The International HIV / Aids Alliance has utilised video conferencing, instant messaging, iPhones and iPads this year. Gareth Jones hears how the flight ban brought matters to a head.

The Alliance’s head office is in Brighton, but as a global charity, it needs easy communication between its secretariats and partners in Asia, Eastern Europe, South America and Africa. Sharing and commenting on documents via email was slowing productivity and the charity needed real-time software to allow it to develop.

Furthermore, approximately 20-30 per cent of employees in Brighton are away from the office at any one time, and much of this is due to travelling abroad. Air travel alone was costing the company up to $900,000 per year, with over half of this coming from unrestricted funds.

To compound this issue, the ash cloud that shut down much of Europe’s airspace for over a week in April affected 30 of the charity’s staff. A scheduled board meeting and finance and audit committee was due to take place, but trustees were stranded in the US, Australia, Singapore, Ukraine and India. The charity needed a contingency measure to allow the trustees to communicate and also share board paper.

The Alliance had previously tried to address these issues by installing a Polycom video conferencing system, purchased in January this year. However, the system used too much bandwidth for effective video communications to places like Bangkok and Africa. The Alliance had also installed Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), a real-time platform offering instant messaging, conferencing and multiparty voice and video calling.

However, some groups within the organisation were unable to use OCS as they were not part of the secretariat network. The Alliance needed a technology that anyone could use regardless of where they were and what PC they were using, and which incorporated instant messaging.

The need for speed

Following trials with several online conferencing solutions, the Alliance felt they were not delivering the speed and immediacy that it required. However, the charity had existing systems from Cisco and decided to see what they could offer.

“The crucial moment for us was when we realised our trustees were not going to be able to attend April’s board meeting due to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano,” says Paul Higgins, head of ICT at the Alliance.

“As Cisco has always been a very trusted supplier for us and we had heard very positive reviews of its WebEx Meeting Centre, we made a last minute decision to conduct the meeting using the software. Fortunately it was very successful, with a full complement of trustees sharing documents and exchanging comments.”

The charity’s training and e-learning expert also recommended using WebEx Training Center as a replacement for its old training solution. Subsequently, Cisco WebEx became the charity’s standard online conferencing facility.

Furthermore, the Alliance is now trialling WebEx Connect Instant Messenger, which fully replaced Microsoft’s OCS because it allowed all groups associated with the Alliance to easily download the instant message (IM) platform and start communicating immediately.