Customer’s Challenge:
• Eliminate print driver administration
• Ensure system stability and performance
• Reduce support costs and downtime

Benefits Delivered by triCerat:
• Reduces time and effort involved in administering Terminal Servers
• Reduces support effort and cost
• Improves user satisfaction and productivity

The Customer
As the caterer of choice for more than 100 Fortune 500 companies, Blue Plate serves clients throughout the Chicagoland area and offers meeting and event planning services to customers across the United States. Since 1983, the firm has come to be recognized as one of the most respected and innovative full-service catering operations for its superb cuisine and world-class venues. Today, Blue Plate’s award-winning chefs and event staff create more than 3,000 events annually, ranging from intimate cocktail parties to elaborate galas.

The Challenge
Blue Plate’s data center supports operations at the firm’s headquarters on Chicago’s west side, as well as its two remote catering locations, the Park Grill at Millennium Park in Chicago and Rhapsody, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Center using Windows Server 2003 terminal services. With over 450 employees working at these locations and at events in other remote locations throughout the US, a large number of business functions are dependent upon this infrastructure.

The Blue Plate Terminal Servers host a range of applications including Microsoft Office, Great Plains FRX, Photoshop and Eatec, a specialized food service application that enables event planning, menu creation, purchasing, and invoicing. Personnel access these applications from desktop PCs. Staff at remote locations, including the Park Grill and Rhapsody also use Palm PDAs and laptops to access the infrastructure.

As business grew, the everyday task of printing invoices, event materials, and other related documents became extremely problematic. Printers were not showing up in user sessions and driver installs became quite tedious. With nearly 70 people dependent upon Blue Plate’s server-based applications at any given time, overcoming print problems was a necessity. “When I first began at Blue Plate, we were spending probably 25 percent of our time on print problems alone,” said Dewey Boshers, Blue Plate’s IT Manager.