BBC Technology

Kerry Cousins and his team at BBC Technology know the importance of having powerful and effective software solutions in big business. That's why he chose ISYS:desktop to manage the BBC's software documentation.

The BBC is well known as one of the UK's biggest television and radio broadcasters. What you may not know is that the BBC has separate divisions and companies that provide services from media management to costume design. BBC Technology is one such organization, designing, building and operating technological solutions for media business.

The number and variety of software applications used by an organization the size of the BBC is enormous. Cousins' integration team is responsible for deploying and maintaining software for the BBC businesses across a network. The team manages the licensing and installation of thousands of software packages centrally, so they can monitor usage across the organization and ensure that licenses are allocated in the most efficient way.

To support this process, Cousins' group has a huge store of documentation including software manuals, Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documents and their own reports and technical notes on previous installations. ISYS:desktop enables them to quickly locate relevant documentation whenever it is required.

Previously, Cousins and his team kept documentation on a file server in a directory structure designed to assist users to browse for the information they needed. As the collection of information grew, the directory structure itself was no longer adequate to actually help users.

Now that ISYS:desktop is installed, Cousins' team can search thousands of files and find information in an instant, without knowing where that information sits on the file server. "ISYS helps us find things that we never even knew were there," says Cousins. "Before, we could only find what we knew to look for. Now we're finding things we never even knew we had". Another benefit of ISYS is that it quickly helps the team to identify the information they don't have. "ISYS saves time because not only can we find things immediately, we also know when we don't have something, and it saves us from wasting time looking for something that's not there," he said.

Cousins estimates that each search with ISYS:desktop saves about 10 minutes of browsing through the data on the file server. He uses ISYS about 10 times every day, which adds up to more than 11 hours each week!

In the centrally-managed environment at the BBC software programs must follow best practice in terms of installation. "ISYS is very neat," he says. "It's well written, orderly, installs nicely and doesn't take up lots of room."