Borough of Brent

Objectives

• The IT team wanted a solution which was secure, easy to use and manage, reliable and that met the relevant data retention and protection regulations.
• The communications and library teams were primarily interested in the end user experience, more detailed visitor reporting, whether the data could be exported to their existing mailing software and how the system could increase their social media exposure. Unified Consultancy and Purple were able to meet all of these requirements and more.
• A solution in line with the government’s digital inclusion initiative, which aims to equip the whole country with skills, motivation and trust to go online.
• Content filtering was also required to ensure visitors cannot access inappropriate websites. With state of the art content filtering, Purple gives Brent the ability to choose which categories of sites to allow and which to block.

Installation

London Borough of Brent already had an existing guest solution and wanted to run the two systems concurrently to compare performance and to ensure Purple met all of their needs. The primary challenge was ensuring Purple was effectively marketed to the public to ensure a sufficient level of data was collated to allow comparison of both systems. Unified Consultancy distributed instruction leaflets to visitors in the Civic Centre to raise awareness of the new system and also ran a staff education initiative to ensure they were aware of the new system and the value it adds.

Another challenge involved ensuring the IT lending library devices were all pre-registered, ready for immediate use without registration. This challenge was resolved by the Purple WiFi helpdesk, who manually pre-registered the devices in bulk, using their MAC address.