Case Study: How a ConvergeOne Solution Helped The Nebraska Masonic Home Maximize Its Network

Customer Situation

For The Nebraska Masonic Home (NMH), updating its network did not produce the hoped-for results — that is, not until the organization got help from the ConvergeOne companies NACR and S1 IT Solutions.

The Home, located in Plattsmouth, NE, is a retirement community that offers independent and assisted living as well as multiple levels of nursing and specialized Alzheimer’s/dementia care services. When NMH staff began experiencing a lot of frustration with desktop failures and email-borne viruses soon after purchasing a new server and new PCs, the organization turned to the team of NACR and S1 to resolve the issues and improve network and communications performance.

ConvergeOne Solution

Working in collaboration, NACR and S1 IT Solutions set out to stabilize NMH’s local area network (LAN) and desktop environments — all while offering a unified source for services and support, with one person to call for every need.

In addition to providing Block of Hours support to immediately address performance issues as they arose, the team deployed engineers to the NMH site for a week-long, complete assessment of the organization’s current infrastructure — inventorying and documenting everything from the network connections and server down to every desktop and user device.

Right away, the team discovered that the server, purchased by NMH only eight months earlier, was at 99% of capacity, resulting in extremely slow processing speeds. So, the first order of business was to boost server memory from 4 GB to 12 GB, to better support all the hosted applications.

To address the virus issues and tighten network security, the team installed and programmed a new Juniper SSG-20 Gateway, integrating it with the facility’s server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2008. The team migrated the email system from an outsourced ISP to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and ensured that the NMH domain name was properly registered.

The team successfully brought NMH’s resident care plan software in-house, installing it on the network server to deliver better performance and accessibility; they also showed NMH staff how to correctly manage and back up the system. Additionally, the team migrated NMH’s accounting application from a desktop application to the server to allow access for multiple users simultaneously.

“The service we have received from NACR and S1 has been outstanding,” according to Jessica Nolte, Controller at NMH. “It is wonderful to be treated the same as a large organization even though we have fewer computer users.”

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