BACKGROUND
From 1st April 2009, the vision of Leeds City College became a reality as Leeds College of Technology, Leeds Thomas Danby and Park Lane College Leeds & Keighley merged to form what is now one of the largest and most influential colleges in the country, with over 60,000 students and a turnover of £80m a year. The five main Leeds City College sites are now known as Horsforth Campus, Keighley Campus, Thomas Danby Campus, Park Lane Campus, and the Technology Campus.
The joint aim of the merger was to raise achievement levels in Leeds and Keighley, offer more courses to suit the needs of everyone from school leavers to employers, and enhance facilities to be amongst the best in the country.
SOLUTION
As part of this merger SICL was commissioned to design and implement a new Active Directory infrastructure and Exchange organisation. The design took into consideration the need for a single Active Directory forest and single email name space and addressed the following:
- Security
- Performance
- Resilience
- Scalability
SICL implemented resilient Domain Controllers at each of the 3 main sites consisting of a physical server at Park Lane campus and virtual servers at Thomas Danby campus and Technology campus. SICL also installed an Exchange cluster at Thomas Danby campus and migrated all staff users to the new Active Directory and Exchange structure.
The new Active Directory and Exchange infrastructure was designed and sized to enable Student Users to be migrated to this new infrastructure as required.
RESULT
Improved reliability and speed on remote access has resulted in greater user confidence in the network and increased productivity.
“SICL demonstrated great flexibility and worked with LCC to test and deploy the solution which will allow LCC to add its student directory later.”
Graham Eland
Head of ITSS
Leeds City College