Polymorph creates reliable infrastructure for Youth for Christ

Youth For Christ has carried through a major overhaul of its IT systems to improve its efficiency.

The organisation required a system that would enable staff to respond to general queries and other administrative tasks whilst offering the functionality to also deal with emergency responses and other important duties related to its work supporting youths in a variety of contexts.

The overhaul was prompted in part by an old server that was liable to failure. It had failed in the past, leaving the network offline for an entire week during the server rebuild.

The volatile server meant that YFC would be exposed without any back-up servers.

YFC had been migrating away from its existing on-premise architecture, comprised of Office 2003/Exchange 2003/SharePoint 2007. It has now transitioned onto Office 365 to provide increased service and functionality for email and Office capability, and as part of this move, a migration and enhancement to the SharePoint portal was required.

YFC therefore needed an update to SharePoint that could be rolled out across the 71 centres and easily used by its staff with minimal training.

Polymorph was brought on board to help YFC in the upgrade and design a custom YFC-branded intranet portal that would contain all new applications for expenses, holidays and meeting management as well as new policy and procedure document libraries.

The new intranet was simple to use and required only basic training for the senior staff so that they could feed this information down through their teams. This allowed users to learn the system on the job, saving time taken up by training.

With the new intranet in place, YFC is now able to return focus to its core operations, looking after youth around the UK without having to worry about email systems crashing.

Richard Bromley, Local Ministries Director, Youth For Christ said: “With our existing network, we were dangerously exposed in the case of server failure and we needed a solution to prevent this and create a better connectivity between our 71 locations across the UK.

“Polymorph provided us with a new intranet that created a better synergy between teams as well as a new level of professionalism, exactly what we needed as the organisation grows to help more and more young people in the UK.”