MICROSOFT IDENTITY MANAGEMENT SERVER (MIIS)
Client: AXA Financial
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: With more than $450 billion in assets under management, AXA Financial, Inc. is a one of the world's premier financial services organizations.
Business Situation: A processing challenge arose in regards to how AXA uses MMS to dynamically supply third-party vendors with information about employees from the MMS metadirectory, which collects and pools all identity data from various internal repositories.
Solution: THG architected an MMS 2.2 Management Agent Script that automates the extraction of user attributes from the company’s MMS hierarchy, compiling the user fields specified by each vendor.
Results & Benefits: AXA Financial’s senior IT management team reported that the custom MMS 2.2 Management Agent Script that THG created for the company eased administration immediately, made delegation significantly more effective, and provided a seamless way in which to effortlessly feed each vendor the full data set of information required. This script is now able to scan thru more than 18,500 AXA Financial users and extract the necessary data within seconds.
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Client: Charming Shoppes, Inc.
Industry: Women’s Retail
Customer Profile: Charming Shoppes is a leading specialty apparel retailer primarily focused on plus-size women’s apparel through three distinct brands: Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and Catherines Plus Sizes.
Business Situation: To facilitate the smooth integration of Crosstown Traders into Charming Shoppes’ environment (a critical component of the overall acquisition), Charming needed to provide directory synchronization between the Crosstown Traders’ messaging system and the Charming Shoppes’ Microsoft Exchange solution.
Solution: The primary objective for this project was to facilitate the integration of a new company to an existing messaging infrastructure, maximizing interaction between the two while minimizing the administrative burden of allowing such exchange.
Results & Benefits: From an administrative perspective, the efficiencies the THG solution provided included: much more centralized administration of the messaging infrastructure, more enforcement of standards; positioned for migration to a single mail platform; positioned for future automation of account creation and provisioning from a single authoritative source.
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Client: OMD Worldwide
Industry: Media Services
Customer Profile: A full-service media buying and planning shop with more than 100 offices in 60 countries, OMD also has specialist units focused on such areas as direct response, digital services, and integrated marketing.
Business Situation: OMD required a method of synchronizing user data contained in the separate Active Directory forests used by independent OMD business units, and various third-party directory services employed by its partners and clients to create a unified SQL database of all user identities.
Solution: The Henson Group architected an MIIS 2003 solution enabling virtually any foreign directory service to integrate with OMD’s various directories.
Results & Benefits: Natively provides MA’s that support virtually every directory services product on the market; ability to connect directly to SQL databases; architecture highly scaleable and flexible.
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MICROSOFT INFOPATH
Client: Covanta Energy Corp.
Industry: Energy Provider
Customer Profile: Covanta Energy owns and operates 25 facilities, primarily in the U.S., where municipal solid waste is converted into renewable energy.
Business Situation: Covanta has a Sarbanes Oxley manual reporting compliance process called the “Facilities Monthly Closing Checklist” it wanted to convert from a manual process to a more automated system. To accomplish such automation, Covanta sought to leverage its investment in Microsoft InfoPath and SharePoint technologies.
Results & Benefits: The InfoPath solution The Henson Group designed successfully replaced the existing Facilities Monthly Closing Checklist process and was flexible enough to handle future changes. The solution will evolve with Covanta’s needs, such as changing questions, question order, additional sections, etc.
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MICROSOFT OPERATIONS MANAGER (MOM)
Client: Citigroup
Industry: Financial Services/Business Media
Customer Profile: A subsidiary of Citigroup, Salomon Smith Barney (SSB) is a global, full-service financial firm, which provides brokerage, investment banking and asset management services to corporations, governments and individuals around the world.
Business Situation: This financial giant needed a solution that would monitor Windows-based servers and notify administrators when problems occur on those servers. In addition, the client wanted the servers to try and correct themselves when issues arise.
Solution: THG implemented a custom solution that leveraged Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and Microsoft Application Center at Citigroup that produced an estimated $500,000 in cost savings in server management.
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Client: Goldman Sachs
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: Goldman Sachs is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm.
Business Situation: Goldman Sachs approached The Henson Group while it was in the process of deploying and customizing Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to replace NetIQ’s AppManager. Goldman Sachs’ intention was to have MOM automate many of its manual support processes and incorporate as many existing automated monitoring processes as possible.
Solution: At the outset of this “Phase 2” MOM 2005 deployment, a THG Microsoft Certified Consultant with deep MOM experience conducted a thorough audit of Goldman Sachs’ monitoring needs and objectives. Subsequently, THG formally proposed a series of recommendations for achieving pre-determined goals.
Results & Benefits: Today, due largely in part to the recommendations The Henson Group provided, Goldman Sachs has a single administrative interface for the managing and monitoring of a broad global network of servers.
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Client: Kaplan, Inc.
Industry: Educational Services
Customer Profile: A wholly owned subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, Kaplan is one of the nation's leading providers of educational and career services.
Business Situation: Kaplan was exploring the possibility of implementing a solution to achieve more robust server monitoring. It had been using a number of disparate solutions, with limited functionality, and wanted to standardize on a single product designed specifically for monitoring the Wintel platform.
Solution: The Henson Group architected a MOM 2005 solution including roughly 200 agents across a number of Kaplan’s managed domains to monitor the company’s corporate infrastructure.
Results & Benefits: Centralized management across entire network; replaced a number of limited disparate solutions; standardized on single product designed specifically for monitoring the Wintel platform; solution accommodates project growth (capable of supporting approximately 4,000 managed systems); higher level of fault tolerance achieved with agent failover.
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Client: Kelley Drye & Warren
Industry: Legal Services
Customer Profile: Founded in 1836, Kelley Drye & Warren has more than 300 attorneys that attend to more than 20 practice areas. .
Business Situation: What Kelley Drye lacked to establish a truly comprehensive, sector-leading IT infrastructure was a top-of-the-line technology monitoring solution, such as MOM 2005.
Solution: To achieve Kelley Drye’s objectives, THG architected a single-server deployment of MOM 2005 with agents designed monitor 30 Windows servers across Kelley Drye’s eight locations internationally.
Results & Benefits: THG was able to deploy a MOM 2005 solution that achieved Kelley Drye’s objectives. In fact, almost immediately after bringing the solution into production, a number of previously unknown security and performance holes in Kelley Drye’s Exchange-based messaging environment were identified.
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Client: Lehman Brothers
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: Lehman Brothers serves the financial needs of corporations, governments and municipalities, institutional clients, and high net worth individuals worldwide. The Firm is headquartered in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Tokyo, and operations around the world.
Business Situation: Lehman recently launched a migration to move its messaging environment onto an Exchange 2003 platform. During this migration, Lehman sought to implement a monitoring solution for its global Exchange and Active Directory environment to replace its antiquated OpenView monitoring solution.
Solution: Lehman’s previous server monitoring environment, based on OpenView, was complex, decentralized, and did not provide the granularity or level of detail necessary for proper proactive monitoring of its Exchange environment. To rectify these shortcomings, THG architected a MOM 2005 solution to monitor 200 servers.
Results & Benefits: THG’s MOM 2005 solution now ensures that Lehman’s Exchange messaging remains highly available, with MOM proactively identifying issues.
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Client: Movado
Industry: Luxury Watchmaker Manufacturer / Retailer
Customer Profile: One of the world's premier luxury watchmakers, Movado Group, Inc. designs, manufactures and distributes watches from six of the most recognized and respected names in time: Movado, Ebel, Concord, ESQ SWISS, Coach Watches and Tommy Hilfiger Watches. Collectively, its watches are sold throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Far East.
Business Situation: This luxury watchmaker needed a solution that would monitor its network of Windows-based servers and provide notifications when issues arose on those servers.
Solution: THG’s custom MOM solution provided Movado with a single administrative interface for managing and monitoring its broad global network of servers.
Results & Benefits: Movado gained not only the ability to monitor server health, but to also obtain real-time security auditing for protecting file shares, Operating Systems, applications, and IIS hacking attempts.
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Client: Stamford Health System
Industry: Healthcare Services
Customer Profile: Stamford Health System (SHS) provides a comprehensive range of health services to residents of Stamford, Connecticut, and the surrounding area.
Business Situation: SHS sought a server monitoring and management solution that would help it achieve high availability among its core servers that provide critical infrastructure services.
Solution: The Henson Group exceeded SHS’s objectives for designing and deploying a comprehensive server monitoring solution based on MOM 2005.
Results & Benefits: Centralized management across entire network; replaced a number of limited disparate solutions; standardized on single product designed specifically for monitoring the Wintel platform; solution accommodates project growth (capable of supporting approximately 4,000 managed systems), higher level of fault tolerance achieved with agent failover.
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Client: Warburg Pincus
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: A leading private equity investor since 1971, Warburg Pincus currently has approximately $9 billion under management and $5 billion available for investment globally in a range of sectors.
Business Situation: In its New York operation, achieving consistently high availability it needed with an infrastructure consisting of more than 40 servers was challenging.
Solution: THG proposed designing a custom solution based on Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, deploying MOM agents on servers that required monitoring, including all mission-critical servers.
Results & Benefits: The most noticeable gain that Warburg Pincus realized was the virtual elimination of systems downtime. With the MOM 2005 Agents effectively deployed to the required servers and scripted to monitor specific services, THG reduced the time it takes to identify an issue, ascertain the root cause of the issue, re-start the server and bring that server back online to approximately 30 seconds.
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Client: Wegmans Food Markets, Inc.
Industry: Retail Food Chain
Customer Profile: Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. is a 68-store supermarket chain with stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia.
Business Situation: the organization lacked a robust solution to proactively monitor its hardware supported by the ‘Wintel’ platform. (The portmanteau term ‘Wintel’ is a concatenation of Windows — Microsoft's operating environment — and Intel — the originator of the x86 processor architecture used in many of today's PC compatible computers).
Solution: The Henson Group designed and implemented a highly customized server monitoring solution based on Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to centralize monitoring of the ‘Wintel’ platform hardware for Wegmans.
Results & Benefits: The Henson Group exceeded Wegmans’ objectives for designing and deploying a comprehensive server monitoring solution, to oversee its Wintel platform, based on MOM 2005 that was centrally located, yet did not require extensive management. Since Wegmans currently manages less than 200 computers, all MOM 2005 components were hosted on a single computer.
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MICROSOFT PROJECT SERVER
Client: Abyssinian Development Corp.
Industry: Not-For-Profit Community Services
Customer Profile: Following a 2003 reorganization, the New York City Board of Education was rechristened the Department of Education. With approximately 1.1 million students spread across more than 1,200 schools spanning all five New York City boroughs, the Department of Education is by far the largest public school system in the US, if not the world.
Business Situation: Considering the depth of services ADC offers its community, coordinating the complex network of activities, projects, and events is always a formidable undertaking. Furthermore, as a not-for-profit with relatively limited funds for administrative management and technology tools, ADC is fiscally conservative and must make the most of every investment it makes.
Solution: The Henson Group provided training and consultation regarding Project Professional 2003 for Harlem-based not-for-profit Abyssinian. Subsequently, when ADC sought the more robust functionality offered by Microsoft Project Server 2003, THG stepped in to provide expert implementation assistance.
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Client: New York City Department of Education
Industry: Education
Customer Profile: Following a 2003 reorganization, the New York City Board of Education was rechristened the Department of Education. With approximately 1.1 million students spread across more than 1,200 schools spanning all five New York City boroughs, the Department of Education is by far the largest public school system in the US, if not the world.
Business Situation: While IT initiatives hold great potential in helping achieve these goals, a mandate to spend more taxpayer dollars inside the classroom has made the message clear that IT administrators at the NYC Department of Education simply have to do more with less. That does not mean the large number of IT initiatives ongoing, planned, and needed will be reduced. Therefore, the Department needed a technology solution to help shore up shortfalls and get things done. Considering the sheer size of operations, though, the challenge to prioritize, schedule, assign resources, monitor and project manage as many initiatives as possible, has been frustrating, to say the least.
Solution: Microsoft Project (or MSP) is a project management software program developed and sold by Microsoft which is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads. (The first version, Microsoft Project for Windows 95, was released in 1995. Further editions were released in 1998, 2000, and 2003.)
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SHAREPOINT PORTAL SERVER (SPS)
Client: The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P)
Industry: Retail
Customer Profile: With corporate headquarters in Montvale, N.J., this retailer operates 427 retailed food stores in nine US states.
Business Situation: A&P needed a portal to create an environment in which managers and administrative professionals could interact and collaborate.
Solution: The Henson Group set about deploying a customized version of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to provide A&P with an enterprise business solution integrating information from its various systems.
Results & Benefits: THG deployed a highly customized version of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, based on the challenging criteria defined in Discovery, to establish a robust web portal that A&P can rely on to facilitate more efficient collaboration among all of the managers throughout its many retail stores and administrative facilities.
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Client: Covanta Energy
Industry: Energy Provider
Customer Profile: Covanta Energy owns and operates 25 facilities, primarily in the U.S., where municipal solid waste is converted into renewable energy.
Business Situation: Covanta, with its many facilities across the country, needed a way to disseminate information among its employees through a single portal accessible through a simple sign-on to the company intranet. Without this solution, the company risked not being able to accommodate new employees acquired through acquisitions. The company made updating its system a goal for 2005 and hired THG in December 2004 to begin the process.
Solution: Three THG consultants installed SPS over five weeks, consolidating the company’s intranet and automating the company’s formerly labor-intensive, manual monthly reporting process by which employees in the field report on their progress to headquarters in New Jersey.
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Client: Greenhill & Company
Industry: Banking Firm
Customer Profile: Greenhill & Co. is a leading independent investment bank that provides financial advice on significant mergers, acquisitions and restructurings and manages merchant banking funds.
Business Situation: Recently deploying SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Greenhill & Co. needed to be familiar with the software in order to drive Internet commerce and business process applications.
Solution: The Henson Group implemented a highly customized version of SPS 2003 to establish an enterprise business solution that integrates information from its various systems into one solution that also offers single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities, as well as flexible deployment options and management tools.
Results & Benefits: THG exceeded Greenhill & Co.’s expectations for this deployment, designing and deploying a custom portal based on Microsoft SharePoint technology that delivered the robust functionality the incumbent intranet lacked.
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Client: MedPointe Pharmaceuticals
Industry: Healthcare
Customer Profile: MedPointe is a specialty pharmaceutical company that develops, markets, and sells branded prescription therapeutics.
Business Situation: MedPointe wanted to leverage its SPS portal to serve as a Contact Management Application. MedPointe previously relied on an unreliable series of disparate spreadsheets to manage its contact data.
Solution: While SharePoint Web Parts “out-of-the-box” can provide a wealth of features, to achieve the level of functionality MedPointe sought — drawing data from a SQL Server 2000 database to feed a dynamic Contact Management Application that is fully integrated with an SPS portal – MedPointe required application development experts experienced at leveraging the .NET Framework that SPS enables.
Results & Benefits: The custom Contact Management Web Part that The Henson Group developed for MedPointe makes overall management of vital contact information from a single location seamless, effective, and efficient.
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MICROSOFT SMALL BUSINESS SERVER
Client: Ross Search
Industry: Executive Recruitment
Customer Profile: Ross & Company, Inc. (also know as Ross Search) is a leading executive recruiting firm, specializing in general management searches and related services on behalf of prominent venture capital and private equity funds with investments in the healthcare, information technology and electronic commerce industries.
Business Situation: Ross IT professionals were struggling with an increasing number of IT issues, from absorbing a battery of viruses and worms to an inability to impede the flow of a steady avalanche of spam. This multitude of issues caused painful IT outages—increasing in frequency in recent months—that severely affected productivity.
Solution: Ross Search sought an enhanced version of the SMS 2000 product it was using to better meet its business needs and provided more comprehensive protection and functionality.
Results & Benefits: THG migrated Ross to Small Business Server 2003, while executing a comprehensive hardware refresh.
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MICROSOFT SQL SERVER
Client: Cynergy Data
Industry: Professional Services
Customer Profile: Founded in 1995 by entrepreneurs John Martillo and Marcelo Paladini, Cynergy Data provides electronic credit, debit, and check transaction processing and related services to such customers as retailers, restaurants, e-businesses, and catalog firms.
Business Situation: With two offices in New York, Cynergy Data currently processes more than $1.6 billion annually, in credit, debit, check conversion and numerous other forms of electronic payment transactions. Considering the nature of its business, Cynergy Data obviously places a premium on effective data management technology. Cynergy Data approached The Henson group began exploring with THG the benefits of investing in a comprehensive, two-way, real-time replication of an SQL 2000 database running a custom-banking application.
Solution: The Henson Group met expectations for achieving the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Replication that client Cynergy Data required to make it much easier to copy, distribute, and potentially modify data across the entire enterprise.
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Client: Ernst & Young
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: Ernst & Young is also one of the world's largest accounting firms (third in revenue of the Big Four behind PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) with some 700 offices in 140 countries, offering auditing and accounting services.
Business Situation: Ernst & Young (“E&Y”) provides corporate partners with an enormous amount of financial industry information via its EYOnline.com web site. When E&Y was in the process of replacing servers and updating its Windows system, Microsoft recommended the use the .NET platform to deliver more benefits to E&Y’s clientele than would its existing Java platform. E&Y made the project a primary focus of IT operations, hiring more than 30 developers—mostly independent contractors—to implement a .NET-based system. As THG had worked successfully on other comparable projects leveraging the .NET platform, Microsoft recommended THG to the client, which interviewed the developers on its own, and ultimately hired THG.
Solution: E&Y needed one external domain into which all of its users could log on and access information. Part of Microsoft’s rationale for developing .NET was to build a framework allowing for easier Web site construction and usability. The platform has its own coding language, C#, which allows programmers to complete their work in fewer lines of code than in a non-.NET platform. The framework also disposes of unnecessary lines of code on its own, rather than requiring programmers to nullify code themselves. .NET is also very easy to update once installed.
Results & Benefits: The Microsoft.NET platform and the use of the Microsoft SQL Server to create email alerts now makes E&Y’s internal Web site the focal point for information about the firm and the various industries it represents for its global clients. Availability of information is the core functionality of the firm’s internal Web site, as with any company Web site that provides its users subscription-based access to information pertinent to a particular industry or account.
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Client: Ladas & Parry
Industry: Intellectual Law
Customer Profile: Ladas & Parry LLP is a major U.S. law firm primarily engaged in the practice of intellectual property law. With more than 80 attorneys and intellectual property professionals in five offices (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London and Munich), Ladas is frequently engaged to handle substantial legal projects while providing expertise in many highly specialized and sophisticated areas.
Business Situation: Ladas was in the midst of a major, two-year technology migration initiative revolving around replacing its antiquated mainframe-based database technology with Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Previously, Ladas’ IT reporting functions were manually based and therefore inefficient. Additionally, especially challenging was the manual process of creating custom reports when necessary. Inevitably, the limitations with manual processing meant that IT reporting simply never reached the level of functionality Ladas’ IT professionals would have preferred.
Results & Benefits: Within four weeks, THG designed and deployed a custom solution based on SQL Reporting Services that automated the creation and delivery of a sophisticated series of reports.
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Client: Lifetime Television
Industry: Media (Cable Network)
Customer Profile: Lifetime TV is the leader in women's television and one of the top-rated basic cable television networks.
Business Situation: In early 2004, Lifetime launched a major technology migration initiative involving replacing its antiquated mainframe-based database technology with Microsoft SQL Server 2000. But, despite the migration, much of Lifetime’s IT reporting processes were still manual-based and therefore inefficient. Additionally, especially challenging was the manual process of creating custom reports when necessary. Inevitably, the limitations with such manual processing meant that IT reporting simply never reached the level of functionality Lifetime’s IT professionals would have preferred.
Solution: Deployed a solution based on Microsoft SQL Reporting Services designed to significantly improve IT reporting for Lifetime Television’s New Media division—the internal unit managing the network Web site, www.LifetimeTV.com.
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MICROSOFT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SERVER (SMS)
Client: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: A top trade organization serving more than 340,000 Certified Public Accountants spread throughout the U.S.
Business Situation: AICPA approached THG to architect a custom solution that would not only automate the deployment of software and track hardware and software inventories, but seamlessly deploy security patches protecting its systems from the latest viruses, worms, and other malicious programs.
Solution: To meet the dual challenges of automating AICPA’s software distribution activities and increasing the trade group’s IT security, THG’s engineers designed a custom version of Microsoft’s Systems Management Server 2003 (SMS) integrated with the Software Update Services Feature Pack.
Results & Benefits: The automated process of software deployment reduced AICPA’s software installation process by approximately 87 days per administrator, resulting in a cost savings of $200,000 annually. And, automated security patch management will save the organization an average of 23.75 deployment days every year, which translates into a 75% reduction.
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Client: Purdue Pharmaceuticals
Industry: Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals
Customer Profile: Headquartered in Stamford, CT, Purdue is engaged in the research, development, production, and distribution of both prescription and over-the-counter medicines and hospital products.
Business Situation: Recent massive downsizing prompted Purdue to consider re-architecting its SMS 2003 solution, including implementing new features bundled into Service Pack 2. However, even without the reductions in IT staff, to fully leverage the latest SMS 2003 enhancements, Microsoft recommends seeking expert assistance to ensure the customer receives the optimum return on investment from the technology.
Solution: To meet the dual challenges of automating software distribution and increasing IT security, THG designed custom versions of SMS 2003 and SUS that were deployed to Ryan Beck’s network of 1,500 PCs, most running Windows 2000 Professional, though there were a number of Windows XP boxes.
Results & Benefits: The Henson Group worked alongside the Purdue Windows Engineering Team on refining an SMS 2003 solution that would eventually affect approximately 1,500 employees — down from the 2,100 total number of employees that were at Purdue before the downsizing.
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Client: Ryan Beck & Company
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: Ryan Beck is a full-service investment banking and brokerage firm servicing clients from 34 offices spread across 13 states.
Business Situation: Using several dozen servers linked to 1,500 client PCs, Ryan Beck’s infrastructure was functional, though distributing software updates has become increasingly expensive and time consuming—especially in light of the firm’s dramatic growth during the past decade.
Solution: To meet the dual challenges of automating software distribution and increasing IT security, THG designed custom versions of SMS 2003 and SUS that were deployed to Ryan Beck’s network of 1,500 PCs, most running Windows 2000 Professional, though there were a number of Windows XP boxes.
Results & Benefits: Ryan Beck reported that the automated process of software deployment reduced the software installation process by approximately 87 days per administrator, resulting in a cost savings that can be measured in the thousands of dollars annually. And, Ryan Beck now has automated security patch management, which reduces the deployment of patches to thousands of computers from four days per month down to a single day.
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Client: The Dress Barn, Inc.
Industry: Specialty Retailer
Customer Profile: Based in Suffern, NY, Dress Barn is one of the nation's leading women's specialty retailers offering quality career and casual fashion apparel at value prices, operating 792 stores in 45 states.
Business Situation: As a publicly traded company, Dress Barn is obviously sensitive to the perceptions of investors, regulators, and analysts and takes even nominal threats very seriously. Therefore, when it commissioned an IT security assessment and subsequently learned of the potential for security breaches in its IT infrastructure, it immediately set about exploring remedies.
Solution: THG designed a single-site deployment of SMS 2003 to accommodate 500 desktops.
Results & Benefits: THG’s solution achieved the functionality Dress Barn required, providing a centralized resource for patch management and distribution. This solution now enables Dress Barn to identify and distribute relevant patches across a variety of platforms and ensure the security and regulatory compliance of its environment.
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MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO .NET
Client: Charming Shoppes, Inc.
Industry: Women’s Retail
Customer Profile: Charming Shoppes is a leading specialty apparel retailer primarily focused on plus-size women’s apparel through three distinct brands: Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and Catherines Plus Sizes.
Business Situation: Charming Shoppes has e-commerce applications that consist of three main external web sites that support the online operations of each of its clothing brands. These three e-commerce applications were based on incumbent code that met the initial demands of the business, but inevitably presented significant shortcomings as the company grew.
Solution: To resolve the issues this company was experiencing with the legacy code its e-commerce applications were based upon, THG designed a tiered solution for the using .NET (VB.NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET).
Results & Benefits: The Henson Group achieved all of Charming Shoppes’ objectives for enhancing the functionality of its three e-commerce applications through a major code migration initiative.
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Client: Charming Shoppes, Inc.
Industry: Women’s Retail
Customer Profile: Charming Shoppes is a leading multi-channel specialty apparel retailer primarily focused on plus-size women's apparel. Charming is the parent company of three distinct retail store brands—Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug and Catherines Plus Sizes—and Crosstown Traders, Inc., a direct marketer of women's apparel.
Business Situation: Charming engaged The Henson Group, Inc. (“THG”) to analyze its e-commerce environment—which is comprised of ASP, Visual Basic, and SQL technologies—to identify areas of substantial performance degradation and propose viable resolutions.
Solution: For this engagement, The Henson Group leveraged the concept of reverse engineering, carefully analyzed the major components that comprise Charming’s e-commerce infrastructure, which includes an assortment of applications.
Results & Benefits: In conclusion, based on the observations of THG Principal Consultant James Casas and Architectural Consultant Greg Henson, as well as the input from a variety of knowledgeable internal and Microsoft sources, The Henson Group strongly recommended Charming rebuild its e-commerce site using Windows 2003, IIS 6, and .NET.
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Client: Ernst & Young
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: Ernst & Young is one of the five largest accounting firms in the U.S., with more than 103,000 employees in 670 locations in 140 countries globally. The firm’s total revenue was $1.3 billion in 2003.
Business Situation: E&Y’s corporate network, accessed through EYOnline.com, had too many external domains for its global users and required a way to consolidate those external domains into one internal domain housed in Lyndhurst, N.J., where the company’s Web site also resides. Without this synchronization, the company had no effective way to guarantee that users outside the system were receiving their information in due time.
Solution: .NET provided a way to synchronize E&Y’s external domains with its internal one, by consolidating all domains into a single internal one. The system allows for clients to receive email alerts on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis, depending on their needs, about the financial services provided by E&Y.
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Client: GoldenTree Asset Management, LP
Industry: Investment Advisor
Customer Profile: GoldenTree Asset Management is a major New York City-based investment firm with approximately $7 billion in assets under management.
Business Situation: GoldenTree needed to automate the manual processes involved with trading activities conducted by its employees that are beyond the scope of the services it provides to its clients.
Solution: The Henson Group set about building an intranet ASP.NET application that works with Active Directory and SQL Server and GoldenTree’s email system.
Results & Benefits: THG’s solution eliminated the manual processing of the PTF, thereby dropping turnaround times from one day to a matter of minutes. Trades will no longer be executed without prior approval. The solution also enforces the redundancy of the notification process to compliance by eliminating a single form and replacing it with emails available to multiple compliance users simultaneously. And, the solution reduces the total time for manually tracking these forms from five hours per week to a few hours per month.
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Client: Ladas & Parry
Industry: Intellectual Law
Customer Profile: Ladas & Parry LLP is a major U.S. law firm primarily engaged in the practice of intellectual property law. With more than 80 attorneys and intellectual property professionals in five offices (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London and Munich), Ladas is frequently engaged to handle substantial legal projects.
Business Situation: To deliver comprehensive and often proprietary intelligence to clients, Ladas relies on an internally developed reporting application, known as TrademarkWatch. Written in VB6, TrademarkWatch pulls data from the databases and delivers the reports in an email format. Recently, several major clients requested Ladas change the email reporting format to deliver information in an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) transmission.
Solution: Specializing in providing Managed Code to Managed Code migrations, THG proposed re-coding the VB6-based client reporting application to deliver the XML feature. This would enable Ladas to achieve its XML goal, not require the firm to commit to a larger migration than it was prepared for, and give it a first-hand view of the power of .NET.
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Client: MedPointe Pharmaceuticals
Industry: Pharmaceuticals
Customer Profile: MedPointe is a specialty pharmaceutical company that develops, markets, and sells branded prescription therapeutics. Headquartered in Somerset, NJ, the heart of the nation's pharmaceutical corridor, MedPointe boasts a 360-territory sales and marketing force providing a knowledgeable and trusted link to physicians and healthcare providers across America.
Business Situation: Today, SharePoint Portal Server serves MedPointe primarily as a document-centric portal product that can aggregate content from multiple sources — such as file servers, databases, public folders, Internet sites — and present it through a single access point. It addresses the immediate need of knowledge management and information retrieval capabilities within the Microsoft Windows and Office environments. With the initial installation complete, MedPointe expressed interest in leveraging SPS to serve as a Contact Management Application. Up until that point, MedPointe relied on a series of disparate spreadsheets to manage its contact data. As MedPointe grew, this spreadsheet-based system became very difficult to maintain with any level of consistency, simply because of the inherent limitations of spreadsheets that are saved on a variety of network shares.
Solution: The Henson Group leveraged SPS’s Portal Framework, consisting of Web Parts and reusable components containing Web-based information that can be customized and extended through the Web Parts and the Resource Kit, which includes a Web Parts Gallery (though THG opted to create a new and unique Web Part). The Henson Group built a custom Web Part to serve as a Contact Management Application, storing a broad range of information, such as customer names, medication details, prescription histories, relevant notes on contacts, phones numbers, addresses, and more.
Results & Benefits: The custom Contact Management Web Part that The Henson Group developed for MedPointe makes overall management of vital contact information from a single location seamless, effective, and efficient. For the individual, the Web Part can automatically display contact information relevant for performing their tasks, speeding up the time to located, utilize, and edit information. For the enterprise, the application is much more manageable, stable, and secure than the previous spreadsheet-based solution.
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Client: Yellow Book USA
Industry: Retail/Consumer
Customer Profile: Established in 1930, Yellow Book USA is the oldest and largest independent yellow pages publisher in the nation.
Business Situation: To help validate a decision for an acquisition, Yellow Book engaged The Henson Group to provide an audit and evaluation of Click Forward's technical operations and applications to identify areas of concern and, if applicable, to propose viable recommendations for improvement.
Solution: In this instance, The Henson Group leveraged its specific experience and understanding of reverse engineering techniques to carefully analyze the major components that comprise Click Forward’s infrastructure and application architecture, which includes an assortment of applications.
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MICROSOFT WINDOWS SERVER
Client: Grey Global
Industry: Advertising/Media
Customer Profile: Formerly known as Grey Advertising, Grey Global Group Inc. is a full-service advertising and marketing services firm that ranks among the largest global communications companies in the world, with operations in almost 90 countries.
Business Situation: Grey Global required expert-level assistance to accomplish a Windows NT to Windows Server 2003 upgrade that would include an Active Directory/Exchange 2003 implementation.
Results & Benefits: THG’s deployment strategy exceeded Grey Global Group’s expectation. Meeting the client’s aggressive and abbreviate timeline for implementation, THG completed the migration plan, the on-site testing, and the knowledge transfer documentation within four weeks. Subsequently, Grey Global Group’s IT organization was able to take these deliverables and execute a seamless migration that achieved all objectives.
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Client: Lehman Brothers
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile: Lehman Brothers, an innovator in global finance, serves the financial needs of corporations, governments and municipalities, institutional clients, and high net worth individuals worldwide. Founded in 1850, Lehman Brothers maintains leadership positions in equity and fixed income sales, trading and research, investment banking, private investment management, asset management and private equity. The Firm is headquartered in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Tokyo, and operates in a network of offices around the world.
Business Situation: Lehman Brothers needed a computing platform that offered enhanced security, easy and reliable software distribution, and improved performance for applications and boot time on computers within Lehman Brothers’ environment.
Solution: THG architected the server migration from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000. This included the architecture of Active Directory service infrastructure, integrated security, and virtual private networking (VPN) capabilities in Windows 2000 Server.
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WINDOWS SHAREPOINT SERVICES
Client: iN DEMAND Networks
Industry: Entertainment
Customer Profile: iN DEMAND is a leading provider of video-on-demand (VOD), pay-per-view (PPV), and HDTV programming. It offers first-run movies, professional sporting events, concerts, and other content through some affiliated cable television systems across the US.
Business Situation: iN DEMAND already had several collaboration portals installed based on Microsoft SharePoint Team Services 2001 (STS) and sought an upgrade to the latest flavor of the product, WSS 2.0. A customized migration to WSS 2.0 would provide iN Demand with the best available technology to effectively aggregate information across file servers, databases, public folders, and Internet sites, while requiring minimal IT support.
Solution: Having performed numerous WSS 2.0 deployments, The Henson Group provided iN DEMAND with expert migration assistance based on unique insight on the technology and its many nuances, usually known only by Microsoft veterans.
Results & Benefits: The Henson Group provided an upgrade to Microsoft WSS 2.0 that delivered to iN DEMAND an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that its professionals can take advantage of relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently.
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Client: Tishman Speyer
Industry: Real Estate
Customer Profile: Tishman Speyer is one of the leading owners, developers, and operators of first class real estate in the world. Since its founding in 1978, the company has acquired or developed a portfolio of more than 76 million square feet, valued at more than $20 billion.
Business Situation: Considering the scope and scale of its business in the high-end real estate sector, Tishman Speyer has always had need of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.
Solution: The Henson Group provided expert configuration and custom Web Part development services to assist Tishman Speyer in leverage Windows SharePoint Services as a replacement for Documentum’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology.
Results & Benefits: The Henson Group exceeded Tishman Speyer’s expectations, providing all of the custom configurations required.
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