Improve Efficiency and Mobility in the Modern Healthcare Environment

Healthcare organisations are going through many technology-enabled changes to enhance how care is delivered and to improve the ways in which their workforce interact within the working environment.

Been able to access new or existing desktop applications anywhere, anytime is seen as essential, but end users in the modern healthcare environment often experience many frustrations with functionality in their day to day activities. These include difficulties with:

• Windows 10 Logins
• Email Access (O365 or NHS mail) to multiple users utilising single hardware station
• Single or legacy applications using Java
• SystmOne Access
• VDI Access
• Desktop Image Sprawl

VDI has proven to be useful in organisations, but not without introducing additional management challenges. Healthcare organisations struggle with managing their complex VDI environments while at the same time dealing with other forms of desktop virtualisation (session-hosted platforms, DaaS, etc.) and physical desktops. Many have developed different techniques to manage each of these platforms, which works fine until something disruptive comes along.

The Solutons

Phoenix provide IT solutions, hardware and software and are working closely with FSLogix to address these daily issues by looking at:

Application Masking
This feature allows an administrator to control what applications users have access to and achieve a single Windows Gold image. In addition to full applications, administrators can also control visibility to printers, fonts, Office add-ins, Internet Explorer plug-ins, etc. This masking technology also works to control access to particular Java versions. Because this is such a powerful use case, it has been broken out into its own feature set: Java Version Control.

User specific access to applications has traditionally been controlled by using Application Virtualisation products (e.g. AppV), products that limit the ability to launch specified applications (e.g. AppLocker), or by creating and managing Server silos. FSLogix introduces a new approach.  Simply install the applications normally and then control the user access by completely hiding the application at run-time for users who should not have access.  This reduces the number of OS images that must be managed since there is no requirement to have separate images with specific sets of applications.  Also, since no work is being done by the system when the application is being used, applications run at native speed and don’t use any more computing resources.

Profile Containers
This feature is specially designed to roam profiles in remote computing environments (e.g. Citrix, VDI, etc.).  Because of this, it is a simpler design and greatly out-performs existing roaming profile solutions.

It accomplishes this by allowing the complete user profile to be stored in a single container.  At logon, the container is dynamically attached to the computing environment using native, in-guest VHD/VHDX Microsoft services.  The user’s profile is then immediately available and appears to the system exactly like a native user profile.  Traditionally hard problems for roaming profile solutions (like OST files) are elegantly handled and the user experience when accessing these files is comparable to native speeds.

Office 365 Containers
This feature solves the problems that exist when using Microsoft Office in a roaming profile environment.  Users experience fast email, fast searching, fast access to OneDrive files, etc. The difference is that only Microsoft Office 365 data and the search index are stored in the container vs the whole user profile. This solution should be used in place of Profile Containers where a solution is already in place to manage the user profile. This feature easily layers over any existing profile solution.

Java Version Control
This enables the use of different versions of Java on the same desktop. It is common in large computing environments to have web pages or Java applications that only work with a specific version of Java. Normally Java requires that all applications and web pages use the latest version of Java that is installed on the local computer, thus breaking the application or web page that requires an older version. FSLogix allows an admin to specify with a policy the version of Java to be used with a specific application or web page. This is seamless to the end user and has been extremely successful when using Imprivata or the NHS Swipe card system.

FSLogix is the leading innovator of solutions that reduce the amount of hardware, time and labour required to support desktop virtualisation platforms. With implementations ranging from less than 1,000 to over 50,000 users, FSLogix Apps enhances user experience and productivity, while reducing support requirements for IT departments.