The move will unite over 4,500 members of staff across 100 sites in the Brighton and Hove region. The council wanted to standardise its technology and desktop applications to improve the ability of staff to share information with one another.
The project was delivered by NEC Philips and sees the council move away from its Lotus Notes email system and Novell network technology and install a Microsoft-based environment. Brighton and Hove City Council will now be using Microsoft Exchange and other Office technologies across all its desktops.
The fact that the council’s operations spread across at least 100 buildings in the region meant that NEC Philips needed to produce a more complex network infrastructure than normal.
Chris Reynolds, ICT Project Manager at Brighton and Hove, 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.”
The council also hopes that it will provide significant cost savings compared to its previous system as well as improve productivity due to improved network performance.
NEC Philips will also be providing the council with supports for its new infrastructure. Reynolds said: “Whenever we had queries during the implementation phase the NEC Philips 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.”
