Sappi Limited was founded and incorporated in South Africa in 1936
and is a leading global paper and pulp producer which also produces
coated fine paper, chemical cellulose and specialty papers. The company
has sales offices in over 100 countries and manufacturing operations in
nine countries on four continents.
In August 2008, Sappi Fine Paper Europe started preparing for the
acquisition of the coated graphic paper business, M-real in Finland. As
of January 1, 2009 – Day One – the IT systems at two paper mills in
Finland, one in Germany and one in Switzerland as well as the sales
offices would need to be integrated with the Sappi IT infrastructure. To
prepare for this sudden expansion, which would mean an additional 1,300
employees, Sappi created an architectural design of a completely new IT
environment.
They needed to create a user workspace which would allow new
colleagues to become part of Sappi on Day One, without changing anything
in the existing infrastructure at M-real. After further integration
during phase two, the workspace would need to easily scale up to both
fat clients and thin clients without changing the look and feel of the
user experience, while remaining manageable and cost effective.
When the acquisition was approved, Sappi and RealDolmen, a RES
Software partner, built a datacenter in Austria, running Citrix XenApp,
Enterprise Edition on Window Server 2003 systems. To further optimize
IT, application streaming using Citrix application streaming and
enhanced printing using Thinprint were also introduced. All 1,300 new
employees were given access to a web-based published and virtualized
desktop under the management of RES Workspace Manager.
Following this rapid integration, Sappi completely renewed IT at the
new mills. The employees were provided with new desktops: thin clients,
fat clients and laptops running a published desktop managed by Workspace
Manager. This desktop is identical to the web-based workspace used in
phase one but now it includes a lot more applications. Sappi found that
Workspace Manager was much faster and easier to manage than traditional
solutions. Changing default printers for users, initializing e-mail
profiles and other settings can now be done with a few mouse clicks.
