Trustmarque completes VAR contract with Plymouth City

Value Added Reseller, Trustmarque, has been helping Plymouth City Council migrate to Windows 7.

Trustmarque has been working on several Windows 7 projects with Plymouth City including carrying out a project to tune the Council’s Microsoft’s System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) to deliver greater control over on-going administration.

The project has meant that the Council has been able to consolidate its desktop environment from 4,000 to 3,200 and introduce hot-desking to help reduce property overheads.

Plymouth City employs more than 14,000 people and delivers more than 300 services to Plymouth residents including transport, social care, leisure, education and schools.

But with pressure to reduce costs the Council wanted to consolidate its office space and assets by enabling a more flexible working environment.

Tom Unwin, Technical Architect for Plymouth City Council said that the plan was to have eight desktops for every ten employees.

This became more important as mobile working is on the increase. The problem with Windows XP was that each person needed a computer configured for their use.

Windows 7 would allow for the expansion of SCCM and make consolidation of the desks easier.

The Council benchmarked a number of providers and Trustmarque was successful in its bid to deliver Windows 7 and expand the deployment of SCCM.

The project started in January 2011 and the first line pilot was rolled out in April.

Trustmarque migrated office based staff, such as HR and finance, and then moving on to the mobile workers, such as social workers. Trustmarque tested the environment in advance and highlighted any applications that would cause an issue.

Microsoft’s SCCM, assesses, deploys and updates servers, client computers and devices across physical, virtual and mobile environments. Trustmarque created the build for the system to ensure it was configured to manage every device in the IT environment and to enable central administration.

Unwin explains said that if the council wanted to add a new device it would have taken three or four days to get the configurations correct and to get that system up and working. Now, it takes half a day.

Trustmarque also provided training on the job, which meant that after Trustmarque left its staff were skilled up to run the SCCM system themselves.

It has meant that the council’s inhouse engineer can fix any problems they have had so far and anyway Windows 7 has generated a lot less user helpdesk calls.