Case Studies 

Over the past 50 years Needham & James has become well established as one of the most respected and progressive legal practices in the Midlands. With a strong commercial client base and a range of legal services in fields such as commercial property, banking and company law. A move to new premises in Stratford has provided a flagship building that reflects a growing prominence in a number of key business areas and also ensures state of the art IT and communications facilities needed to optimise client service. With ambitious expansion plans for further growth; including new premises at Birming-ham, the future looks bright. Connect Network Systems were contracted to install 650 Category 6UTP connections across 4 floors of the new purpose-built offices, with multimode fibre linking each floor and the communications room.

Port of Felixstowe (PFL) is the largest container port in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe. PFL is a member of the Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH) Group. HPH is the world’s leading port investor, developer and operator, with interests in 21 countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Today, HPH operates a total of 251 berths in 43 ports, together with a number of transportation-related service companies. With industry-recognised core competence in the effective and efficient management and operation of ports, HPH Group handled 51.8 million TEU in 2005.

The new Learning Resource Centre is designed to meet the ‘self’ and ‘small group’ study requirements of tomorrow’s students. The first and second floors will provide library and ICT facilities, together with all the resources ex-pected of a Learning Resource Centre. There will be 400 workstations in a variety of areas, providing large work spaces and smaller, bookable rooms. The ground floor will house the Careers Library and advisers and, initially, 7 teaching rooms. However, the design of this floor will permit future phased ex-pansion downwards of the Learning Resource function on floors 1 and 2.

Derrick Ramsay Project Manager for JGT... “When Britannia decided that a complete upgrade was needed, we knew this would be a major challenge. The call centre is the core of the operation so it was not an option to close the centre. The work would have to be planned around a fully operational office, with night shifts, four days a week. In addition, the building is old and certainly not designed for networking. We proposed Connectix Cabling System for two major reasons; the ability to colour code the whole system and use of the integrated cable management which reduced the space required in the cabinet. This was linked through to the six way floor boxes at each work area.”

New College Durham is a college of further and higher educa-tion in County Durham, England . It was founded in 1977 as a result of a merger between Neville’s Cross College of Education and Durham Technical College. The college operated on two main sites near the city of Durham: Neville’s Cross and Fram-wellgate Moor. In 2002, the college was given planning permission to build a new £35 million campus at Framwellgate Moor. The HE campus at Neville’s Cross closed and moved to Framwellgate Moor. Construction work began in 2003 with the new buildings being constructed around the old buildings. When the new buildings were completed, work began to demolish the old buildings. The first phase was opened and completed in September 2004 with the second phase opening in September 2005.

This state of the art building offers a new outlook on secondary education; with excellent sports facilities, up-to-date music facilities and equipment, a training kitchen and restaurant, easy access to computers, a well-equipped learning resource centre. All contained within a safe and secure environment. The Petchey Academy has structured cabling in every classroom, supporting the Wireless LANs (APs), AV (including all TVs and whiteboards). Security is taken very seriously and the IT cabling infrastructure also supports the door access control system (swipe cards).