Leon BarnfieldICT ManagerWest Midlandshttp://www.peopleserve.com/
PeopleServe (formerly Biscom) is a key provider of government-funded education, training and employment services across the UK's West Midlands region. The company is part of the ResCare family of companies, one of the largest providers of welfare-to-work services for people of all ages and skill levels in 38 US states and a growing number of international locations. ICT Manager Leon Barnfield looks after PeopleServe's network which consists of over 350 PCs across 13 office sites in the West Midlands area.
PeopleServe has 500 users on 350 Windows PCs
With responsibility for all the Job Centres in the West Midlands, PeopleServe have a duty of care to protect their learners and customers from inappropriate and objectionable content on the Internet. They needed a new web filter as their existing system (OpenDNS) was too slow and unsuitable for scaling alongside their growing organisation. Their key requirement was for an accurate and robust system that would be easy to install and manage across multiple sites. For this reason, automatic updates were particularly important. Leon was also keen to trial a Smoothwall solution since he held the Open Source version of Guardian (DansGuardian) in very high regard, having used it in a previous role.
When Leon trialled Guardian, he was amazed at how simple the software was to install and set up. As a government-funded organisation, value for money was also crucial for PeopleServe. The solution in their case was a competitive 3 year deal, which Leon says other providers were quite unable to match.
Leon is now delighted with Guardian and says he has been particularly happy with the level of service and support that he has received from Smoothwall to date.
After trialling Guardian and looking at the competition's solutions and prices, it was clear to me - there was no competition!
Guardian is a dream to install and has enabled me to very quickly set up all of my different sites. Support for replication means I only have to configure one machine - then Guardian replicates and configures the rest for me. This is such a cool feature!
Having used Guardian for a few months now - I can't imagine how I ever managed without it! I have contacted the sales and support teams with a few questions and the support, the professionalism, the helpfulness and friendliness of the staff is amazing. They are a pleasure to work with
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