Sør-Fron is a municipality in Innlandet county, Norway, with a population of just over 3,000. Like all municipalities in Norway, Sør-Fron delivers primary education, outpatient health services, seniors citizen services, unemployment and other social services, zoning, economic development, and municipal roads.
Cloud-based Apps and Remote Collaboration
With a mix of services and a workforce of 400 delivering them, Sør-Fron’s largest user group were healthcare providers serving all types of healthcare specialists, including midwives, infant care specialists and seniors. “Providers are major system users working with patients and accessing applications, so seamless, simple, and transparent application/provider access and collaboration is vital,” explained Sør-Fron municipality IT advisor Knut Myromslien.
Like every organization during the pandemic, Sør-Fron needed to transition to remote work in 2020. They had just begun transitioning to limited Office 365 and Teams SaaS use for improved collaboration as part of their cloud journey. The legacy back-end system consisted of a Citrix VDI platform and gateway that supported a thin client environment for the workforce.
The municipality began incorporating more SaaS applications into their stack and decided to move to workstations and laptops for both office and remote workers. As things began returning to normal in 2022, we started discussing a more agile approach to workspace and application management that could enable our collaboration journey,” explained Knut.
The Journey to Greater Collaboration
The firm that would one day grow into Abacus IT had been a longtime integration partner for Sør-Fron, having implemented and maintained their Citrix system over the decade-long partnership. The municipality began thinking of a more agile yet simple approach to workspace and application management in 2021. Abacus began considering Recast for its broader customer base and suggested it for the municipality. “Our needs were very complex with very different kinds of personnel and applications,” said Knut. “Recast could simplify that complexity for IT and make it transparent for end users, which was essential.”
Improved Present and Future Collaboration Possibilities
Glenn Eriksen and his Abacus IT team handled the implementation and broader system design. Abacus instituted a pilot project in the spring of 2022 with a group of 10 users from the estate department, which used many applications and services. “We didn’t know what the outcome would be on our end, but we had a lot of trust built up with Glenn,” said Knut.
Abacus installed a few applications and the windows OS into the Recast platform with pilot users delivering positive feedback. The second phase of the project involved delivering several applications into the end user devices to support the transition from Citrix and thin clients to PCs and laptops. According to Knut, the next phase involves moving more challenging applications into the Application Workspace portal and focusing on application stack reduction via SaaS use:
“Our goal is to deliver all the apps to end users with consolidated and transparent single sign on access across the general application stack, Office 365/Teams and Azure AD. Recast provides a wealth of opportunities that we’re discovering, so we’re going slowly with just the Smart Icon delivery with Abacus IT spearheading the application implementations and updates.”
The next phase saw the Abacus IT team adding over 100 additional users that were all experiencing a new way of working with a shift from thin clients to a variety of devices. Increased end user time savings, transparency, and collaboration are now becoming clear as the workforce makes the mental shift.
Paving the Way for An Expansive Collaboration Future for Sør-Fron
With over 400 users expected to be using Application Workspace by spring of 2023, Sør-Fron has transitioned from thin clients and a Citrix backend to Application Workspace with a growing number of apps available to all users via workstations, laptops, Chromebooks, and other devices. “We’re achieving our goal of delivering a more modern workspace with less complex IT experience that we expect will increase productivity without an increase in costs,” explained Knut.
The municipality will migrate the journaling system for the doctors this spring from the municipality’s on-premises data center to the cloud, which will support municipality third-party partners in working on the system with proper access. The next possible step is expanding application access that would eliminate the current need for some users to log into the existing Citrix gateway by further implementing Smart Icon configuration for transparent access. “We’re an IT staff of three that doesn’t work weekends, so the system needs to work,” said Knut. “The Recast portal is an easy transition since they see the same icons as they did on the Citrix platform so it will hide any technical transitions behind the icons, so they just click, and it works how they expect.”
The municipality expects to consolidate its data center over the next several years as they upgrade servers and move more applications to the cloud. “I think the big picture is to transform the way the personnel across the municipality works and communicates while also using Application Workspace to enable more self-service and automation in the coming year and integrate better into Teams as our main collaboration platform,” said Knut.
With the Sør-Fron IT team relying on Abacus IT, Knut is looking at much more expansive possibilities for the future with Application Workspace:
“We’re considering the future possibility of switching our education system users from their current Google platform use for education to Teams and Application Workspace, which could be another 400 people relying on Teams. These possibilities show how the platform is becoming a catalyst for expanding the way the municipality and its users communicate and collaborate by creating new ways to work operationally and do things faster and better.”