3 November 2008

Brighton Pavillion

Brighton & Hove City Council in the UK is migrating its multi-vendor IT infrastructure to Microsoft technology. The project covers more than 4,500 staff across over 100 separate buildings in the Sussex city.

The council used NEC Philips to deliver the project, which included initial consultancy and solution design through to the build and deployment. After many months of project planning and implementation, the rollout is now well under way.

The initiative is part of a strategy to standardise the council’s infrastructure technology and desktop applications, with the aim of improving the potential for the sharing of information among staff. The changes will see Brighton & Hove move away from a Lotus Notes e-mail system and Novell networking technology, to implement a fully Microsoft-based environment which will use Exchange, as well as other Microsoft Office technologies deployed on all 4,500 staff desktops.

Council sources say the move has led to significant cost savings against the previous infrastructure in the form of support and management costs. Additionally, it is expected to result in greater efficiency within the council as a whole, with all users benefitting from the improved network performance and facilitating better interactions and communications between staff.
NEC Philips was engaged at the start of the project and researched the council’s requirements before producing a complex network design to suit to an environment spanning 100 buildings. Chris Reynolds, the council’s ICT project manager said: “Our buildings range in size from modern, large, open plan environments to much smaller, older offices. Many of these offices have previously used their own small servers creating miniature network environments in each business area. The Microsoft migration project is retiring these older servers and giving staff access much larger, and totally sharable network resource in the form of our Storage Area Network fronted by our Microsoft Active Directory. This will offer new possibilities with regard to sharing information across teams and business areas.”

When implementing a large network upgrade, detailed and continuous advice is essential to ensure the process runs smoothly with minimal disruption to staff. To help resolve problems, NEC Philips provided consultancy sessions on areas needing troubleshooting, while also providing 24/7 telephone support to the council for day-to-day issues as part of the support contract.

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