Business Needs

As part of the BTS strategy to achieve a competitive cost structure, BTS is committed to drive productivity gains, and reduce spending through operating efficiencies, to provide the company with greater financial flexibility to invest in industry leading networks, products, and content. As a solution provider for Bell, BTS needed an Open Source partner to deploy and customize a new enterprise social network in order to support corporate communication and announcements, employee engagement (by activity, province, etc.), quality assurance procedures, and technical training. It was also faced with the challenge of monitoring the operations and infrastructure for this social network, designed to connect BTS technicians. BTS required the ability to monitor the system, as well as the actions, posts, comments, training and QA documents, video consultations, etc., of the users in real time.

Solutions

As a trusted advisor and implementation partner for over 10 years, BTS selected Inmind to collaborate with their team to provide solutions for the design, development, implementation and deployment of the Connect Project. Inmind was able to significantly reduce the level of risk, time to market, and operating costs by leveraging Inmind’s high-performance hardware appliance platform, Mind in a Box.

The solution is built on the Open Source enterprise social network HumHub. It uses a LAMP infrastructure (Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL, PHP), and a variety of Open Source technologies. It has been modified to support rich media content (audio, video, etc.), as well as a document management, and a collaborative wiki environment; supporting internal BTS training and quality assurance activities. Mind in a Box allowed for the creation of highly styled and customized dashboards through a collaborative visualization layer. It was also extensively integrated within Bell Technical Solutions’ existing infrastructure, supporting its Active Directory services and Single Sign On authentication portal, as well as access from various clients (desktop and mobile). As a result, it is now possible for technicians in the field to receive mobile alerts, to notify them with new content or relevant updates (official announcements, social exchanges, etc.).

Results

Bell Technical Solutions measured performance increases of up to 20 times faster response times, as well as greater stability, when migrating the monitoring system from Virtual Machines to the Mind in a Box appliance. This helped save by minimizing maintenance costs and downtime with the successful rollout of the Connect Project. Originally designed for 700 number of users, BTS has now rolled the platform out to more than 7000, with a projection to scale to 8000+ employees this year.