You might consider a Church of England cathedral to be
an unexpected user of IT technologies such as thin client systems,
mobileBlackberry devicesandpower over telephone lines. However,
Portsmouth Cathedral has been pushing the envelope with its IT
system for several years.
Portsmouth Cathedral
is the Mother Church of the Diocese of Portsmouth, a geographical
area that includes south-east Hampshire, Portsea Island and the
Isle of Wight. The cathedral is the base for the Bishop of
Portsmouth and the focus for diocese-wide church services and
events. As such, its clergy are highly mobile and have complex
diaries, both of which make them ideally suited to mobile and
remote access to data and the cathedral's network.
Challenges and limitations
Three years ago, Portsmouth Cathedral was experiencing daily
limitations and failures with its IT infrastructure. It ran a
client server set-up based on a
Linux server that ran bespoke business software and a legacy
calendar system. The equipment was managed partially in-house and
partially by a local one-man-band IT support firm.
The main problems the cathedral was facing in 2004 were based
around not being able to coordinate its booking systems with all
the different parties involved. It did have a legacy diary system
for room bookings and making staff appointments, but it was not
easy to use and required a high level of skill.
Accessing the internet and the business system were also tricky,
and it was a very difficult environment to work in, with users
frequently complaining about the technology.
Due to the physical layout of the cathedral, only a few members
of staff had access to the IT network, e-mail or internet services,
and the network could not be accessed remotely.
The cathedral's 30 staff wanted to get more out of the IT
system, and realised it was time for a complete IT overhaul.
However, the organisation only had an IT budget of £28,000 a year,
out of a total £550,000 annual discretionary budget.
Thin-client system answers prayers
In 2005, the cathedral approached local systems integrator
Taylor Made Computer
Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Partner and a Citrix specialist.
Taylor Made recommended a
thin-client system because of the challenges involved in
cabling up the cathedral for a
client-server system. Many of the cathedral's heavy wooden
fixtures could not be moved, and the layout of the cathedral meant
that under-floor cabling was not an option.
In June 2005, Taylor Made introduced a new IT system that it
first installed, tested and benchmarked on its own premises before
installing at the cathedral.
The new system comprises a series of
HP Proliant servers running
Microsoft Windows Server 2003,
Exchange Server 2003 and
Citrix Presentation Server.
A number of workstations were replaced with HP thin clients to
access the Citrix services, and broadband connections and desktops
running Citrix were introduced for remote offices and personnel
working from home.
"There is quite a lot of data going backwards and forwards, and
Windows Terminal Services is a great system, but Citrix takes it to
the next level for speed of access to data," says Ian Lockwood,
commercial director at Taylor Made.
The answer to cabling problems
Unusually, Taylor Made introduced a central broadband internet
connection to allow all network services to be accessed from a
single point, eliminating the need for additional data cables or
wireless technology.
The cathedral is a listed building, and therefore offered
limited cabling possibilities, says Lockwood. In addition, there
were a lot of staff who worked from home and from a church office
in Portsmouth.
Taylor Made circumvented the cabling problem by using the
cathedral's existing telephone lines. It modified the standard
phone plug sockets, putting voice and data traffic over the
telephone system by using
VHDSL (very high digital subscriber line) technology. "Lots of
different bits of technology went into this to make it work. Our
engineers had fun," says Lockwood.
VHDSL is a variant of HDSL (high bit-rate digital subscriber
line) and provides a data service at rates of between 10mbps and
26mbps over 300m. These fast speeds mean that VHDSL is capable of
supporting new high bandwidth applications such as HDTV, as well as
voice over IP and general internet access, all over a single
connection.
To secure remote access to the organisation's network, the
cathedral implemented Safeword for Citrix,
a two-factor authentication system that uses key fobs as the
hardware element to generate single-use passcodes.
Under the new system, the cathedral carries out
data back-up on site using Veritas software and tape drives,
and the network is monitored remotely around the clock from Taylor
Made's premises.
Lockwood says Taylor Made is able to resolve most problems from
its offices, and rarely needs to dispatch an engineer.
An unusual customer
"Portsmouth Cathedral is a very unusual customer to have, but it
has the business requirements that many of our solicitor clients
have: the need to communicate internally, coordinate its programmes
and services, and it needs to communicate efficiently and
effectively with its customers via the website and e-mail."
In 2006, John Murphie, administrator and chapter clerk at
Portsmouth Cathedral, joined the cathedral staff and took on the
role of IT manager by default because of his interest in IT and his
administrative remit.
A retired member of the armed forces, Murphie is responsible for
the smooth running of day-to-day cathedral activities as diverse as
human resources matters, writing contracts, managing diaries and
organising the cathedral's services.
Adopting new technologies
Murphie now leads the IT change programme and is keen to see the
cathedral investigating new technologies such as Blackberry devices
and interactive web presentations, as well as offering website
visitors online booking and other facilities.
The first application that Taylor Made brought to the cathedral
in 2004 was e-mail, with the website built shortly after. "These
have really been accepted as part of the business," says
Murphie.
Murphie is currently helping the cathedral staff adopt a shared
online system based on Citrix Presentation Server that they can
access from their offices, their homes or any of the thin client
terminals in the cathedral itself. This will facilitate team
working and save staff time on all sorts of activities, says
Murphie.
"The next move is to get people using message board software to
pre-empt some of the more routine business meetings. I want to be
able to invite people to collaborate via a private domain, so when
you get to the committee people know what their positions are. It
will mean better communications and fewer meetings," he adds.
Murphie says Taylor Made has been very engaged in implementing
the IT system, despite originally seeing the cathedral as "an odd
place for a computer system to be in". But this has meant they have
given the cathedral "a good deal of attention", he adds.
Unlocking the potential
Murphie says, "We came fairly late to computing, but we are
making up time now. Almost three years on, and we are now beginning
to really unlock the original Citrix system's potential. The reason
we went to thin client is that it is easier to manage the network
and allow clergy to access the system. Plus, Citrix has allowed us
to do things like virtual tours on the website."
He adds, "I tend to take these things quite slowly, but I have
upgraded to a
Blackberry that I will personally trial. The clergymen travel a
lot, and if this works for me, I will try to get them to adopt it.
They will be able to make phone calls and answer e-mails out and
about."
Murphie said that the main problem the cathedral faced was with
staff IT adoption and training. The clergy team at the cathedral
were not particularly familiar with technology, and they were used
to working independently, so found it hard to collaborate using the
new system.
Training the clergy
Taylor Made offers a range of training for
Microsoft Office packages as well as for Citrix as part of the
IT installation, and took on the task of helping the clergy become
more IT literate. The training led the clergy up a steep learning
curve of the new technologies.
This included teaching them the ins and outs of the
collaborative diary features of Microsoft Exchange and Outlook
2003, and the generic diary environment for managing cathedral
events and appointments.
Murphie says, "People do not naturally trust computers, but
because the Citrix system has been so reliable it has become easy
to trust. We now use the Citrix system for doing things like
creating and distributing management papers, for research and for
regular communication by e-mail."
The system has also helped the staff work together and adopt
flexible working practices, says Murphie.
For Murphie himself, the system has reduced the time he spent
mailing out Chapter minutes from three and a half hours to eight
and a half minutes.
Not content to rest on his laurels, Murphie hopes to add tools
to help the cathedral be
greener and more efficient, such as projectors in meeting rooms
to save on the number of presentation print-outs that are
required.
He is also investigating making church services available by
podcast, and introducing an online facility for people to
purchase books and souvenirs, or tickets to Cathedral events and
concerts, directly from the website.
As for Taylor Made, Lockwood said it has been approached by an
IT manager for the Church of England, and is looking into a similar
Citrix system for them. It goes to show that even a two thousand
year old organisation like the church can benefit from
technology.
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