Empowering a Distributed Workforce with Office XP and the Windows 2000 Platform
Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC) provides engineering, transportation and installation services to the oil and gas industry at sea, focusing on deepwater construction projects.
- Industry
- Energy en Utilities
- Alliance partner
- Microsoft
- Solution
- Application Development
- Business Intelligence
- Infrastructure Services
The company required an agile, secure IT environment to give its distributed workforce the ability to access project data any time and any place, enhance communication and data exchange with external parties, and solve operational problems such as data storage and remote access.
Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC) provides engineering, transportation and installation services to the oil and gas industry at sea, focusing on deepwater construction projects. The company required an agile, secure IT environment to give its distributed workforce the ability to access project data any time and any place, enhance communication and data exchange with external parties, and solve operational problems such as data storage and remote access. In a joint project involving Microsoft and Capgemini, a new workstation and server environment was designed and implemented. The new environment is based on the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 platform, including the implementation of Microsoft Exchange 2000 and Microsoft Office® XP, providing HMC with a robust platform from which to empower its staff.
Client Profile
HMC is part of the Heerema Group, which has four autonomous divisions, each of them related to different markets in the offshore industry: Engineering & Project Management (Intec Engineering), Heavy Transport (Dockwise), Fabrication (Heerema Fabrication Group), and Offshore Installation(HMC). Since its establishment in 1948, the group has become an industry leader in the fabrication, transportation, and installation of fixed constructions for the oil and gas industry at depths of up to 1,000 metres and more. Today, due to the ever-increasing demand for energy, the extraction of oil and gas is shifting to deeper waters in the region of 2,000-3,000 metres. Constructions that are placed on the seabed, and the lack of existing infrastructure at this depth, are providing new technological challenges for the company. These developments have been a major contributing factor in HMC becoming a widely distributed organization, its 750 person staff situated at its offices in the Netherlands, the USA, and on its deepwater construction and crane vessels.
Business Issues
It was essential that HMC’s future IT strategy support the company’s new activities and project requirements. Besides implementing state of the art technology in terms of infrastructure, applications, and operating systems, it was also very important to make sure HMC’s project teams had remote access to the necessary applications and files for each assignment. To do this, HMC needed to upgrade its existing Microsoft® Windows NT® Server 4.0 and Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 -based environment. HMC required an improved infrastructure that would sustain a new centralized IT structure, optimize the use of embedded Microsoft Windows® 2000 facilities and focus on software distribution, data structure, and unattended workstation installations.
“For an efficient centrally managed IT infrastructure, standardization of servers and workstations is essential,” notes Wilfried Joosten, Managing Consultant at Capgemini . “This was particularly important for HMC as their workforce required access to PCs on vessels where local IT support is not available.”
Solution
Capgemini created the improved IT environment by utilizing the native functionality of Windows 2000, including Remote Installation Services, Distributed File System, Offline Folders, Microsoft Active Directory®, Microsoft IntelliMirror®, and Group Policies. The first step was to create an unattended installation of the operating system for HMC’s 20 servers. Using Remote Installation Services (RIS), HMC was able to remotely install the server operating system in a standardized fashion without the need to physically visit at each machine. The next step involved the creation of a managed workstation environment by installing a software image. This image is distributed on a CD or via ‘multicasting techniques’ and contains the standard workstation environment, which includes the Windows 2000 Professional operating system and a standard set of pre-configured applications-Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook®, Microsoft Office XP, and AntiVirus software. After the standard image is installed the workstation is ready for automated application distribution.
Application Software Distribution
Application software distribution was achieved using standard Windows 2000 features. The mechanism used is based on Microsoft System Installer (MSI) packages that are distributed and installed via Windows Installer, depending on the Group Policy Objects (GPO) in the Active Directory.
As such, configuration management is completed in Active Directory, a software distribution GPO is defined for each application, and each workstation is linked to a set of GPO’s. From the moment the workstation starts -up, there is an automated check to see which packages have been installed and to identify which ones are missing, with missing packages being automatically distributed and installed. An MSI package not only contains the application, but also the HMC configuration and settings for that application. As a result, due to each PC having a known baseline configuration and the applications being pre-packaged with relevant preferences set by HMC, the company can be confident that project software will install equally well on each workstation.
Data Transparency
HMC also has to manage large amounts of project data spread across the organisation, which must be available to all project workers. To manage the growth of data, the head office is equipped with a Storage Area Network (SAN) and a dual tape library. In addition to this, near-line storage is used to manage unlimited growth of data. All aged and unused data is automatically stored in a near-line storage tape library. For users the data is still visible in the folder structure. As soon as the data is accessed it is read from the near-line storage tape library. To optimally support the HMC organisation, the data structure is reorganised to fit into the project organisation using Distributed File System (DFS). The user is able to access all data through the ‘My Documents’ facility in Windows 2000, so no drive mappings are made.The ability to synchronize data to give its project teams vital, up-to-the minute information was also important for HMC. In this case, Offline Folders are used to automatically synchronize data between laptops and the servers as soon as users are connected to the Local Area Network (LAN). “Using a combination of these technologies, HMC’s employees now have access to tailored data that is specific to them and the projects they are working on,” observes Joosten, “which gives HMC’s workforce the information they require, when they need it.”
Benefits
With Capgemini’s help HMC has been able to implement a stable, yet flexible data and application distribution environment, whilst upgrading to Office XP at the same time. “The IT infrastructure now reflects HMC’s distributed project-based organization much more closely,” says Joosten. “Even on HMC’s sea faring vessels the company can be confident that the environment is stable, predictable, and will serve the needs of project workers fully. When you’re involved in the kind of complex and large scale projects that HMC is, the importance of this kind of stability and reliability cannot be understated.”
By combining a managed extranet service from Infonet, the new infrastructure and Windows 2000 platform provides access to applications and information any time and any place. Furthermore, it has enabled HMC to stay compatible with their clients-mainly oil companies-in order to allow the exchange of information in an efficient way, with the company receiving a number of positive reactions from clients and users alike. “Our users are especially enthused by a number of Office XP features which help them work more efficiently,” says Wim Korndorffer, Information Systems Manager, HMC. “The new Windows 2000 & Office XP environment improves our way of working in terms of efficiency and will support our future business needs and our overall effectiveness at the same time.” The previous IT infrastructure at HMC was based on Microsoft technology, including Windows NT Server 4.0 and workstation and Exchange Server 5.5, which enabled a quick and smooth migration to the Windows 2000 platform and Exchange 2000 Server.
“The expertise of Capgemini in this area was of enormous benefit to HMC”, says Korndorffer.” Our long existing relationship with Capgemini played a major role in completing the migration project. First of all, Capgemini delivered a high quality design of the required new environment, which is implemented close to 100%, without major deviations. Secondly, Capgemini was able to deliver on time and within budget. Last, but not least, an optimal fit between the people of Capgemini and HMC contributed to an optimal execution of the project and exchange of knowledge for the benefit of our own IT staff,” said Korndorffer. HMC is currently focusing its business on deepwater projects. These new markets will undoubtedly necessitate new IT requirements in the future, but HMC believe that they now have in place the IT environment to cope with the new demands. “We decided to implement the new environment for one main reason: to be ready for the future. We are convinced that the new environment will support our future business needs, so that we will be able to focus on application developments, with the new infrastructure providing a strong and reliable basis,” concludes Korndorffer.
For More Information
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For more information about Heerema Marine Contractors products and services visit the Web site at: www.heerema.com.