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Avaya and Sun Ray Setup for an Airline

It's been a while since my last blog entry but I thought this was too good not to blog about.

We finished successfully a Proof of concept with a company in the Airlines sector. A three day Proof of concept in which the first day we setup the Sun Ray and Sun Secure Global Desktop software, as well as the Windows Terminal Server, AD Integration, and installed applications.

The main pain being that the clients firewall within their internal network was blocking everything so it was a constant pain to get ports unblocked for what was required.

So basically in three days we setup a total production environment with access from inside and outside the network. Try and do that with Citrix and Wyse!!!!!

All three environments run on Windows Terminal Services delivered to the Sun Ray using the Windows Connector for Sun Ray. All environments the data always remains in the datacentre and is completely centrally managed, no minature OS on the client and drivers to manage like other thin clients.

The environments we setup were:

- Airports

We setup a couple of Sun Ray's with a Serial receipt printer, Bag Tag Printer and USB barcode scanner (Symbol) and had one setup with the airline check-in functionality and another with departure gate setup just with the barcode scanner (ie. to scan the boarding passes). Their character based airline booking system worked perfectly. The hotdesking ie. moving your session from one Sun Ray to another works fine, even in the middle of a transaction, and printers follow you.

- Call Centre

We setup Sun Ray's with their Avaya VOIP phones. We installed Avaya IP Agent for Citrix on the Terminal Server (and unlike the name of the product says it works perfectly with Windows Terminal Services). So it all worked perfectly, printing to network printers, logging into their phone, accepting phone calls via the IP Agent Software, diversion to mobiles and so on.

- Call Centre Operator from home

To save on fuel costs and also real estate costs they were looking at relocating some of their call centre at their homes. Problems they have is security of having a client out offsite, and the cost of phones and so on.

So we setup a Sun Ray with VPN client to VPN in over the internet to the Sun Ray server in the datacentre. Also with the Avaya software you are able to setup the phone extension in the office to link in with the users home phone, so they can accept and make calls using their home's analogue phone.

- Back Office Users

The office suite, outlook, and Internet Explorer, and their web applications worked fine as expected, as did all of their other applications. The Avaya VOIP software to control the phones also worked well. The hotdesking was also very useful being able to access your desktop from any Sun Ray in the company.

-Remote Users

We also setup Sun Secure Global Desktop to be able to access their desktops via their existing normal PC, Mac or other kind of client. This also worked perfectly. It was also there as a sort of Disaster Recovery solution as they can get to this using any internet access point.

So it was a good Proof of concept, the customer understood Thin Client computing and it was very successful.

Signing off.. M

Posted at 11:31AM Aug 26, 2008 by sunraybruce in General  |  Comments[1]