Brighton & Hove City Council

The Challenge

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 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 Solution

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 Benefits

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.

Why NEC ?

NEC 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.” <NEXT>