The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry will next month begin rolling out a major infrastructure upgrade based on a Microsoft platform to replace its existing Novell systems.
“We trialled five pilot sites in December,” says ministry spokesman Brett Sangster. “We’re upgrading our email client from Groupwise to Outlook.”
The nature of its business means MAF has many remote workers and multiple sites throughout New Zealand. The ministry has chosen a range of vendors for its group of projects in the infrastructure refresh.
Intergen, Synergy and CGNZ have been selected for a number of application development projects that will be based on a .Net framework. Unisys will undertake the desktop deployment for what is termed Project Outlook, while hardware will be provided by Dell, the Laptop Company and Logical CSI, which will also provide network services and supporting infrastructure. Storage will be provided by Revera.
MAF has also issued a Request for Information for an HR information system. It has selected five, at this stage un-named, suppliers to go to RFP.
The ministry also has on its books the Sentry Project for Quarantine Services. The plan is that this will track data from in-bound cargo and link to Customs’ Cusmod system. The roll-out and hardware refresh will continue through to June.