"Phenomenal" is a word that Kirsten Leemans, HP`s project manager for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, uses a lot now that most of the delegates have gone home and the summit has widely been declared an organisational success.
He must now wait for National Intelligence Agency (NIA) agents to declare the thousands of PCs, servers, laptops and handhelds clean enough for redistribution. This he expects to do sometime next week.
HP`s involvement in the summit came very late in the day and even at the time it was widely acknowledged that the time lines would be a major challenge.
"The biggest challenge by far was the time constraints. This and the scope of the United Nations requirements which required a lot of rapid changes on the ground."
Looking back, though, Leemans is more than pleased with what was achieved in the time allotted to the task. "Hardware failure was almost non-existent ... and most of the support needed was around bringing in new machines, and minor problems." The support call centre set up at the Johannesburg World Summit Company`s offices was equally quiet, he says.
Regarding security concerns, Leemans says the system was well protected. "The V-Lans were crucial to this success" because they ensured that each category of delegate only had access to what they were allowed. He also attributes the low security profile to the port security system used, which ensured that no one was able to walk up to a network port and plug in an unauthorised machine.
There were the first-level issues such as viruses, but Leemans says that by installing anti-virus software on both the desktops and on servers the system was more than adequately protected.
And now that the summit is over, the process of collecting the hardware is well under way. "My task now is to ensure that all the hardware is collected and accounted for. Obviously we expect some shrinkage but looking at initial figures, the loss should be a lot less than even half a percent," says Leemans.
Once the hardware is collected, it has to be formatted and cleaned to ensure that none of the sensitive data on the machines remain. Once this is done, NIA agents will be required to certify the machines are clean before being redistributed.
"I am very relieved it is all over," says Leemans. In the run-up to the event there was "much stress", because there was such a "potential for a great win, but also for a failure".
"It was a phenomenal success," he says.
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