The Client The Borough of Halton is situated on either side of the River Mersey in North Cheshire adjacent to Merseyside in North West England. Halton is made up of the twin towns of Widnes and Runcorn together with the villages of Hale, Moore, Daresbury and Preston Brook. It is the most densely populated district in Cheshire with over 118,210 people.

The council itself has over 6000 employees across four main directorates encompassing schools, social services, environmental services and highways all offering a diverse range of services. In addition to the main site there are 18 satellite offices with up to 3000 users and public access offered through a library suite.

In April 2004 the Government published priority service and transformation outcomes for local e-government. The published priorities comprise 73 outcomes that help councils to improve the delivery of services to citizens and business, enhance business process efficiency and embed e-government within the mainstream of organisational culture.

Halton Borough Council is currently rated as an ‘Excellent Council’. In order to maintain this status it has to meet key deadlines for the e-Government priority outcomes.

The Challenge

As part of its long-term plan for the future and to enable its e-Government agenda Halton Borough Council recognised that it would need to consolidate and update its existing IT infrastructure which was becoming inefficient and difficult to manage. Drivers for change were:

• The discontinuation of products such as Microsoft Windows NT4, Exchange 5.5, and older versions of operating systems and office applications
• The need to provide access to email and office based systems for remote workers
• The Freedom of Information Act and Data Protection Act demanded policies for email management and archiving

As a business analyst for the council Alison Wafer is responsible for the Infrastructure and IT environment, moving users forward from obsolete and legacy systems such as Windows 9X, NT4 and 2000, and Office 97 - 2000. “We wanted to deliver a better user experience for our employees and increase productivity. Many workers are using systems they like and are comfortable with so ensuring a smooth transition with minimum disruption is key,” said Alison.

thinstore and Halton Borough Council

thinstore were initially invited to review a Citrix environment which was installed to deliver a software application called CareFirst to Social Services which was not running as well as it should.

The council IT department had become increasingly disillusioned by companies that had appeared to offer the necessary qualifications and expertise, but were ultimately unable to deliver on their promises. “We decided to test thinstore’s abilities,” said Alison, “actions speak louder than words and our confidence in thinstore went from strength to strength as they fixed many of our problems and began to advise on our long term Infrastructure strategy.”

Dave Ball, Network Manager explained what was different about thinstore, “I liked the problem solving approach their consultants had and if they didn’t have the answer they thought outside the box and researched it. Their ability to talk to us in both technical and business terms meant that we were easily able to present their findings and solutions to non-technical business managers.”

Microsoft Active Directory

“In order to build the foundations for Halton’s IT Infrastructure, a move from Microsoft NT4 server to Active Directory was essential before any other work could be undertaken,” said Paul Robinson, Chief Technical Officer for thinstore. “The IT department wanted to delegate admin responsibilities to various departments and directorates within the council allowing them to set up email groups and perform password changes. This would give personnel more responsibility and reduce the number of calls to the IT helpdesk.”

“A previous supplier had originally undertaken an Active Directory migration within the social services Citrix environment. This was not scaleable and immediately ran into problems,” said Alison, “There was obviously no consideration for the existing environment because a brand new Active Directory domain had been created to run alongside our NT4 domain.”

thinstore advised that an “In Place Upgrade” would solve this problem and would have very little impact on the business, upgrading all users to Active Directory so that they could then be organised into appropriate groups. After in depth planning and testing the transition was made smoothly, “Everybody logged in as normal and none of the users noticed any difference. It was business as usual with no disruptions,” said Alison.

Microsoft Exchange 2003

After a successful Active Directory Upgrade thinstore were able to create Microsoft Exchange 2003 services for the council and migrated the IT department from version 5.5 to 2003. Training was provided to enable IT staff to migrate the remaining 2500 mail boxes across the council themselves. “Migrating to Exchange 2003 will enable Halton Borough Council to offer extra functionality to users,” confirmed Alison, “Simply by having a web based email facility many users can work remotely or out in the field and access their email which they couldn’t do before.”

Terminal Server and Citrix

The council has around 200 different applications running on disparate operating systems at the client side and this created an enormous overhead in the licensing and management of software applications.

“We have many different versions of Office installed on our legacy Windows 95 PC’s, the most logical thing for us to do was migrate the users to a centrally maintained environment where versions could be controlled,” said Alison. “This created a licensing issue for us that thinstore solved by using application SILOs, a technique that allows us to publish our older legacy applications to a standard desktop environment that was common for everyone and therefore avoiding the need to purchase new licenses.”

Paul Robinson added “The use of HP Blade servers simplified the overall design structure and made deployment very easy, we used the HP management software to control servers and operating system versions to maintain consistency across the server farm. The use of Citrix Presentation Server allowed for the creation of the SILO’s themselves and gave us control over user settings.”

The Bottom Line

“thinstore’s knowledge of Windows networking and Active Directory implementation has helped to reduce the number of helpdesk calls we receive on a daily basis. The network is more responsive and we are more confident in our own abilities following thinstore knowledge transfer programme,” said Dave Ball.

thinstore are now assisting Halton Borough Council with the design of their Active Directory to create organisational units. In summing up Alison Wafer said, “The relationship with thinstore is a long term one and they will be assisting us with other projects in the future. We like their honest approach and trust them with our systems. They are a key partner for the enablement of our e-Government agenda”.

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