Central Baptist Family Services

Success Story

Central Baptist Family Services selects Novell Nterpise solutions to stabilize and secure its network environment, enhance collaboration, and empower its employees with the tools they need to better serve children and families.

Overview

Central Baptist Family Services (CBFS) provides family-focused services and programs to more than 7,000 children and families throughout Illinois, Missouri, Florida and Wisconsin. The agency's 700 staff members work to enhance the physical, social, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development of families by offering child abuse prevention programs, child and family counseling, juvenile justice programs, behavioral health programs, residential care for emotionally troubled youth and child care programs.

Challenge

CBFS's network environment, which consisted of over 25 isolated LAN-based systems, was somewhat inefficient, unstable and often insecure. The organization sought to enhance its infrastructure and ease network administration by providing improved backup capabilities to guarantee non-stop, reliable and secure functionality, while streamlining IT management and offering multi-platform capabilities.

CBFS also needed to address its site-to site collaboration needs, as well as internal and external communication. Without a real-time system in place, employees received e-mail only twice a day, delaying basic day-to-day business activities.

CBFS required a more efficient solution to provide real-time functionality and Web-based access to communication tools.

The organization also wanted to enhance users' productivity by offering anytime/anywhere access to work-related resources such as child and parent records, custom applications, HR policies and procedures and e-mail and calendaring in a user-friendly, personalized Web-based portal.

Novell solution

"Novell solutions have changed the way we do business. We can now put data in the hands of our social workers, whether they are in the office, courtroom or at home."

John Falsetti
Senior Vice President of Information Services
Central Baptist Family Services

With a limited IT staff "seven people overseeing offices in four states" CBFS decided to implement Novell solutions, including Novell eDirectory, NetWare and GroupWise. With the assistance of Novell Consulting, CBFS was able to stabilize its network and transform its environment to the Web. "Novell has a unique approach. They are solving business issues; not just selling products," said John Falsetti, CBFS vice president of Information Services. "We have been incredibly impressed by the responsiveness, expertise and knowledge transfer of Novell Consulting."

CBFS selected NetWare to expand its network stability, security and availability. Leveraging eDirectory, NetWare eases administration by allowing technicians to easily manage and access the network from any device, in any location. NetWare enabled the agency to easily and reliably consolidate its server environment by moving the storage of critical resources and files from its 27 servers to one central location in Illinois, eliminating the administrative burdens and security issues of managing 27 separate servers in a geographically diverse environment. In addition, NetWare provides a flexible, easy-to-use storage system that provides seamless access across the agency's various platforms, including Microsoft NT.

The agency has also implemented Novell GroupWise a real-time communication and collaboration solution, offering messaging, calendaring, information sharing and document management as well as Web-Access functionality. With Web Access, employees no longer wait for e-mails twice a day. Instead, users are able to retrieve communication from any Web browser anytime, anywhere, significantly increasing user productivity.

Novell's portal solution offers an additional layer of flexibility by making all critical information and resources available in a Web-based, single-point of access portal environment. By leveraging eDirectory, the portal solution offers CBFS employees customized access to e-mail, schedules, reports, files and other resources anytime, anywhere.

"Novell solutions have changed the way we do business. We can now put data in the hands of our social workers, whether they are in the office, courtroom or at home," said Falsetti.

Results

The Novell solution has dramatically streamlined the inner-workings of the agency's infrastructure, enabling the IT department to do more with less. Today, CBFS's IT staff represents only one percent of its entire agency "far lower than the national average of three percent" yet output nearly three times as much.

CBFS has successfully secured and stabilized its network environment, enhanced communication and collaboration and achieved ultimate flexibility for its employees through Web-based capabilities. This newfound stability enabled the organization to meet the demands of servicing a new five county contract in Florida*a new endeavor that went live without any additional administrative IS-related costs.

"Our focus from an IS perspective, is to support the mission of Central Baptist by implementing Web-based tools that enhance the workday of the direct care staff the people that really make a difference in the lives of the children and families we serve," said Falsetti. "By leveraging Novell solutions, we've been able to do so without the administrative overhead typically associated with a company as geographically diverse as ours."