Presbyterian Church World Headquarters

Industry:

Not-for-Profit

Environment:

Microsoft Windows Sever 2000 and 2003, Active Directory, SQL Server, DNS, DHCP, IIS; Novell eDirectory and GroupWise; BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Overview

Representing an institution that is hundreds of years old with over 2.4 million members, the world headquarters of the Presbyterian Church carries a huge responsibility.

In charge of coordinating the not-for-profit activities of the Church— including student loans, missions, and even hurricane relief—the organization, located in Louisville, Kentucky, must ensure the continual flow of information with minimal interruptions.

Evaluating the Solution

The headquarters manages 33 servers, 800 computer users and 140 BlackBerry devices. With such a vast network and a limited number of network administrators, the organization began to actively search for network management tools.

They first tried a competitor product that, while cheaper, failed to install or run properly. Faced with a malfunctioning product and unhelpful support staff, the Presbyterian Church headquarters opted to try Mobile Admin with a potential third alternative waiting.

The third option was never tested when all who tried Mobile Admin liked it too much to consider an alternative.

A Network Analyst also raved about the helpfulness of the Mobile Admin support staff, stating that it was a welcome change to encounter people who were helpful but didn’t try to push a sale.

Saving Time

Transferring from an administration system which relied on pagers to notify Network Administrators about problems, the headquarters quickly felt the timesaving benefits of Mobile Admin. Able to solve the problem of a locked account from his BlackBerry while at lunch, Randy Bowman, a Network Analyst, marveled that he was able to “do in five minutes a job which would normally have taken 25.”

Increasing Adaptability

When the world headquarters recently saw three of their five network administrators quit, they worried that the two remaining individuals would be unable to manage the hundreds of users on their own. However, according to Bowman, “with the time saved in using Mobile Admin, we are not noticing their absence nearly as much as we could be.”

The Benefits

With such a lean IT team but such a huge responsibility to users and the organization, Mobile Admin has given them a way to streamline how technical support is delivered, increasing productivity without increasing stress levels.