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Creative & Cultural Skills Case Study
November 20, 2010
Background
Creative & Cultural Skills is the Sector Skills Council for Advertising, Crafts, Cultural Heritage, Design, Literature, Music, Performing, and Visual Arts. They bridge the gap between industry, education and the government, to give employers a real influence over education and skills in the UK.
Creative and Cultural skills (CCSkills) has in the region of 100 employees. The primary site in London houses the majority of the users with two small satellite offices in Edinburgh and Cardiff.
CCSkills approached NSE with a diverse set of requirements aimed at significantly reducing their in-house IT burden. CCSkills had previously maintained hardware on site for file servers and software such as Microsoft Exchange. In addition to outsourcing of infrastructure, CCSkills also needed to rebrand and develop their websites and leverage the power of CRM within the business.
Solution
From the outset CCSkills were keen to utilise the power of the Microsoft platform for both Email and CRM, taking advantage of the significant discount available to charities. Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Exchange were provided by NSE as a completely outsourced (Software-as-a-Service) solution.
“NSE’s Hosted Dynamics CRM provides us with a charity focussed solution, whilst also integrating seamlessly with their Hosted Exchange offering.” said Dan Gerrett of CCSkills. “NSE expertly handled the migration from our existing systems, providing a painless transition to our new hosted environment.”
A comprehensive design and requirements gathering process was then carried out for the CCSKills corporate site. NSE provided a customised Content Managed Website (CMS) with bespoke social networking functionality implemented from the ground-up, delivering strong value-add for the key stakeholders.
The future
The next step in the process is to complete the outsourcing of all servers from within the CCSkills infrastructure, implement offsite backup and introduce a VoIP telephony solution. In order to facilitate this, a new 100 Mbps Ethernet leased line (plus backup ADSL connections) will also be provided.
NSE’s Managed Cloud solution will provide the above requirements, plus seamless integration between the VoIP system and the CRM and Exchange platform.
“NSE is the ideal IT partner for us, both agile and able to offer a complete range of solutions that will scale with us as a business.” said Dan Gerrett. “We would not hesitate to recommend them to other companies.”
