Posted 21/11/2024
Orbis is a public sector partnership between East Sussex County Council, Surrey County Council, and Brighton & Hove City Council. The partnership provides resilient and efficient business services for the three constituent councils, their residents and customers. Orbis deliver this by generating efficiencies through sharing resources, people and technology – providing an alternative to outsourcing – keeping public money and jobs in the public sector.
The merging of Active Directories across three large public-sector bodies can be a difficult undertaking. Orbis’ requirement was to have all three of their Active Directory structures synced to provide a collaborative space in which MS Teams, Exchange email services and file sharing could be made as simple as possible, and each of the three councils’ users had the ability to reach out easily through email to any of the other staff members by way of a Global Address List (GAL) consisting of all 27000 team members across the three organisations. When the team was approached to advise on deployment of PowerSyncPro, there was already a sync solution in place, but this solution was not optimal in terms of its provision, function or licensing. Staff turnover across the group of 7000 to 8000 users per annum meant that user identities, access and licences not being managed or maintained effectively by the existing sync solution was, causing problems for user management and licence budgeting.
August 2018 saw the provision of PowerSyncPro across the group’s AD structure. Despite the variability of Active Directory deployments – one council running a Hybrid-AD solution, and two running Active Directory on-premises – PowerSyncPro synced all three directories smoothly and without issues, smoothly handling emergent challenges such as adding a display name suffix to all users within the GAL, allowing group member identification by other users both internal and external.
During the following two-year support period that PowerSyncPro was operational across the group, there were a sum total of three support tickets raised, all of which were minor in scope. PowerSyncPro even kept the group synced seamlessly during each of the member council’s migration of Active Directory to the cloud; PowerSyncPro just kept on working, ensuring complete resilience and availability of chat, mail, collaborative digital workspaces and user visibility. During this period, PowerSyncPro functioned as intended, and even when the server running the PowerSyncPro deployment was restarted, the software just picked up where it had left off, requiring no interventions or management.
“PowerSyncPro was the ideal solution for the group’s needs, as it did not require any external management or additional support, with no requirement to keep on top of, or budget for, user sync licensing. PowerSyncPro was deployed across a pretty diverse range of Active Directory structures and only a handful of issues that required support.
For the rest of the time, there was no interruption of services for the whole period of deployment, even when each council decided to migrate to the cloud. PowerSyncPro just sat in the background, like electricity or water, quietly doing its thing without users even noticing it was there.” Michael Brett, Enterprise Infrastructure Design Manage, IT & Digital, Orbis
• Flexible service: a fresh approach to IT that’s designed around your business
• Technical expertise on tap: no more struggling with IT challenges
• Responsive and fast: we’re there when you need us
• Affordable solution: a cost-effective way to outsource your DirSync function
• Fully scalable: increase your level of support as your business grows
• Reassurance: we make complex things simple
• Peace of mind: with over 50 years of combined experience, there’s not a challenge we haven’t overcome
