Sydney reseller's major Harbour Ferries deal

IT consulting firm Professional Advantage has overhauled the IT systems of Harbour City Ferries in a project believed to be worth six figures.

Harbour City Ferries inherited an "outdated" IT ecosystem after the government privatised Sydney's ferry services in 2012.

Over four months, Professional Advantage has been upgrading the systems used by Harbour City Ferries' staff, including the 200 based in its corporate office and the 450 working on its many wharfs.

Professional Advantage business development manager Andrew MacKenzie said the ferry network was using dated technology originally from incumbent Netcat. "They had a lot of legacy platforms. There were a lot of users on Windows XP and Office 2003. They didn't have a document management platform; they were running file shares."

Harbour City Ferries was also relying on hardcopies to communicate with staff, which caused problems as some staff didn't have access to changes made to the rosters in real-time.

The first step of the upgrade involved implementing Office 365 SharePoint Online, as well as equipping Harbour City Ferries staff with smartphones operating on Windows Phone 8.

Operating SharePoint on legacy Windows PCs did cause some trouble. MacKenzie said "there were some challenges in getting the intranet accessible on a different operating environment. Internet Explorer wasn't supported and they had to use Google Chrome as their primary browser for access to the intranet."

To overcome the temporary limitations, employees are being issued with a mix of desktop PCs, Lenovo Carbon Ultrabooks and Lenovo Helix tablets running Windows 8.

SharePoint Online will also be used to collect operational data, such as fuel usage, engine hours for each ferry, and regulatory maintenance activities.

There are other upgrades in the pipeline too. In the coming months, Professional Advantage will migrate Harbour City Ferries from Microsoft's 2003 Exchange to Office 365 Exchange Online, upgrade them to Active Directory 2012 for easier PC fleet management and roll out Lync Online.

The upgrade is saving the company thousands a month in data centre costs, Meckenzie told CRN.

Harbour City Ferries IT manager Adam O’Halloran said the "partnership we’ve struck has been so successful that we’ve engaged Professional Advantage on an ongoing support basis".

The contract has a term of 12 months and is priced at $7,000 a quarter.