Connecting a community at Newton Dee
Newton Dee, a Camphill Community in Aberdeen, offer homes, meaningful work and opportunities for adults with learning difficulties and other special needs.
The Community spans 180 acres, of which 120 acres are dedicated to biodynamic farming. Both the co-workers and the residents work on the farm, and in other workshops, where they can develop skills to produce food, toys and furniture that help to support the community. Around 200 people live in the Community, around half of whom have additional support needs. The others are mainly co-workers and their families.
With almost 20 office-based staff, as well as up to 100 co-workers, supporting the 36 houses located in the grounds, Newton Dee struggled with an unreliable server at the centre of their IT. The server they used proved to be problematic, often losing data with lengthy periods of downtime, which had an effect on the productivity of the staff that needed access to it.
In order to manage the IT system, long term co-worker, Jacob Vollrath, had to give up his valuable time finding solutions to the many IT problems that came up; a task that he handled by himself, often working into the evening in order to best mitigate problems.
This resulted in extremely undependable services due to a lack of support and downtime across the teams.
Following an initial meeting with Jacob, who was in desperate need for better reliability and IT management for the whole community, the Nimbus Blue team worked to provide a dependable solution for Newton Dee.
David recommended moving to a Windows server that could be centrally managed and maintained by the Nimbus Blue team. This would involve updating the server, whilst retaining the same hardware – reducing cost implications and vastly improving reliability.
This included:
With the introduction of the GDPR regulations in 2018, Newton Dee are continuing to consult Nimbus Blue on how best to enforce and adhere to the necessary security changes.
This is vitally important for Newton Dee, as they hold and manage a large amount of personal information on the residents, which they understandably want to ensure is protected and secured in the correct manner.
This type of support can include:
Using Nimbus Blue as their trusted IT provider has allowed Newton Dee to take the pressure off management, and free up their schedules, providing a much healthier IT system that betters the whole community in the long run.
Jacob Vollrath, manager at Newton Dee, said:
“We are delighted to have streamlined our connection and can offer a better-structured server for use amongst our team and therefore further improve our work with the residents.
Our organisation doesn’t count productivity the way a normal business does. We support people; there isn’t an end product, but there is the constant search to help people to develop and improve their quality of life.
What Nimbus Blue has helped us do, is free up my time, and other people’s time to be more focused on the people we support, rather than on whether our computer’s are working properly. This is the biggest difference of all.”
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