London Borough of Croydon moves remotely to hosted Land Charges

London Borough of Croydon has been an NPS Land Charges customer for over 25 years. When they were faced with spiralling costs for upgrading their servers to Windows 2012 and other outsourced ICT issues, they decided to join the NPS Land Charges hosted environment. They renewed a 3 year contract to join 21 other Local Land Charges customers all using this very proactive managed service.

They had planned to go live with the hosted server and latest version of Land Charges at the end of March but, due to the unexpected influx of remote working, they postponed by a week to prepare. Once everyone was settled and connections re-tested, they successfully went live on 7th April. Croydon managed to overcome the challenges of a remote migration, with relative ease and confidence.

Stuart Henderson-Smith, Croydon’s Local Land Charges/Address Management Team Manager, stated

“We were concerned that the added logistical problems brought about by Covid-19 would cause problems migrating, however it quickly became obvious that the hosted solution we were testing was the best option during this period. As with any project, there were a couple of issues to resolve, however, generally everything went smoothly and the support has been great.”

The migration includes new interfaces for address and planning data automatically being moved via SFTP and means that scheduled tasks now load automatically overnight. Nicola Peters, who manages the hosted Land Charges service, sees Croydon progressing beyond the initial benefits, commenting

“There are now plans to get Croydon using spatial data as well as implement other data interfaces to improve working practices overall”.

It is fantastic to see our customers adapting to the challenging environment we currently find ourselves in, and we are proud to have assisted their migration.