DeVry University is a division of DeVry Inc., a private, for-profit educational organization. The main university campus is located outside Chicago, Illinois, and there are more than 60 other locations across the U.S. and Canada serving about 40,000 students. DeVry University offers undergraduate and graduate education, including the Keller Graduate School of Management. The university is nationally known for its information technology programs. It also has an extensive online education program.

The Challenge: Delivering Applications to Online Education Students

When DeVry began its online education program, only business and general education courses were offered. Nancy LaChance, director of Academic Computing, recalled the push to expand online learning into the technology arena. “About five minutes after I took this position, someone said, ‘How are we going to make technology applications available to our online education students?’

“You see, students choose DeVry for high-quality education in technical fields that will prepare them for the workplace. We guarantee them a hands-on experience. So instead of reading about programming, for example, they program. Our ability to deliver applications to them for hands-on information technology experience is absolutely fundamental to our success.”

Since online students did not have access to DeVry’s computer labs and classrooms, and because it was not practical for them to individually license applications such as Oracle Enterprise Developer, MultiSim Electronic Workbench and 3Com’s health IT solutions, the university needed to find a way to deliver these applications to students anytime and anywhere.

Implementing an Application Delivery Infrastructure Solution from Citrix

LaChance and her team tried various application delivery solutions without much success. “Along the way, I recall it was a Microsoft person who said we should look at Citrix,” she said. “We went to a demo of Citrix Presentation Server and saw that it was exactly what we needed. And now Presentation Server with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is our primary methodology for delivering applications to students who are online.”

Following the successful implementation of Citrix Presentation Server™, LaChance quickly saw its potential for DeVry’s campuses. “We felt we could reduce the cost of running applications, and more importantly, give students 24/7 access to these applications without worrying about the configuration of their home computers or other complexities that keep people from using applications outside the classroom or lab environment. So we have been moving away from the local install model to the Citrix model whenever possible.”

Currently, DeVry delivers about 20 applications to students and faculty, including Microsoft® Office 2007, College Board’s PowerFAIDS for financial aid, Peachtree Accounting, Microsoft® Visual Studio, MathWorks’ MATLAB and Eclipse’s Java Development IDE. The Presentation Server environment runs on 27 HP servers and supports a wide range of student devices, including Macintosh workstations.

Recently, LaChance added Citrix® EdgeSight® for Presentation Server to monitor and track application usage patterns and errors. “We are in the middle of an acceptance curve. Application delivery to online students was very well accepted and positive. Now we want to optimize the experience for classroom and lab users who are used to a local install. We expect EdgeSight to help us get a better understanding of the end-user experience.”

Enhancing IT Speed and Agility

“Speed of making changes is the number-one benefit of Citrix Presentation Server, in my opinion,” said LaChance. “An example was our move up to Office 2007 in the summer of 2007. Rather than having to worry about installing and configuring the software in the local environment on every campus, and potentially having to upgrade hardware, I performed the upgrade centrally on my servers and made Office 2007 available to everybody. Not only that, I can run it concurrently with Office 2003, which I might not be able to do with a local install. We got the new application in the hands of faculty so they could develop curricula for it, without impairing their ability to work with Office 2003.”

She continued, “To move from Office 95 to XP took us four years. We did the Office 2007 upgrade in six months. So I love Citrix.”

Reducing IT Costs

Another key benefit of Presentation Server and EdgeSight is cost savings. “We are able to pinpoint the number of software licenses much more accurately now,” LaChance explained. “Instead of having to install an application on all desktops, we can base licensing on the number of concurrent Presentation Server users. And EdgeSight reports tell us how many concurrent users are logged in at any one time. For example, when it was time to renew our contract for our Web development application, we were able to reduce the licensing costs from $500,000 to $50,000 because we only needed to support 250 concurrent users. In another case, we were able to show a department that they only needed 50 licenses, not five times that many. Keep in mind that some of these applications are not inexpensive.”

Improving the User Experience

In addition to reporting on application usage patterns, EdgeSight enables DeVry’s IT team to monitor and track errors. She commented, “We are starting to tap into the ability to see all the error messages students are getting. If we get a large number of students with the same type of error, we can prepare materials to help them avoid that error. This is a huge benefit from EdgeSight. We believe EdgeSight is taking us to the next level by identifying problems and patterns, and helping us understand what is happening in the environment. We were never able to do this before.”

Further, application delivery with Presentation Server provides a consistent experience, whether a student is connecting from campus, online or a mix of locations.

Encouraging Enrollment by Staying on Top of Technology

The ability to get students up and running very quickly on a new version of an application with Presentation Server is helping the university recruit and retain students. “It creates a positive experience for them and demonstrates that DeVry is on top of technology,” said LaChance. And there is another advantage. “As more businesses move to Citrix, our students are getting a jump on their IT careers because they are used to working in a Citrix environment. This helps DeVry attract more students to our technology education programs.”

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