British athletes get Olympic technology boost

The British Olympic Association (BOA) has upgraded its infrastructure ahead of the London Olympics in 2012 to improve communication services for British athletes.

The BOA, which has responsibility for the Great Britain and Northern Ireland team, replaced a Novell Netware local area network with a Microsoft server infrastructure, managed by Active Directory.

The new infrastructure deployed by Lynx Technology has been rolled out to all the BOA’s training centres. Employees and athletes can connect to the network using fully-supported mobile technology, whether from the BOA’s training camp in Austria or the UK medical centre.

The BOA’s IT manager, Phil Bolton says the previous Novell system was difficult to manage and inflexible for the organisation’s employees, many of whom work in remote places.

‘We weren’t able to take advantage of modern messaging techniques including emails through web access. We lacked a mobility solution,’ said Bolton.

The BOA has 50 employees, but its numbers will swell as more people are needed to manage athletes and spectators for the London Olympics in 2012.

‘We are expecting numbers to reach 80 for the Olympics and we will be able to support them efficiently,’ said Bolton.

The new system supports synchronised email messaging and personal information management services on mobile devices.

‘With employees travelling to and staying in other countries, we needed to deploy a mobile infrastructure to support anytime, anywhere communications,’ said Bolton.

‘It has delivered a lot of benefits - it is much easier in terms of administration across the sites as they are now connected to the same network. Instant messaging means that users are able to hook into the BOA network and pick up emails on smart phones and PDAs and always stay in touch,’ he said.

Bolton says that in the future the BOA will consider using Windows SharePoint collaboration software.

‘It will create a portal for people to easily share files easily with our Olympic partners,’ he said.

What do you think? Email us at feedback@computing.co.uk

Further reading:

London Olympics announces IT supplier shortlist

Olympic planning system on the starting blocks