TELUS
Platform Standardization Keeps TELUS Ahead of the Competition
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Company Overview
BC TEL and TELUS merged in January of 1999, and the new company, which would be known as TELUS, became Canada's second largest communications company. TELUS employs more than 22,000 people in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.
TELUS offers a host of services from local, long-distance and wireless services; high-speed data networks; advanced data, Internet and e-commerce solutions; and multimedia, advertising, mapping and information services to more than 50,000 small businesses and thousands of mid-sized and large corporations across Canada.
As well, the company is in the process of building a fibre optic network spanning the country that when complete, will provide high-speed data and Internet services to Canadian businesses from coast-to-coast.
Business Challenge
TELUS required a solution to address technology integration issues stemming from its merger with BC TEL, and to keep the demands of a constantly evolving marketplace in check. Under BC TEL's previous IT infrastructure, communication and information sharing between different business units was a challenge. After the company merged with TELUS, communication and collaboration became even more of a priority.
"If someone needed information from another business unit, it could take anywhere from a day to a week to a month to figure out how to make that happen," explains Erika Tischer, project manager for Windows 2000 at TELUS.
The challenges extended further, to TELUS' disparate mobile workforce, which spanned provincial boundaries. For Rick Fix, manager, desktop services at TELUS, any new solution would have to provide for improved functionality and support for portable devices. "Advantages for our mobile users were key," he says. "We have a large laptop community and after the merger, those numbers exploded. We needed a solution that would allow our road-warriors to operate more effectively than ever before."
With tens of thousands of employees across scores of departments in geographically dispersed areas, it was centralized management above all else that drove the decision to implement new technologies. The company needed to find a solution that would allow mobile and fixed-location employees to freely share information and resources across the network, while ensuring that network security was protected.
Solution
Both parents of the newly created TELUS had previously benefited from deployment of the Windows NT Server platform, and were pleased with its performance. So, when Microsoft introduced its next generation platform, Windows 2000, TELUS made its decision.
Arthur Tymos, vice president and chief information officer at TELUS, recognized that platform standardization was important to a newly merged company, "For our purposes, the Windows 2000 platform integrates the best network, application, and Web services in one package, by having those capabilities in one enterprise-ready platform, we were confident that we were making the best decision."
Brian Carlson, server services manager at TELUS, claims it was the Windows 2000 feature set that dictated the final decision to standardize on the latest version of Windows. "The functionality within Windows 2000 is exactly what we were looking for," Carlson says. Adding that everyone has been looking forward to Windows 2000 from a security standpoint.
Implementation
Six months before the launch of Windows 2000, TELUS upgraded their master domain and began to run Active Directory™, the enterprise-wide directory service within Windows 2000. At TELUS, business units function as separate entities, they have separate products and services but utilize the same corporate infrastructure. Active Directory acts as a Meta directory, enabling TELUS to reduce the costs and complexity of managing multiple directory services. "With Windows 2000 Active Directory we were able to ensure greater flexibility in assigning access privileges in order for each of the business units to have control of their products and information," says Erika Tischer.
And when it came to enhancing TELUS' corporate intranet, "We knew we would not need to jump through a lot of hoops to get our intranet up and running. Windows 2000 promised, and delivered intranet functionality, right out-of-the-box," adds Brian Carlson.
Once the desktop deployment was complete, IT staff was pleased with the ease of the upgrade. "Windows 2000 domain controller functions exactly the same as a Windows NT 4.0 domain controller. The domain upgrade from Windows NT to Windows 2000 was extremely straightforward, and we were able to retain most of our system settings, preferences, and program installations. Microsoft really did their homework on that end," says Fix. "A lot of the staff were surprised to learn that we had upgraded our infrastructure at all, only because they never experienced any network interruptions or glitches during the deployment or immediately after."
Business Benefits
For Marcel Hodinski, team leader, infrastructure services at TELUS, platform stability was a key benefit of the Windows 2000 deployment project. "Windows 2000 makes the entire IT infrastructure more robust," he says. "That in itself will permit us to push our IT resources further, utilize resources more effectively and really get the best out of our IT investment. When you manage your infrastructure more efficiently, it equates to a better return on your investment and a lower total cost of ownership."
Return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) are key benefits in choosing the right corporate computing platform, but there are others. One such factor is the added support for digital devices and protocols found in Windows 2000. Improved support for hardware such as USB products and Windows CE handhelds means better access to the variety of digital devices that TELUS' mobile workforce demands.
"In our environment, Windows 2000 has shown itself to be the best platform for new devices. As a result, our employees have been able to more readily embrace digital devices like cameras, scanners and CE Devices," according to Tymos. "Windows 2000 can scale to fit the needs of the mobile user. And with 2,500 laptops in Alberta alone, a reliable mobile OS is important to us. Windows 2000 helps make the lives of our mobile users instantly better," adds Tymos.
Internally, the granularity of Windows 2000 allows managers to create precise access policies, which are flexible and easily redefined. "Under our previous system, it was really a choice of too much or too little access," explains Erika Tischer. "With Windows 2000, each business unit serves as a delegate for its own information. If something needs to be shared between units, one contacts the other and sharing is enabled between the two. Which helps to facilitate management and lower the TCO of the Windows 2000 Server platform."
Next Steps
TELUS is discovering that its intranet is quickly becoming one of its most important communication tools. Tymos, points out that as part of their knowledge management strategy, company planners identified the intranet as a key tool for employees to share information and communicate.
"We are actively growing that capability and more and more it is becoming the place where people start and end their business day," says Tymos. With out-of-the-box features like built-in support for HTML and other Internet protocols in products like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and others, Windows 2000 makes intranet page creation and management simple.
Conclusion
Being the second largest company in the rapidly evolving Canadian communications marketplace, TELUS required a highly sophisticated corporate platform that was not only interoperable with the company's existing infrastructure but would also provide the scalability necessary to keep pace with change. By deploying Windows 2000, the company is lowering the cost of computing with powerful, flexible management services, sustaining up time with extensive reliability and availability, and improving the bottom line with broad support for existing and emerging hardware and communication products.
"Windows 2000 delivers a number of great benefits to our business," says Tymos, "including a major reduction in the cost of infrastructure management, a simplified and lower cost client environment for our mobile and in-house employees, and a computing environment that is flexible and scalable enough to support TELUS' changing business environment."
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to:
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