"We have an excellent technical staff, but if an officer has a problem with a laptop in the field, it would sometimes take two to three hours for a technician just to get to the patrol car," said Capt. Henry deVries, manager of the Hudson Valley Transportation Management Center. "Not only was this not efficient use of the IT staff member's time, but it also could be a distraction to the officer trying to focus on doing his or her job."
The New York State Police has selected the LANDesk Management Suite to help manage the mobile laptops in state trooper vehicles and department of transportation help vehicles, as well as the desktops in its dispatch centers.
In addition to remote problem resolution, the New York State Police IT staff is using the company's management suite to better manage software and hardware inventory, software license management, security updates and patch management. The department uses Verizon 1XRTT wireless technology to administer many of these activities and keep the vehicles on the road.
"With so many machines on the go in various vehicles, managing hardware and software inventory was nearly impossible before we deployed this solution. And with the increasing number of virus attacks on system vulnerabilities, we had to have a more reliable and efficient way to get patches distributed," deVries said. "Now we can automatically deliver software updates as an officer is quite literally driving down the highway."
