Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Youth Ministry Improves Its World-Wide Communications
Overview
Country: United States
Industry: Youth Services
Customer Profile
Young Life is a non-denominational, non-profit organization committed to impacting kids' lives with strong, positive influences, and preparing them for the future.
Business Situation
With hundreds of locations in the United States and the world, Young Life felt it needed to improve its communications, both among its staff and volunteers and with the public, and decrease its costs.
Solution
Young Life standardized on Microsoft® systems and servers; implemented a staff resource Web site; implemented mini-Web sites for all its field locations; and upgraded its e-mail platform.
Benefits
n Better communications
n Lower costs
n Easier site creation
n Lower maintenance
n Round-the-clock service presence / "I think Microsoft has done a good job of making things easy for the user…. There isn’t a great learning curve for users of Microsoft products, which is frankly just about everyone."
Cary Alberti, Senior VP of Services and CFO, Young Life
Young Life, a non-denominational, non-profit Christian youth ministry headquartered in Colorado, needed to improve its communications throughout the United States and around the world. And, with a highly mixed environment encompassing 500 desktops and seven varied Novell, UNIX, and Microsoft® Windows® based servers, the diverse environment was difficult and expensive to maintain. Several technical solutions helped them to correct these problems. Young Life standardized on Microsoft desktop operating systems and Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003. It implemented a staff resource Web site using Microsoft Content Management Server, established mini-Web sites for all field locations using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, and upgraded its e-mail platform from Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003. Young Life was assisted in these efforts by Microsoft Gold Partner Interlink Group.
Situation
"Young Life, which began in 1941, is a non-profit organization committed to making an impact on kids' lives and preparing them for the future. Young Life leaders leave the comfort of their adult worlds and enter the arena of high school and middle school life…. Young Life is active in all 50 states and more than 45 countries, reaching an estimated one million teenagers annually. More than 90,000 kids spend a weekend during the school year or a week during the summer at one of Young Life's 24 camping properties in the United States and Canada."
-- YoungLife.Org
"When I joined Young Life five years ago," says Young Life Vice President of MIS Kelly Mertens, "we sat down with the ministry units and developed a strategic plan to facilitate operations and communications for our field staff and volunteers." With over 3,000 total staff members in the United States and around the world, aided by more than 20,000 volunteers, communication between Young Life's central office and its field was and is critical.
Young Life was experiencing multiple problems at that time. Its biggest business problem was communications, but this was exacerbated by an information technology (IT) infrastructure that wasn't up to the task.
Choked with Paperwork
It was taking too long for the field to find out how much funding they had, and the field was burdened with unnecessary paperwork. Much of the field did not have e-mail available to them. The organization was being strained by having to maintain diverse operating systems and tools that were not working effectively. The organization's Web sites were not meeting Young Life’s needs. The sites did not cater to the non-technical field staff, they were expensive to create and maintain, and they did not adhere to Young Life’s branding standards.
"At the time, our field workers were choked with paperwork," says Mertens. "Not only did they have piles of paper to file, it could take them up to two weeks to get their revenue and expense reports back from the service center by mail. And without those reports they didn't know what funding they had to work with."
Adding to Young Life's communications woes was poor availability of e-mail. The organization's existing e-mail server, Microsoft® Exchange Server 5.5, required the installation of client software on every desktop or notebook that connected to the server. Young Life had, and has, many more staff and volunteers than it has computers and client licenses, so the organization needed a client-free or thin-client e-mail solution. It also needed an e-mail solution that would work in remote camp sites with very low bandwidth.
Too Many Platforms
Another issue was that Young Life had a mixed IT environment, using everything from legacy Microsoft products to IBM AIX, to Novell, to Linux. The sheer diversity was creating manageability problems.
"We had to train people on multiple platforms, and we didn't have enough people to sustain that kind of environment for any length of time," says Mertens. "We had a hard time staying current because we had so many products to upgrade. Compatibility problems were an issue, and we also had the issue of licensing fees. Having and keeping that many systems running cost a lot of money.”
Young Life’s decision to consolidate its IT environment and standardize on a single platform was driven by reliability issues and the growing cost of supporting the mixed infrastructure. While they considered other software, the Microsoft environment was the natural solution—to meet the organization’s manageability requirements, to extend its remote e-mail capabilities, and to support its heavy programming and development needs.
“The [Microsoft] .NET Framework vision fit in lock step with our emerging strategy to use the Web as a central development platform for delivery of systems and tools to our worldwide staff," explains Mertens. "We looked at where Microsoft was going with .NET technologies and with the [Microsoft] Windows ServerTM [operating system] platform. It became obvious that it was a good fit with where we wanted to go as an organization."
Possibly the most compelling driver for the upgrade was Young Life’s need for remote e-mail access. Updating their systems to the latest Windows Server operating system created the foundation for directory-enabled applications such as Exchange Server 2003.
Solution
"In May of 2002, we began migrating our diverse IT infrastructure onto a standardized Windows Server platform, and standardized our development environment on the .NET Framework," says Mertens. "This included the migration and upgrade to Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory® directory service, with the Microsoft Windows® 2000 operating system on the desktop. It also included Exchange Server 2003 for e-mail and scheduling throughout the organization’s 500 desktops and 500 Exchange [Server] accounts."
Young Life chose Microsoft Gold Partner Interlink Group, a regional solutions provider in Denver, Colorado, to help with the design and strategy of their Windows, Active Directory, and Exchange Server upgrade. Interlink’s standard Architecture, Design and Implementation Methodology established rigor around the high-level plans that Young Life had prepared for their Active Directory migration, providing formalized documentation and standard templates to aid the process.
Young Life’s existing Microsoft Windows NT® operating system version 4.0 -based environment had a primary domain controller and two backup domain controllers in the Colorado Springs service center and was based on a single domain. All users in other locations connected across WAN and virtual private network connections to the service center. Interlink made recommendations for the upgrade from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory. Interlink provided Young Life with an implementation strategy; Young Life performed the actual migration themselves using the Active Directory Migration Tool, which is included with Windows Server 2003. The new environment consisted of a single Windows Server 2003 domain with two domain controllers.
After Young Life had their Active Directory environment running successfully, they were ready to start on the Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003 upgrade. It was imperative that the upgrade cause no disruption to the business, since e-mail is a mission-critical application used for communication between Young Life staff in the Colorado Springs service center, field staff, property staff, and, most importantly, the donors who keep the organization in business. The previous Exchange Server 5.5 environment had proven unable to meet the organization’s needs; it was based on a single Exchange Server 5.5 server running on outdated hardware and a configuration that was questionable.
Interlink worked with Young Life to put together a comprehensive plan for Exchange
Server 2003 requirements, architecture, and implementation that enabled them to be successful with their implementation while reducing risk. The teams worked together on the initial preparation steps to prepare the Exchange Server 5.5 and Active Directory environments for the introduction of Exchange Server 2003. Interlink performed the critical upgrade steps such as the Active Directory Connector implementation that synchronized the Exchange Server 5.5 Directory with the Windows 2003 Active Directory. Because Microsoft Outlook® Web Access was a critical part of the project, Interlink put into the design an Exchange Server front-end and back-end architecture that would place an Exchange Server 2003 front end and Outlook Web Access server on the secured Young Life network. The remainder of the implementation was then done by Young Life staff based on a go-forward plan that outlined the steps for decommissioning servers and moving mailboxes.
"The whole thing was a non-event," says Mertens. "The implementation was transparent to the users, which is exactly the way you want a migration to be. We give a lot of credit to Interlink for keeping the migration smooth."
Upgrading to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 provided Young Life with enhanced Outlook Web Access. This Web-based solution provides remote users a rich e-mail and scheduling interface, without the installation of client software. Furthermore, it provides the ability for workers in the field and at camp sites with low bandwidth situations to work effectively, because of its enhanced cache mode features. The upgrade also solved some of the disk space issues Young Life was experiencing with Exchange Server 5.5.
"In 2000, roughly 150 of our areas, perhaps one-quarter of our camps and clubs, had public Web sites," says Mertens. "It was a large, expensive effort. Each of those sites was developed and hosted independently. In some cases, a few volunteers put up a site as an amateur effort. In other cases, a site was developed by consultants, giving the club a professional result, but costing quite a bit of money."
This growing problem led to the vision for ‘mini-sites,’ a Web-based framework with common tools and centralized hosting. The goal of mini-sites is to help Young Life staff in the field improve their ability to reach out to students, parents, and the community. It will also provide a method for planning and executing fund-raising events and communicating donor needs to the local community.
Interlink worked with Young Life to design and implement a Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 solution to meet Young Life’s objectives. The key to the solution is its ability to be administered centrally and implemented locally. The solution gives field workers, most of whom have little to no technical background or training, the ability to easily provision and maintain local area sites and camp sites.
"The content for each mini-site is provided locally," explains Mertens. "It takes about a week to get a new Web site up and running for a property. For areas that don't have the manpower to create a customized mini-site, we generate a default site that provides their location and contact information along with some standard pictures."
Benefits
Young Life's transition to a current, all-Microsoft-based IT environment provided several tangible benefits: centralized management, better IT staff efficiency, and fewer servers with more functionality. "We have seen an impact on the manageability of our environment," says Vince Cacciato, MIS Services Manager. "Although we’ve only been on this new environment less than 60 days now, we are seeing the benefits of centralized management on a small staff. One person can do what three or four people had to do before.
" We were using seven servers in our old environment. Now that we have upgraded, we are down to three, and we can use those freed-up servers in other applications."
"What we really tried to accomplish was to give Young Life the opportunity to do more with less in terms of their technology needs," says John Hermann, Microsoft Partner Engagement Manager. "Standardizing on the Microsoft platform helped them do this."
"Microsoft’s got the only fully integrated story out there," says Joe Shirey, Interlink General Manager and Microsoft Regional Director. "From directory services to messaging to desktop productivity, the integrated platform really addresses the broad spectrum of communication and collaboration needs."
The e-mail upgrade to Exchange Server 2003 gave Young Life a better user experience, and at a lower support cost. Most importantly, it provided e-mail access to field staff and volunteers without dedicated computers.
"We upgraded our e-mail from Exchange [Server] 5.5 to Exchange [Server] 2003 to improve our users' experience and reduce our maintenance costs," says Mertens. "The feedback from our roughly 500 e-mail users has been overwhelmingly positive. Everyone loves Outlook Web Access. It's really slick because its capabilities and user interface are nearly identical to the client version of Outlook messaging and collaboration client. Now that we're rolling out Outlook Web Access, we expect to add more e-mail accounts, as we reach people in the field without desktops.”
"We decided on Exchange [Server] 2003 because of some of the great benefits that come with it," adds Cacciato. "Any one of our remote people can access their e-mail anywhere in the world on the Internet and use a very functional client. We also wanted to make this jump to Exchange [Server] 2003 because of the ease of restoring even single mail boxes."
Web Sites
The two Web projects that Young Life undertook, the internal staff resource site and the external mini-sites, have made positive contributions to the functioning of the organization, as well as boosting the organization's bottom line.