CASE STUDIES NEWCASTLE UNDER LYME BC
Borough Council benefits from infrastructure upgrade
Background
Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, located in the North Midlands, covers an area of approximately 81 square miles and has a population of around 125,000. The Council’s headquarters are in Newcastle-Under-Lyme in Staffordshire and it employs about 625 people to provide a wide range of services to the public.
The Council has 60 elected members who represent the 94,550 eligible voters in the borough, from across 24 wards. The council services are organised into departments and cover: assets and amenity services, community services, finance, legal and democratic services, policy review and communications, personnel services and regeneration and planning services.
Problem
IT has always played a key role in ensuring that the council can deliver high quality services and value for money to its citizens. Traditionally a Mainframe based organisation, from 1998 onwards the council has implemented a significant number of Microsoft Windows NT4.0 servers to provide authentication, e-mail and database functionality.
The client-server architecture introduced by this platform both significantly reduced reliance on the mainframe services and introduced valuable new capabilities and functionality to the council.
Although the new platform was capable of supporting the council’s IT requirements going forward, they wanted to be in a position to take advantage of the new feature rich environment provided by Microsoft Active Directory, something which was not possible with Windows NT4.0.
To be able to utilise Active Directory the council needed to migrate its IT platform to the latest Microsoft 2003 based products. This had the added advantage of providing the council with many additional operational and total costs of ownership benefits.
It was an important pre-requisite that existing services were not affected and kept operational whilst the migration was being undertaken.
Solution
The Council are a long-standing SystemCare customer of Nviron’s. As a result of this and the in-depth understanding that Nviron consultants had of their IT infrastructure, the council decided to work with Nviron on the Windows and Exchange 2003 migration project.
Nviron were deployed to design, manage and conduct an upgrade of the Domain infrastructure, the e-mail system and the installation of a new Microsoft System Management Server (SMS), to facilitate the management of the new platform.
The products implemented by Nviron included:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
- Microsoft SQL Server 2000
- Microsoft System Management Server 2003
The project was completed over a three month period. During that time a laboratory was assembled in which all the principles and concepts used in the migration were thoroughly tested and validated before being deployed live.
A multi-disciplinary team of qualified Nviron consultants worked closely with management and staff from the council to create a staged and qualified plan that efficiently delivered recognisable milestones on which the project successively built until completion.
Simultaneous to the platform upgrade, the council had to ensure that an existing project to separate Newcastle Borough council from the Staffordshire County wide e-mail structure was also completed. This involved the detailed examination of the e-mail system and the installation of a discrete connection infrastructure that not only allowed the council’s e-mail to function independently, but facilitated the continued subscription to the County based Internet connection and Virus scanning services.
To ensure stability and recoverability the ‘parallel migration’ method was utilised. A test environment was created that replicated the current system at both the server and client level. Procedures were developed and tested that ultimately resulted in detailed documentation designed to clearly define the actions needed to conduct each element of the operation.
HP server systems were chosen to host the new services. These systems were commissioned using Microsoft Windows Server 2003. A new Domain with Microsoft Exchange Server and SMS services was also added to these servers. The SMS system was put to immediate use to deploy a recent version of Internet Explorer and Outlook enabling users to take advantage of the new service from the outset.
The advantage of this ‘standardised’ deployment was the immediate and visible benefit of the new system. Using the procedures and migration utilities validated within the lab, the migration to operational status of the new infrastructure was conducted in a single weekend. During this time Nviron consultants partnered closely with council staff to ensure that all client systems, mailboxes and users were successfully relocated.
Seamless access to the old infrastructure continues to be facilitated by a trust between the Domains. This will continue in operation until all legacy applications are replaced or relocated as and when needs arise. New facilities such as Outlook Web Access and Group Policy were utilised immediately to great effect, with plans shortly to be drawn to enhance the system further with Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) and a Microsoft Windows SharePoint platform.
The migration proved to be completely successful and delivered as planned a seamlessly integrated and upgraded infrastructure upon which the council can continue to enhance their service offering and capitalise on their investment.
Newcastle-Under-Lyme Borough council commented:
“We have been delighted with level of expertise and depth of knowledge of the Nviron consultants utilised on our migration. Their experience of the Microsoft Windows platform has enabled us to successfully move to a more modern computing infrastructure that will enable us to improve the service provided to all our users and deliver value for money to our citizens.
The solution provided by Nviron enables us to continue to use our existing legacy applications until there is a sound business case to upgrade them, and at a time that will be convenient and cost-effective for us.”
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