerge on the market. “For example, the Windows 7 operating system will provide built-in support for GPS positioning,” says Kim. “We’re already configuring that into our PolicyPortal solution for Ethiopia because it will help administrators keep closer track of the location of computer assets. The software-plus-services approach makes it easy to merge new technologies into an existing solution.”

Familiar Tools, Reusable Code

This flexibility provided by the software-plus-services approach extends to the development team at FullArmor. Kim says that the familiar Windows development environment and reusable code supported by the software-plus-services approach allows FullArmor to work faster and more efficiently in getting solutions to the marketplace.

“With software-plus-services, we took a traditional IT application and moved it to a new environment with very little pain,” says Kim. “At the same time, this project did not remove us from traditional IT work. With software-plus-services, the Web and very small and flexible pieces of client-based software become an extension enterprise-level IT environments.”

Software + Services

Software-plus-services is an industry shift driven by the fast-growing recognition that combining Internet services with client and server software can deliver exciting new opportunities. Microsoft is dedicated to helping individuals and businesses take advantage of these opportunities. By bringing together the best of both software and services, we maximize capabilities, choice, and flexibility for our customers. The broad software-plus-services approach unites multiple industry phenomena including software as a service, service-oriented development, and the Web 2.0 user experience under a common umbrella.

For more information about software-plus-services, go to: softwareplusservices

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"What we really needed was a platform that would simplify application delivery yet still provide the scalability and manageability required for large, dispersed organizations with a lot of PCs.”

Danny Kim, Chief Technology Officer, FullArmor

| |

“The key benefits for using the software-plus-services approach in this project [in Ethiopia] revolve around being able to provide educational services in remote areas where the use a combination of offline and online capabilities.”

Mark Gantar, Chief Executive Officer, SQLSoft+ | |

“With software-plus-services, we took a traditional IT application and moved it to a new environment with very little pain."

Danny Kim, Chief Technology Officer, FullArmor

| |

| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Microsoft SQL Server 2008

■ Technologies

− Microsoft .NET Framework

− Microsoft

− Windows PowerShell

− Group Policy

− Active Directory

− Windows CardSpace

− Windows Sensor and Location |Partners

■ SQLSoft+ | |

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published July 2009 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about SQLSoft+ products and services, call (800) 775-9905 or visit the Web site at:

For more information about FullArmor products and services, call (617) 457-8100 or visit the Web site at: [pic][?]

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To view the video documentation of FullArmor and other success stories visit the Microsoft Success Web site at: business/success/

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