Customer Solution Case Study
/ City Council Reduces Overhead Costs by
30 Percent with Communications Upgrade
Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry:Government
Customer Profile
Salford City Council is one of 10 local authorities that make up Greater Manchester in the northwest of England. It provides local government services for 220,000 people in its constituency.
Business Situation
Salford City Council wanted to provide a unified collaboration and conferencing solution for employees, to support its agile workforce and reduce real estate and travel costs.
Solution
By upgrading to Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Salford City Council can provide employees with a unified client for presence, instant messaging, voice, and ad hoc collaboration and online meetings, which will help the council reduce overhead costs by 30 percent and reduce travel by 20 percent.
Benefits
- Reduced costs
- Eased management
- Improved user experience
Jonathan Burt, Corporate Infrastructure Architect, Salford City Council
Salford City Council provides services including aspects of education, social services and health, land use planning, libraries, physical communications, and community safety to the community of Salford, part of the Greater Manchester metropolitan area. Because many of these services are critical to citizens’ daily welfare, it requires a robust communications solution that promotes collaboration. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner POSTcti, Salford deployed a Microsoft communications solution for 1,600 employees, which helped it increase productivity, reduce travel, and create a more agile workforce. It decided to upgrade its solution with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 to extend communications capabilities to 4,500 employees, supporting its initiative to reduce office space, ease management, and provide a more unified solution for its agile workforce.
Situation
Salford is about 200 miles northwest of London. With excellent road and public transport links to all parts of the United Kingdom, the city is well placed as a visitor and commercial center. With 220,000 residents, the city of Salford covers 37 square miles and the five districts. The Salford City Council employs about 10,000 people, including teachers and social workers.
Salford City Council is responsible for delivering services to citizens who include the vulnerable and at risk. An effective communications solution is imperative for it to successfully deliver its services, which can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. Salford wanted to move away from more traditional forms of communication like email and the telephone in favor of more instant communication, to help employees be more responsive to community members in need.
The council worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner POSTcti to implement a communications solution based around Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. POSTcti provides expertise in the design, deployment, integration, and ongoing support of Exchange Server and Office Communications Server. With 10 years of experience deploying Microsoft solutions, it also helps its customers manage the technical and configuration issues relating to integrating private-branch exchange (PBX) systems into Microsoft communications solutions, while maximizing asset retention and minimizing additional cost and risk. “Having the backing of a partner like POSTcti ensures that our business-critical solutions are deployed correctly, and they pass invaluable experience on to our in-house team,” says Jonathan Burt, Corporate Infrastructure Architect with Salford City Council.
The council deployed Office Communications Server to provide instant messaging, presence, and conferencing capabilities to help employees collaborate and support citizens. Salford deployed the solution to 1,600employees; 180 of those employees also use enterprise voice. To provide voice service, Salford has relied on a voice over IP (VoIP) solution provided by Cisco since 2001. It integrated Office Communications Server with Cisco Call Manager using direct Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) connection to provide enterprise voice service through Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, which the council deployed to provide audio conferencing capabilities that could help it reduce travel.
Office Communications Server interoperates seamlessly with other applications the council was using, including the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client and the Active Directory service. Salford also deployed Exchange Unified Messaging so employees could receive and manage both voice mail and email messages through their Office Outlook inboxes.
To extend communications capabilities with partners like Microsoft and POSTcti and other government agencies in the Manchester area that use Office Communications Server, Salford also implemented federation. With federation, workers can see presence and calendar information for federated colleagues and easily connect with them through instant messaging (IM) and voice calls.
Salford City Council has also been evaluating a POSTcti application called LivePA that works with Office Communications Server. Workers can use LivePA to record calls with citizens for compliance and abuse tracking. Because the calls are recorded on the server, the solution does not take any extra bandwidth, and employees can easily archive and retrieve recordings through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The recordings are encrypted and compressed, so they do not require extensive storage on the network.
The council got to see firsthand the effects of its solution on worker productivity during the large snowstorms that hit England in the winter of 2010, when 70 percent of its employees using Office Communications Server were able to continue working from their homes in spite of the weather, while only 15 percent of the workforce without Office Communications Server continued to work. “Overall, we experienced a 35 percent increase in productivity,” explains Jonathan Burt. “The solution was popular with employees. We didn’t force people to use it; they requested it.”
Office Communications Server was also a key driver for Salford City Council in setting up its agile work program, which enables people to work from any remote location with a network connection. Salford has also initiated a corporate policy to reduce its office space; instead of offering traditional offices, the council instead provides “touch down” locations where workers can set up their laptops when they need to come into the office. “We want to reduce the size of our offices by 30 percent over the next three years, and another 20 percent over the following two years,” says Jonathan Burt.
Salford expects that its agile workforce will increase 40 percent over the next two to three years, especially as it continues to reduce its estate footprint. With more remote workers, the council wants to ensure it can provide robust conferencing solutions that are easy to use. It also wants to increase the social networking aspect of its communications solution, to help workers connect and collaborate even though they may not be in the same office.
Solution
To better support its agile workforce, Salford City Council decided to upgrade to Microsoft Lync Server 2010. Lync Server provides enhanced versions of the communications capabilities provided by Office Communications Server 2007 R2—presence, instant messaging, robust conferencing, and enterprise voice—as well as improvements in topology, deployment, and management tools. It plans to expand its deployment, rolling out the solution to 4,500 employees by March 2011.
Working again with partner POSTcti, Salford deployed Lync Server in a virtual environment using Hyper-V virtualization technology, a feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system. POSTcti used the Topology Builder tool for Lync Server to help design its final topology and configuration settings. The highly-available, fully virtualized configuration consists of a single-edge server, a director, and two frontend servers balanced with a hardware load balancer and DNS load-balancing solution. It also deployed the Monitoring and Archiving server roles.
Although employees have been using Cisco phones, the council is now currently evaluating voice hardware designed specifically for use with Lync Server to replace employees’ desk phones. “Up until now, we had always deployed Cisco phones on the desktop, but with Lync that’s changing,” says Jonathan Burt. Senior management staff will receive Polycom CX600 IP desk phones, which provide directory search and presence information. Workers with laptops will receive Plantronics Voyager PRO headsets for placing and managing calls and conferences through the Lync client on the desktop.
With Lync Server, the council’s IT team will take advantage of the extended management capabilities. Using the Windows PowerShellcommand-line interface, the IT team can easily deploy and manage Lync Server, and through the web-based control panel,it can manage Lync Server from anywhere on the corporate network. Help-desk employees will use role-based access control to delegate help-desk roles. The IT team also installed the Lync Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager for monitoring and alerts.
Salford is using the Response Group Service in Lync to help route calls from the community more effectively. Most recently, it created a single number for local authorities and citizens to call to reach people in the Insurance Audit team to answer questions. With Lync, employees can also place calls using their Response Group number, so that their clients only ever need to see one number for the department.
Because the Microsoft Office Live Meeting client has been integrated into the Lync client, employees now have one single interface where they can view presence, send instant messages, place voice calls, or set up ad hoc collaboration sessions and online meetings. Council employees will also take advantage of enhanced contact information with social networking features like the Rich Contact Card and Skill Search. The Rich Contact Card displays people’s pictures as well as their managers and direct reports, and people can use Skill Search to find subject matter experts in other departments or other regions more easily. Both of these features will also be available through the Salford intranet and employee portals when the council upgrades to SharePoint Server 2010.
Salford will consider usingLivePA with its Lync deployment. The council also plans to create some communications-enabled business process (CEBP) applications based on Lync Server. In one application it is considering, members of the community can access the Salford website and see presence information for people in customer service, and immediately initiate a chat session.
Salford is currently upgrading its Exchange messaging solution to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and it will also upgrade its Unified Messaging server, ultimately replacing its Cisco Unity voice mail solution.
Benefits
With its Lync Server 2010 deployment, Salford City Council can better support its initiatives to create an agile workforce and reduce overhead costs. The IT team can more efficiently manage its communications solution, and workers across the organization can communicate and collaborate more easily and effectively through the unified Lync client.
Reduced Costs
With the agile work program supported by the deployment of Lync, Salford can reduce its number of office locations. As a result, it expects to see extensive cost savings over the next three years. “With Lync, people can work from anywhere, which helps us reduce our office space,” says Jonathan Burt. “We expect to reduce costs by 30 percent initially, followed by another 20 percent over the next few years.”
Salford also expects to reduce travel costs. “With 180 enterprise voice users in Office Communications Server, we already experienced a 20 percent reduction in travel costs for those users. We see this going across the board with Lync as we expand the number of people on enterprise voice,” says Jonathan Burt. It will also reduce carbon emissions, which is another important council initiative.
Improved User Experience
Salford believes employees will benefit greatly from the unified Lync client interface. “With the single client interface, employees will not require two programs and duplicate training to set up web conferences,” says Adrian Sturdy, Senior UC Specialist for POSTcti. “It’s much easier for them to escalate from an instant messaging session to an online meeting.”
Employees find it easy to manage meetings and conversations through the Lync client. “I found it easy to set up conference calls, and participants found it hassle-free and easy to join,” says Debbie McCarron, ICT Service Standards Officer with Salford City Council. “The conversation tab is also great—I can view my past conversations in the blink of an eye.”
As the council continues to drive change through the organization, it believes that features like the Rich Contact Card and Skill Search features will help people collaborate and reach out to coworkers. “The organization is going through a lot of change right now, and these social networking features help people see the organization chart more clearly,” says Jonathan Burt. “They also connect people, and reduce the time people spend looking for coworkers who can help them.”
The IT team also believes the self-help options in the Lync client help improve the overall user experience, especially as it expands its enterprise voice deployment. “With integrated information about connection quality, people can make informed decisions about when to place voice calls, and they can better diagnose and resolve issues when voice quality may have been affected by network or computer issues,” says Pete Wild, ICT Infrastructure Security Specialist with the Salford City Council.
Eased Management
The Salford IT team can more easily scale and manage its communications solution with the more flexible architecture and management options in Lync Server. “One of the reasons we like the Microsoft solution was that we were able to design our own hardware solution,” explains Jonathan Burt. “Virtualization makes scaling the solution much easier and allows us to react more quickly to change.”
Daily management tasks are also easier to perform. “With features like Windows PowerShell, we can perform standard administrative tasks in a more structured way,” says Wild.
With the Monitoring Server and Lync Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager, the IT team can also more easily collate information, view trends, and diagnose problems. “The new monitoring solution alongside System Center Operations Manager will help us identify issues that may need attention before a problem arises,” says Wild. “Lync monitoring alerts us when any issue is affecting communications for users, even if the issue is caused by networking equipment or connectivity problems. “
Salford has seen fewer help desk calls related to Lync. “Better self-help features built into the client also help relieve the burden on the help desk,” says Sturdy. When they do receive calls, the help desk can typically use desktop sharing to resolve them quickly.
Microsoft Lync Server 2010
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 ushers in a new connected user experience that transforms every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative, and engaging; and that is accessible from anywhere. For IT, the benefits are equally powerful, with a highly secure and reliable communications system that works with existing tools and systems for easier management, lower cost of ownership, smoother deployment and migration, and greater choice and flexibility.
For more information about Microsoft Lync Server 2010, go to: