About Westmont College: Envisioning Excellence Through Innovation

Founded in 1937 as a small liberal arts college emphasizing the highest standards for academic rigor, Westmont has gained national recognition for its leadership training, academic quality, and a strong focus on spiritual, intellectual, leadership development and personal growth.

To retain its competitive edge, Westmont focused on making the latest technology available to its students and faculty. For example, Westmont embraced the cloud services model starting in 2009, and the college began migrating applications to the cloud. To date, Westmont has implemented nearly 20 cloud projects including email, calendar, contact management and smartphone syncing, as well as non-typical services such as SPAM filtering, wireless management, fundraising and admissions databases.

The guiding principle for the Westmont IT department was the varying degrees to which the college applies innovation to its technology operations categorized as a continuum. Using this principle, Westmont set out to tackle its most difficult technology challenges, which included managing costs and complexity of its hyper-growth storage and enterprise file environments.

Challenge: This Box Has Walls

An important goal of Westmont’s cloud initiatives was replacing its legacy storage environment to provide more capacity while lowering the support requirements for the IT department. Other success criteria Westmont established for the project were: performance, reliability, integration with Microsoft Office applications, easy-to-use file version control, and support for Apple Macintosh clients. Westmont followed its standard evaluation process and ultimately settled on a cloud solution from Box that it believed would best align with the college’s cloud-first strategy.

This decision quickly introduced a number of challenges. The college had decades of data that needed to be transferred, and Box was unequipped to migrate more than 3 million files and terabytes of data from the existing storage area network. Further, Box’s lack of version-control impacted Westmont’s daily workflow, which heavily relies on multiple users editing the same Excel document. This led to Westmont staff and faculty consistently struggling with high-use financial and student information spreadsheets, especially when it came to editing and saving those files. Any change to a file required syncing the entire file every time, which altered the staff’s traditional processes of frequently saving changes. Additionally, users often experienced system freezes when they attempted high-access rates and were often greeted with “too much activity” or “come back in 60 seconds” messages. Many users, consequently, became very frustrated and some even reverted to sending files via email in order to collaborate.

Another challenge for the cloud-only approach was the available storage capacity and file-management restrictions. For example, many Westmont users quickly reached Box’s hard limit on the number of files that could exist in a single folder, which impacted their workflows. The ability to maintain the college’s existing file and folder integrity was essential to how the college organized and structured its data, highlighting an inherent limitation in Box’s solution.

Benefits: Customization and a Hybrid Deployment Are Keys to Westmont's High Marks

The solution for Westmont was to deploy a more flexible enterprise storage and file-sharing model that addressed the college’s must-have requirements for the transfer of legacy data, consistent remote access to files, high-performance file access for collaboration, and a simple version-control feature that aligned with existing data-management processes. They also wanted to make sure that the solution was secure, since they often dealt with confidential information. For this, Westmont partnered with Egnyte to build a custom solution that migrated from a consumer cloud-only model to a more flexible and secure enterprise-grade hybrid architecture. A key step in this migration was Westmont selecting a cost-effective local storage hardware to enhance capacity and performance. The Egnyte Professional Services team then stepped in and helped implement the entire solution.

To integrate and manage data and files from its on-premises and cloud storage, Westmont used Egnyte Storage Sync. This solution enabled Westmont to store, share and access files from anywhere with any device by combining the access of the cloud with the speed and security of local storage. For example, Egnyte serves both on campus employees by allowing access through traditional drive mapping, and remote employess such as Admissions teams, Fundraising teams, Alumni, Coaches, and faculty on sabbatical who can now work effectively, away from campus. This was essential to a school like Westmont as it helped reduce and eliminate costs of on-premises storage, tape backup, and VPN expenses, as well as IT staff time to manage these resources, boosting productivity. “Moving our storage to a hybrid solution with Egnyte that provides traditional access to mapped drives while on campus and cloud-based access when off campus. The solution works flawlessly and is less than 50% of what we were spending on the legacy storage solution we retired.” said Reed. The Egnyte desktop client was another important innovation, giving Westmont staff a familiar user interface and reliable synchronization of files when they were in the office or on the road. Further, the flexibility to choose specific files to download to their computers proved particularly useful to remote-access employees.

The Egnyte hybrid solution eliminated Westmont’s version-control challenges completely. Now as users access or edit their files, a new version is created allowing employees to track when changes occur and who initiated them. Users could also select among the different versions of the file they want to access. The Egnyte detailed version-control system was essential in helping Westmont smoothly migrate the large number of files and data in its legacy storage. That data was now under the protection of AES 256-bit encryption whether at rest or during transmission, giving the college a huge boost of confidence.

The ability for Egnyte to seamlessly integrate into Westmont’s existing directory of faculty and staff was another major benefit of this solution. Egnyte’s flexible deployment model enabled Westmont to easily integrate their existing Active Directory and LDAP, which provided the Westmont IT team with a powerful set of new capabilities including the provisioning of users and groups, setting notifications, and access controls, as well as running audit reports.

From 3 to 1300, the Path to Value Engineering

Founded by a bricklayer and a joiner in 1923, today Bowmer & Kirkland (B&K) is a construction and engineering group made up of 26 companies spread across three continents – Europe, North America and the Middle East, employing a staff of over 1,300.

B&K works on large scale national projects as well as some of the well-known sporting, academic and transport buildings in the UK including the Edinburgh Elite Sports Centre and the Gatwick Airport. Last year, the company had a turnover of about £662 million.

B&K’s construction group and its subsidiaries heavily rely on the IT team to connect the head office, regional offices and site office teams across Europe, North America and the Middle East to increase efficiency and growth. Following the slow economic growth in the late 2000’s, the management team at B&K decided to consolidate how its groups utilized IT. This consolidation meant all 26 companies in the group were initiated into a global project of digital transformation.

Challenges in a competitive industry

Version Control

A key finding from his study revealed that over the years, paper use for document management became a bigger problem for the group as double data entry confused project teams and lack of document versioning was making it hard to identify the latest copy of a blueprint or a new business pitch. Also, the environmental and economic costs associated with purchasing reams of paper were excessive which made moving to a digital documentation system the logical choice.

Shortened Deadlines

Another discovery was that sub-contractor and client management had evolved rapidly in the last three years. Construction project timelines had shortened, from 52 weeks to 40 weeks, and construction companies were forced to find a solution which delivered value in a shorter time period.

BYOD Concerns

Continued research found the design stage of the project had become increasingly ad hoc as engineers adopted mobile devices to ‘design on the job’ rather than the past method of agreeing on the design before building commenced. Client demands, a shorter time to complete projects, and limited economical resources meant B&K needed technology to help employees securely access the right design to exploit Building Information Modelling (BIM) or pitch documents at any time.

Benefits of Egnyte Enterprise File Services

Effective Collaboration

In response to the new demands of the construction industry, McDonald sought a file collaboration technology where employees could access and share content across multiple time zones. B&K wanted to achieve “value engineering”.

The main reason Egnyte was chosen ahead of Huddle and Dropbox was because it provided multiple deployment models of its Enterprise File Services solution. One of those deployment models is Egnyte’s hybrid cloud solution which bi-directionally syncs local storage systems with the cloud. Through the use of Egnyte’s platform, McDonald and his team have “one version of the truth” at all times giving each of the 25 companies in the group autonomy as they have the choice to decide what files should be kept on the local network and what files can be shared in the cloud with external contractors. With Egnyte’s hybrid cloud solution, the company’s files can be replicated across sites for cross-office file sharing and data redundancy through the use of Netgear ReadyNAS boxes at each location.

IT administrative control of files and users

A key feature of the Egnyte solution for B&K was the Audit Reporting feature which allowed the IT team to identify the location of any file and see who had access to this file. The IT team was not comfortable using Dropbox because they could not see where the files were located.

Egnyte also helped B&K comply with data privacy and recovery regulation, an issue facing construction companies across the world. Having offices in three continents and managing sub-contractors and employees means requests for information come in all day, every day. Egnyte’s Enterprise File Services solution offers multiple ways for IT to control and securely share information with subcontractors and employees. Egnyte’s administrative controls help the IT team set up specific users and groups along with specific folders and sub-folders for projects while controlling the structure and permissioning.

Fast and secure access to CAD and BIM files from anywhere, any device

Egnyte’s hybrid deployment, on premises or in the cloud, meant B&K had two avenues to share large Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) files quickly and securely while not being at the mercy of limited bandwidth coverage on job sites detrimental to cloud-only solutions.

This offered employees fast access from their mobile devices to the local storage on the job site, coupled with the global easy sharing and sync capabilities provided by the cloud. Being able to access the right files at any time from any device means new business proposals and design files are delivered quicker to customers, giving B&K a better chance of winning new projects. Being application agnostic, Egnyte is used by B&K via the Microsoft Outlook interface (Egnyte plugin) which means employees do not have the hassle of going back and forth to work on and share construction content. McDonald states, “With Egnyte, there is no need to watch an egg timer while waiting for the 10GB file to sync. Its speed and ability to audit trails of files really helped in managing documents. Egnyte became the cornerstone of our new IT strategy.”

Building Productivity

Patrick Hindall is in charge of promoting employee productivity. As the CIO of Fulton Homes, he is responsible for making sure employees can work efficiently, either from the central office or out on site. Employees work with large blueprint files and are often working out on the 12 subdivision development sites where there is little to no connectivity. Plan sets usually include around 50 PDF or TIFF files per floor plan with about 5.5 GB in individual floor plan data. The individual files are high-resolution images around 800 KB. They needed an easy and secure way to access these large files and share them with external contractors. Since they shared files and plans on a regular basis, they also needed to know they were always accessing the latest version.

Hindall had tried to solve the file access and sharing problem by deploying a number of different technologies throughout the years, such as third party solutions and FTP. FTP was cumbersome and not user friendly. When sharing with contractors, the contractor would email updated files to someone at Fulton Homes. The employee didn’t always share the updated file with the entire organization and so many different versions floated around the company. The email server databases were full of file attachments being passed around in a giant game of telephone, and no one knew which version was the latest. When employees wanted to give contractors access to a shared folder in order to negate the versioning problem, they had to go through IT. IT ended up spending most of their time fielding requests to create a new file or folder and setting up appropriate permissions to that folder.

“The IT department had become a bottleneck for granting permissions and access to folders,” Hindall said. “We needed to empower employees by giving them the ability to share folders with contractors when out on site.”

Hindall had heard of cloud file sharing solutions and thought they would fit into his employees’ workflow and he signed up for Box’s Enterprise solution. However, after 6 months he realized that Box didn’t meet their business needs. Box only set up permissions on a folder level, when Fulton Homes needed subfolder permissioning. When setting up a folder for a development site, the project lead had access to the entire folder. They only wanted contractors to see the subfolders that pertained to their part of the development. With Box, it was all or nothing at a folder level, and that wasn’t an option for Fulton Homes.

Box also didn’t solve the anywhere file access issue. When out on development sites with little to no connectivity, employees had trouble accessing their files in the cloud. In the office, Box couldn’t quickly sync the 5.5 GB files to the cloud. Latency issues were slowing down everyone’s work. Fulton Homes needed a true enterprise solution. “Box was not designed for a corporation and the way that one operates. They could not implement a folder structure and subfolder permissions to folders and files, which was key for Fulton Homes. Additionally, their lack of a local storage option clogged bandwidth and inhibited employee productivity.”

Hindall found Egnyte and liked the combination of local plus cloud. He deployed local storage with a VMware virtual appliance on an existing file server. In order to start with a clean slate and the latest file versions, he formed a team of key stakeholders and content managers to devise a common folder structure and taxonomy. Hindall requires employees to clean up their files, ensure they are accurate, the latest version and in the correct format before they can upload them into the existing folder structure on Egnyte. This process is helping them organize and clean up the company’s files.

Employees love the solution and the ability to “share in place” with outside contractors. They needed minimal training, as they were able to access their files via a familiar interface, the mapped drive. When in the office, employees work directly off of the server, which speeds up file access time when editing and saving large blue print files. The cloud enables employees to easily share files with contractors and set permissions to folders and files. They no longer have to reach out to the IT department when giving permissions to contractors. When out at development sites, employees access Egnyte via the cloud or a mapped drive. External consultants and contractors will use Egnyte exclusively through the web browser.

Eventually, folders will number in the multiple hundreds and files in the tens of thousands. Egnyte’s sub-folder permissions now make it easy for employees to share the right files with contractors. For example, all employees can view (all files at the root of their “Communities” folder. With standard waterfall permissions, all employees can view all folders & files in this directory. The sub-folders in this folder have different owners and those owners can assign permissions to their subfolders as they see fit. They can make a specific employee an editor of specific a sub-folder or sub-file. However, they cannot remove the View Only permissions that are inherited from the root level and assigned to all employees. This enables Fulton Homes to build a common file repository with a well-known taxonomy that everyone can see, and give content owners the ability to assign edit permissions to their subfolders as they see fit. Moreover, because the content owners are in charge of setting their own permissions, permission changes can be done rapidly and in concert with a workflow. A content owner can grant a specific employee edit access to a sub-file. Then, once the edit is made and proofed, repeal the edit access. Content owners are free to offload tedious & time consuming file edits to subordinates or outside contractors, while maintaining strict version control.