Our Clients

Case Study: National Treatment Agency - Office Systems Implementation

Assignment

The NTA are a specialist NHS agency that aims to increase the availability, capacity and effectiveness of treatment for drug misuse in England. The NTA has a National work programme that is related to Alcohol, Clinical Guidance, Models of Care, Treatment Planning, and other programmes.

The NTA approached JADe to implement a complete IT infrastructure for approximately 100 staff based in Central London and 9 regional offices throughout England. The basic requirements consisted of:-

• centralised filesharing & printing
• email & internet access
• remote access capability from the regional offices.

Solution

Given that the NTA enjoyed the benefits of the NHS Select agreement with Microsoft the overall infrastructure was designed on the basis of Microsoft client and server products.

On the server side, MS Windows 2003 server was implemented for the fileshare & printing and MS Exchange 2000 was implemented as the email server.

On the client side, an approximate split of 40 Dell PCs and 60 Dell laptops were implemented, primarily at the central London office. The clients were installed with MS Office XP and JADe's Contacts Management System (CMS) was also implemented for handling NTA-specific contact details.

The central office network was implemented using structured CAT5 cabling and remote access was provided, for the regional offices, using combination of leased lines and ADSL connections from remote offices. CISCO VPN routers were implemented to provided LAN-to-LAN connectivity between sites. Wireless networking was implemented at regional offices for up to 5 users.

As part of the setup of the central servers, the following migration activities were undertaken:-

• Novell filestores to Windows 2003
• Lotus Notes email to MS Exchange 2000

Result

The main benefits are:-

• A centralised office systems facility that can be accessed readily by all NTA employees. This provides improved efficiency through shared information within filestores and email system (e.g., global contacts).
• A more cost-effective and efficient IT service in comparison to the services being provided by the previous suppliers.

Key Technologies

MS Windows 2003, MS Exchange 2000, MS Windows XP, MS Office XP, JADe CMS, CISCO Routers, Total Virus Defence, Arcserve Backup