The Cape Town City Council (CTCC) IT department has the thankless task of managing about  12 000 PCs, used by  23 000-odd staff, spread over a 250-square-kilometre area. Needless to say, remote on-site support calls are a time-consuming and expensive exercise.

"We have 350 remote sites," says CTCC head of front-end services Danie Kotze. "We implemented a managed Microsoft environment because we wanted to reduce the number of desk-side visits to get better return on investment and deliver better support. We still have to do a lot of desk-side visits though and, as an organisation, we have far fewer resources than the Gartner benchmark [for a fleet this size]. We continually have to do more with less and are looking to improve service to the user with our current technical resource base."