British Museum and Civica develop new e-mail system

18 November 2004, London… Civica plc, one of the UK’s most experienced providers of public sector consulting, software and services, has given the British Museum’s leading archaeologists and curators a happy Monday morning with a complete email system upgrade - finalised over a weekend.

Civica carried out a transition of 800 workstations from Novell’s Groupwise to a Microsoft Exchange environment for personnel ranging from Egyptologists, researchers and conservators, to HR administrators, designers and catering staff, at the main Bloomsbury site and two other sites in London.

Under the project, planned and executed by the Civica team with the British Museum Information Services (IS) department, the final migration started at 5pm on Thursday night and was completed by 5pm on Saturday afternoon. Museum personnel, who had all been given system training, were able to begin using the new Outlook interface straight away on Monday morning.

Live data from the existing email system was migrated over a period of weeks in the run-up to the changeover, ensuring a smooth transition and guaranteeing the integrity of business-critical information.

The new system is boosting email communication according to the British Museum’s head of IS, Graham Head, who said, “This has been a very successful project and we have definitely seen email and calendar usage increase as the new system is much faster and more reliable. It was a major operation for us because of the wide differences in email familiarity in our different departments.

“We have new media designers who, as you can imagine, use electronic communications all the time, while other departments also use more traditional media in their daily work. We anticipate that with the Microsoft environment, maintenance and upgrades will be greatly reduced as time goes on. Civica has helped us build a robust, up-to-date platform for a range of future initiatives now being planned. This is a business-critical infrastructure layer for us” he said.

According to the British Museum’s IT project manager, Jane Clift, one of the secrets of the implementation’s success was Civica’s use of a web client (OWA) to ease transition and an effective plan for improved email management. She explained, “We moved over much of the data the week before and everyone used OWA on day one. Once we could see that the implementation was a success we then rolled out a limited number of full clients (Outlook 2003) to key personnel.”

Civica Services project manager, Richard Abel said, “This was an important project for the British Museum to reduce the resources needed for email maintenance and to boost internal communication. We were pleased that the final migration was concentrated over the single weekend, however the planned elements, such as the communication of the go-live and related activities to all staff, the data transfer and the user training all contributed to the project’s success.”

About Civica plc

The Civica group (www.civica.co.uk), which includes Radius, is one of the UK's most experienced providers of consulting, software systems and managed services to the public sector. The company has a 20-year history of supplying local government, police, healthcare, criminal justice and education organisations in the UK, Australia and the USA. UK customers include approximately 75 per cent of local authorities, 47 of the 53 police forces, more than 250 NHS Trusts and over 30 Local Education Authorities, while in Australia the group is one of the leading local government software suppliers. Civica Services Ltd is an approved prime contractor for software in the GCat government procurement catalogue. Overall the company employs approximately 550 people and has a recent track record of profits growth.


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