University of Wisconsin Consolidates Legacy GPOs and Manages Policies from the Cloud

Ken Fanta, IT Director, learned about PolicyPak Cloud Edition from a peer. A close review confirmed its robust feature set and ease of use. Now, his team uses the tool to manage Group Policy, browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and Microsoft Office applications. With PolicyPak, UW-Wisconsin has gained the following benefits:

Flexibility to meet diverse needs. PolicyPak enables Fanta’s team to create basic policies driven by departmental needs, as well as more granular policies based upon user roles to accommodate the different needs of, for example, researchers versus finance team members. “Starting from the basic definitions, we can easily fine-tune policies to meet the specific criteria of different groups or individuals,” Fanta says. “For example, we can turn off screen savers on research computers so that they don’t go to sleep, or specify local storage for email on clinical computers that are subject to specific record storage requirements.”

Freedom from scripting. Fanta likes that PolicyPak greatly expands what can be done with policy, while keeping everything easy to do. “You don’t have to be a programmer or script writer to get the benefits from PolicyPak. It is all user-friendly drag-and-drop — and I’m someone who likes a good graphical user interface,” says Fanta.

Stress-free cloud application. “PolicyPak Cloud Edition was super easy to deploy,” Fanta says. “We pushed out the application once and then never had to worry about whether we were up to date or which version we were on. I know I’m always on the most current version since PolicyPak handles any updates behind the scenes, on the cloud.”