REDMOND, Wash., March 16, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that the Oklahoma Supreme Court, with 70 facilities and more than 1,200 users statewide, has migrated to a 100 percent Microsoft® Windows® 2000 operating system-based enterprise to boost manageability and reliability and to support a new, statewide case-tracking system that is available internally and over the Web.
Windows 2000 also powers the Court’s public Web site ( http://www.oscn.net/ ), which lawyers and others use daily to conduct 100,000 free background checks and query all state case laws. In addition to supporting the general public and 1,500 internal clients, the Windows 2000-based enterprise system supports thousands of district attorneys, law enforcement professionals and others.
“Windows 2000 has performed flawlessly. Of the 63 enterprise and file-and-print servers in our organization, not one has experienced a software crash,”
said Kevin King, MIS director for the Supreme Court of Oklahoma.
“Windows 2000 delivers on Microsoft’s promises. It’s a good, stable, reliable platform that enables us to give the public better and faster information than ever.”
“It is very exciting to see organizations such as the Oklahoma Supreme Court take advantage of so many of the new technologies introduced in Windows 2000,”
said Keith White, director of Windows Marketing at Microsoft.
“The Court has significantly decreased the time it takes to deploy new systems and now provides faster, more reliable new services to its constituents, thanks to its ingenuity and Windows 2000.”
In December, the Court began to convert its legacy mainframe applications to Windows 2000-based servers running Microsoft SQL Server TM 7.0 and Component Services. By the official launch of Windows 2000 on Feb. 17, it had completed the migration to the 100 percent Windows 2000-based network.
The new case-tracking system is a COM-based, mission-critical line-of-business Web application that handles all case tracking and billing for every civil and criminal offense within the state. The application runs on Windows 2000 Advanced Server, with Microsoft Transaction Service and Internet Information Services 5.0. It executes against more than 100 GB of data hosted by Microsoft SQL Server-based databases.
Boosting Reliability, Manageability
Beyond supporting the new case-tracking application, Windows 2000 was adopted by the Oklahoma Supreme Court to make its enterprise system more reliable and manageable, reduce costs and boost efficiency, according to King. For example, the Court consolidated the number of its domains from 35 to one, vastly simplifying system management.
A range of Windows 2000 features, including Windows Terminal Services, Group Policies, Distributed File System, Folder Redirection and the System Preparation Utility, are providing benefits to this judicial system:
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– The Court’s MIS department administers the statewide system remotely, without the need for third-party remote control software, by running Windows 2000 Terminal Services in administrative mode with up to two sessions open against the server at any one time. King said this feature was a tremendous advantage during the deployment process.
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The Court uses Group Policies to ensure efficient access to applications and to maintain user desktops with fewer disruptions and support incidents. Key applications such as Microsoft Office 2000 are assigned to users via Group Policies, ensuring that users can access the applications while they roam to any PC in the enterprise. Less frequently used applications are published to their Active Directory TM service and are made available through the Windows 2000 Control Panel. Group Policies are also used to secure portions of the user desktop and to assign particular logon scripts based on their organizational unit.
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According to King, it had always been an administrative headache, considering that scores of sites are scattered across the state, to ensure that users were always connected to the correct installation directories. With the Windows 2000 Dfs Site Awareness feature, the Court has created a logical name space with replicas at each remote site, simplifying the installation process by directing users automatically to the local Dfs share point, regardless of where the users happen to be located.
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The Court uses Windows 2000 Folder Redirection to prevent users from losing data stored on their local drives by facilitating nightly data backups. Folder Redirection also enables users to access their data as they roam to any PC in the enterprise.
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System Preparation Utility. The Court is using the updated System Preparation Utility for remote installations of Windows 2000 and all standard applications through a customized boot CD-ROM. The installation process has been reduced to about 20 minutes from initial boot, until the computer is completely configured in the Windows 2000 domain and ready for use.
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