Background
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was seeking subject matter expertise to support NOC Systems Engineering in two specific areas:
- Enterprise-Level COTS Software Support: Governing and administering the NOC’s current SharePoint 2010 site collection; helping with Remedy deployment and troubleshooting; and deploying and supporting WhatsUp Gold and other potential COTS products in the future (This could include any work related to the NOC’s SharePoint site hosting and possible migration to new hosting platforms or versions.)
- Solutions Architect Support: Facilitating changes in the way applications are hosted at the NOC, including advice and planning for migration to new hardware and exploring potential cloud hosting opportunities
Challenge
The SharePoint and WhatsUpGold deployment projects involved working with a wide range of management and technical personnel from across the BLM. The technical experience and interpersonal skills of NexGen employees helped them gain the trust of the administrators in the States and Centers and eased the centralization of the support for these systems.
Solution
NexGen provided subject matter expert support for BLM enterprise COTS applications, inlcuding design, deployment, and administration of the on-premises SharePoint farm and the WhatsUpGold application monitoring system.
Our project team assisted the customer with troubleshooting and resolving several functional and configuration-related issues in the BLM production SharePoint farm, which had been causing problems for several years. Detailed farm documentation was generated and maintained going forward, which prevented these issues from reoccurring. Comprehensive system monitoring was also implemented to provide IRM management and staff with real-time and historic performance statistics and metrics for availability and system status.
NexGen provided design and engineering support for the consolidation of the BLM legacy SharePoint environments, and the deployment of a new SharePoint 2013 farm to which all of the existing sites and content will be migrated.
NexGen spearheaded the deployment and implementation of the WhatsUpGold enterprise monitoring system to provide real-time and historic performance statistics and metrics for availability and system status for National Applications hosted in the Denver Federal Center Data Center.
Outcome
The customer was pleased with NexGen’s performance on this project and is planning to renew the ESS project for another year. The long tenure and consist presence of high-level technical resources at BLM allowed NexGen to consistently exceed the customer’s expectations by being able to draw upon a wide range of expertise and institutional knowledge when responding to their needs. This helped us develop trusted and valued relationships with our customer.
During the most recent performant period, the BLM Contracting Officer noted these comments about the NexGen team:
- Provided personnel with a high level of expertise to meet the requirements
- Met contract requirements schedule; responses were always received in a timely manner
- Performed management tasks in a professional manner
- Demonstrated a high degree of technical skills
- Excelled in communications, keeping BLM well informed
- Very dedicated to ensuring customer satisfaction