Homefirst – First for Technology

Homefirst – First for Technology

Based in Ballymena, The Homefirst Community Health and Social Services Trust (Homefirst) provides health and personal social services for an area of Northern Ireland that covers seven district council areas and a geographical spread of 1200 square miles – a diverse mix of both urban and rural areas.

Established in 1996, Homefirst is the largest community Trust in Northern Ireland servicing a local population of over 300,000 people. It employs over 5,700 staff, including home-helps, social workers, health visitors, district nurses, residential and day care workers, doctors, dental staff, allied health professionals such as speech and language therapists, podiatrists and occupational therapists, hotel services staff such as catering, domestic, laundry and porters, along with administration and clerical staff.

The Trust maintains over 3,000 PCs and laptops spread across 100 individual sites. Managing these computers and ensuring that each was set-up identically proved to be problematic. With a range of different brands of computers in use and multiple models involved, managing a standard desktop image across these machines proved to be a difficult task for the Trust’s ICT personnel.

The management of enterprise applications requires substantial effort in many large organisations such as Health & Personal Social Services (HPSS). Software updates, patches, new versions and industry-specific solutions all have to be installed and set up to meet varied desktop, laptop, storage-drive and controller requirements. When device drivers are brought into the equation, it becomes even more complicated.

Software-based cloning, using the Symantec Ghost Solution Suite product set, was already in place for a number of years at Homefirst but staff had to manage, set-up and maintain a range of different images on the Trust’s computers.

The major problem Homefirst faced was finding the time to update and deploy a range of different Images across the organisation. With Big Bang, LLC’s Universal Imaging Utility (UIU), the ICT department can now update the one master Image in five to ten minutes, on a weekly basis, whereas previously it was taking at least a half-day per Image.

The UIU allows users to create a hardware-independent master Image file, greatly reducing the time and expense associated with Image creation and maintenance. Using the UIU, Homefirst is able to use one master Image throughout its environment of disparate desktops and laptops.

“Running UIU on the selected ideal machine prior to an Image being captured means error messages and ‘blue screen’ failures on the subsequent clone machines are virtually eliminated,” explains Geoff McIntosh, Director, Binary Resource (UK) Ltd, worldwide distributor for UIU.

“Rolling-out software updates and setting-up new desktops and laptops can be managed within a matter of minutes and a previously complex and time-consuming operation can be transformed into a simple, straightforward, fully-automated task,” he continued. “This enables IT departments to drastically reduce the time and money spent on image creation and deployment by streamlining the cloning process.”

The installation of UIU has saved Homefirst time and money and enabled workers to concentrate on other ICT projects within the organisation. They can now focus their attentions to ensure that Homefirst continues to provide a high quality, effective and efficient service.

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Binary Resource (UK) Ltd.
Binary Resource is based in Canterbury, Kent and is a registered subsidiary of Binary Research International Inc. (BRI), which is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. The companies evolved from Binary Research Ltd., a New Zealand-based organisation that created the world’s first PC Cloning software – Ghost – now Symantec Ghost.

Contacts:

Daniel Freeman/Steve George

Spreckley Partners

T: 020 7388 9988

E: binary {at} spreckley.co(.)uk

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