Servo helps the National Portrait Gallery to build a new infrastructure and leverage Outlook Web Access
Founded in 1856, the National Portrait Gallery collects the likenesses of famous British men and women. Today the collection is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, and attracts almost 1.5 million visitors a year.

All the Gallery’s IT services are managed in house by the IT team including the management of 200 users, the digitalisation programme for its collection of 330,000 portraits, the tills and retail systems for the Gallery’s shops, and the databases which drive financial, fundraising and collection applications.

The decision to migrate to a full Microsoft platform
Originally, the Gallery had installed Novell Netware 4.11 to run its back-end systems, with only a few applications running on Microsoft servers. However as time went on, Ann could not see a clear development plan for the Novell system and began investigating the move to a full Microsoft platform. The decision to replace the servers was quite straight forward as these were now 7 years old, and the Novell system was out of date and only being used for file print services. Ann was also hoping to leverage integration benefits with the desktops that had already been migrated to Windows 2000 previously.

The National Portrait Gallery had not worked with Servo previously, but had been introduced to the organisation via the regularly published technology guides and newsletters. When the time came to look for a partner to assist with the migration, Servo was offered the opportunity to present.

“Servo offered a good deployment plan that was very cost effective” commented Ann. “They were punctual and straight forward to deal with.” An experienced team from Servo was assigned to the project covering all aspects of account management, infrastructure design, project management and deployment. The goal was to migrate to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003, and to update their Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) tools extending access to almost half the Gallery staff.

The project began in October 2004 with the goal of completing most of the deployment in working hours – only the migration of data from the Novell to Microsoft server was scheduled to take place over a weekend. After working with servo on the initial Active Directory design, Ann underwent professional training on Active Directory and then conducted a skills transfer to the rest of the team. Her preference was to work alongside Servo whilst the new servers were deployed, the data migrated, and the permissions set up. “We had a tricky time with permissions, and one critical moment when I was moving a large amount of mail boxes and the server couldn’t cope” commented Ann, “but we called on Servo’s engineer who reacted quickly and helped us to complete all the tasks successfully.“

The 2003 version of Outlook Web Access has also proved popular with users. It has a more similar look and feel to the version of Outlook used when working in the office and offers richer functionality. Previously each screen used to refresh making it appear slow, but now it operates in cache mode and is very effective to work on. Users also like the fact that signatures can be incorporated.

This was Servo’s first project for the National Portrait Gallery and we asked Ann to comment on her overall impression. “I am very pleased with Servo’s performance and have since appointed them to provide our maintenance as well. Going forward, the Gallery is keen to look at the benefits of using Management tools like SMS and MOM and we would be keen to undertake this work with Servo.”