News
UKN Group provides systems and support to Yell Group volunteers during Sports Relief.
March 31, 2010
UKN, the technology and services company in Basingstoke, was on hand to provide behind the scenes support at Yell’s head office, for its people who volunteered to man the phones in aid of Sports Relief.
Each year Yell transforms an entire floor of its outbound call centre in Reading into a donations hotline for the action packed, televised show. This year’s event, held on Friday 19th March, saw nearly 100 Yell volunteers, including friends and family, descend on the company’s call centre, where they would work well into the night collecting all-important telephone contributions.
Employees from UKN Group were also on hand to lend technical support for a “one night only” system they had volunteered to design and create in support of Yell’s efforts.
Previously the technical team at Yell had quite a task customising its computer infrastructure so volunteers could operate unhindered, while the sensitive day-to-day business systems were protected from unauthorised access.
The company takes data security very seriously and thanks to recent investment in a server based computing solution from UKN Group, it was able to address the challenge in a unique and effective way.
Key to the new system are the ultra thin desktop terminals; these heavily stripped down devices carry no user data or locally installed software, allowing many of the usual desktop components to reside in the company’s data centre.
Playing its part, UKN Group donated time and resource to customise the recently acquired systems. They created an isolated environment within the normal estate that had no access to any corporate data or business applications. Volunteers would have access to a terminal that automatically defaulted to a secure webpage, set up by Sports Relief specifically for the purpose of recording donations. With no log in credentials required and no access to other web sites, Yell was confident that the system had exactly the right level of functionality and security.
In previous years, setting up guest access within the normal desktop PC estate was a time consuming process. This year, UKN was able to build, configure and deploy the solution for Yell in a fraction of the time.
Yell has been piloting the new server based solution since December 2009 and is well on the way to a full rollout later this year for users in its new flagship head office in Reading. UKN has a long standing relationship with the international directories company and was very pleased to have the opportunity to work with Yell in support of the Sports Relief event.
