Challenge
Crisis Connections is a non-profit offering telephone-based crisis intervention, information, and referrals to community services for youth and adults in Seattle. Their primary case management system was relatively old, and the back-end ran on an unsupported operating system and version of Microsoft SQL server. Also, the technical staff that had built an ancillary reporting system had long since moved on. To further complicate the IT requirements the service runs 24x7x365. Crisis Clinic engaged EXP to help upgrade the back-end to a supported and ideally faster and more reliable platform.
Solution
EXP was engaged to provide technical leadership and database administrator services with the project. The scope of work included:
- Assessing and documenting the current environment
- Designing a rationalized and redundant system based on newer versions of SQL
- Project Management
- Report migration from a legacy platform to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
- Managing other IT Vendors as needed
Result
After providing an initial assessment and recommendations, EXP was engaged to execute on the recommendations. They designed a redundant and fault-tolerant system utilizing SQL Server Log-shipping functionality, which meant that if the primary SQL server was down, failover could happen within minutes. The EXP team worked during off-hours to migrate the databases during a four-hour downtime window, and the new environment was much faster and supportable.
Client Feedback
“We are grateful to the EXP team for working with us on a challenging project. We hit several obstacles during implementation, yet they were able to surmount them all and get us back to operations quickly. The staff loves the increase in speed and I can sleep better with the new fail-over design.”
Chip Phillips, Crisis Connections IT Director