Brighton & Hoves City Council

BRIGHTON & HOVE CITY COUNCIL MOVES TO MICROSOFT TO IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY AND COUNCIL-WIDE INTERACTIONS

NEC concludes Microsoft Migration programme across entire council

Brighton & Hove City Council is migrating its multi-vendor IT infrastructure to Microsoft technology, bringing together more than 4,500 staff across over 100 separate buildings in Brighton & Hove. The council engaged with NEC to deliver the project, which included the initial consultancy and solution design through to the build and deployment. After many months of careful project planning and implementation, the council is well on the way to rolling out this complex Microsoft Migration programme to all the staff.

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 email system & Novell networking technology, to implement a fully Microsoft-based environment which will utilise Microsoft Exchange, as well as other Microsoft Office technologies deployed on all 4,500 staff desktops.

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 were 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. As Chris Reynolds, ICT Project Manager at Brighton & Hove, explains, “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 has provided ongoing, regular consultancy sessions on areas which need troubleshooting, whilst also providing 24/7 telephone support to the council for day-to-day issues as part of the support contract.

Commenting on the relationship with NEC, Reynolds concludes, “The relationship has been excellent. They have produced what they said they would when they said they would, on time and to budget. Whenever we had queries during the implementation phase the NEC consultants were able to address these queries in a very timely fashion and deal with any potential problems as they occurred. Now we have an ongoing programme of training, on-site support and 24/7 telephone support. This gives us peace of mind that we have a reliable IT partner we can turn to at any time.”