Portland Community College

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“VIE was awesome. Having the outside experience was great. They were extremely well organized and I wish I could hire them!”

Leslie Riester

Associate Vice President

As the largest post-secondary institution in Oregon, Portland Community College serves nearly 90,000 part-time and full time students through its four main campus locations and a number of centers in Portland.

Situation

Over the past few years, the PCC IT infrastructure had developed many challenges. The infrastructure was aging and the network manager had just resigned. These challenges were beginning to impact education and administration and something had to be done to remedy the situation. Subsequently, the Technology Services Manager had health issues. There was a need to back fill this role.

Critical Issues

The IT network had grown to be overly complex and had failed several times for multiple days. There was a need to implement a more modern, reliable design. Implementation of other key components of the infrastructure such as Active Directory were lagging. There were multiple server based security challenges causing downtime affecting service levels for students and faculty.

Solution

PCC hired VIE to help address this complex set of challenges. Over the period of 24 months, VIE brought in a team of expert consultants to implement solutions.

VIE provided an interim manager of the Network Team for 9 months and assisted in hiring the permanent replacement. VIE also provided a key project manager who conceived the solution for the re-design of the network and led this project through successful completion. Additionally, VIE assisted PCC with technical architecture and implementation services for other components of the infrastructure including Active Directory and Security. VIE provided an IT leader to cover for the Technical Services Manager during his medical leave.

Results

The result of these efforts has been the creation of a stable and reliable IT infrastructure at PCC, one that will serve the cause of education well into the future.