Complex IT integration across two independent housing associations.

Eastlight Community Homes is the largest community gateway association in the UK, empowering residents to become decision makers within their locality.

Created in 2019 from the merger between Colne Housing and Greenfields Community Housing, the newly formed Eastlight is looking to help solve long-term housing challenges in the East of England.
The social housing organisation provides over 12,000 homes to communities across Essex and Suffolk.

The merger of the previously independent housing associations resulted in two IT systems working simultaneously within the same organisation.

One site was already partially migrated to Office365, whilst the other was still using Microsoft Exchange on-premise. This resulted in day-to-day operations becoming increasingly complex and inefficient, requiring an abundance of project management.

The dual-system set-up also mean that Eastlight had to manage two different service providers, different networks and a host of differing business applications.
The main challenge of the project was to cause as little disruption to ongoing operations as possible, whilst carrying out a complicated merger of systems during the most restrictive part of the initial pandemic lockdown.

The initial task was to link both the Colne and Greenfields locations together, and Central achieved this through installing a wide area network (WAN), along with a new Cisco-based local area network (LAN) within the Colne site, as the existing network was not fit for purpose.

As both organisations were operating from separate Office365 systems, Central amalgamated both into one. Further to this, each site used a CITRIX desktop delivery application, which was also merged into a single entity.

Additionally, Central managed the migration of databases with legacy set-ups that posed a significant challenge when moving to new networks.

A new Cisco Meraki Wi-Fi system was installed at the Greenfields site as the incumbent system was severely outdated — mirroring the Wi-Fi solution already in place at the Colne offices.
Due to the nature of the merger, both sites required more data storage capacity, as the HD (hard drive) capabilities at the Greenfields location were not enough to absorb the Colne information.
To avoid business disruption, Central carried out as much of the work as possible in the background, with the full merger taking place over a weekend.

There was also the physical aspect of updating over 50 staff member laptops, which had to be returned so that Central engineers could carry out the necessary tasks, and then given back to users who were working from home. Social distancing considerations were taken into account, with a drop-off slot system implemented.

Central acted as a hub for issues during the project process, and provided continuous engagement between all stakeholders to effectively manage the changes. Engineers from Central met with the in-house IT team at Eastlight twice per week to ensure the smooth running of the project.