IT Systems Engineer Tracie Waterfield at Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spoke to BDS about her experience of using Directory Manager:
Why did the Trust choose to install Directory Manager?
Back in 2001, the small IT team at Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (formerly North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust) was struggling with the day to day management of an ever expanding Microsoft Active Directory. Servicing manual user account updates for staff record changes was taking up too much time, distracting the team from the more important technical issues.
The Trust wanted a simple and cost effective solution to:
• Create user accounts before new employees started, to avoid unnecessary delays
• Increase and enforce user security
• Action timely and efficient employee name changes
The solution would also have to provide a single resilient management point for the directory, as well as reducing costs and improving productivity by freeing up staff time.
The Trust recognised that BDS Solutions Directory Manager ticked all the boxes.
How has using Directory Manager benefitted the Trust?
As a direct result of the installation of Directory Manager, the Trust benefitted from immediate cost savings and productivity gains, reducing the whole time equivalent (WTE) requirement to manage Active Directory from 1.5 down to 0.5.
In addition, as a result of its continued partnership with BDS over the past 14 years the Trust has continued to benefit from the ongoing development of the Directory Manager Software itself.
Directory Manager (v2) now offers the additional benefits of:
• Greater flexibility in managing mailboxes, home folders, group membership and user attributes
• Introduction of a self-service web portal for ease of administration
• Ability to include non-ESR staff in the user provisioning process
• NHSMail synchronisation
Tracie said: “The Directory Manager software immediately saved us so much time and has now become such an integral part of working life I can’t imagine being without it. The whole installation process went incredibly smoothly and was managed from beginning to end by BDS Solutions. The transfer of information from our old system to Directory Manager was also easy as it integrated with the existing codes within our systems.”
“Using Directory Manager has allowed all of our workflows to be more streamlined. Not only does it automatically update the details of staff within a department across all systems, it also allows for staff moving between departments.”
Find out more about how other Trusts have benefited from Directory Manager here.
Read more about how Directory Manager could help your organisation.