A long standing client of Woodford Computers Ltd. Due to the size increase of this company and staff a move became vital from their existing offices in Tower Bridge to Great Queen Street, (The Flagstore).This was a listed building with bare brick work for the interior coupled with no structured cabling. INF are a company that develops software and the correct layout of the cabling was paramount. Woodford Computers was commissioned to assess the requirements while sympathising with the fact of the building being listed.Following the initial inspection, the standard white pvc trunking would not be appropriate and in keeping with the building. We suggested a galvanised steel metal trunking instead, which looked industrial and in keeping with the whole view of the premises. A budget was set and within the short timeframe of three weeks, the work was commissioned and the plans were made for the move and the relocation took place. INF has a standard small business server 2008 and a VoIP server which handles all the incoming and outbound calls. The relocation of both needed to take place over a weekend keeping the disruption to the company to a minimum. All standard telephone lines had to be moved along with internet connections and we had to coordinate the move on the day so that this ran smoothly making sure voice services and email were not interrupted. The job began two days prior to the move with our cable installation team visiting the new premises and installing 38 new sockets in the galvanised steel trunking and to connect up the patch panel. On the Saturday, the first day of the move, the engineers began to dismantle the old network from the existing premises, taking all storage and server equipment. The client also had an unusual server cabinet (an acoustic cabinet) specially designed to reduce the ambient noise. This however made the cabinet extremely heavy and difficult to move.By Saturday pm every piece of equipment had been relocated and the reconnection commenced.At the end of that first day the server equipment was back in the cabinet, tested and the systems were up and running seamlessly. The relocation was complete. Monday morning saw the arrival of BT who successfully installed the telephone lines and the broadband connections for Data, Email and the VoIP telephone system.By Monday pm the job had been fully completed within the budget and the time frame. If you would like to find out more information about this client and their relocation package, please contact us.
NTC Consulting is a specialist recruitment company with 4 offices based in the UK and Europe. The company has always wanted to operate with a ‘lean’ back office, they didn’t want the administrative burden and cost of having each of their sites linked together through the traditional approach of VPN connections and a server at each site. The answer was to use a dedicated virtual server located centrally at out data centre based in London. This approach allowed each of the companies’ offices to connect directly to the data centre and access all of their programs and data over a secure connection.
The first part of the process was to build a Windows Terminal Server, we use the 2008 R2 64Bit version. This was created with sufficient RAM, hard disk and CPU to allow initially 10 concurrent connections. The companies email was going to be delivered through our Hosted Exchange 2010 system. The users can access their email in a number of different ways which included a full Outlook 2010 desktop application within their hosted terminal server session, a local copy of Outlook on their laptop, Blackberry access (both BIS and BES) and via iPhones. They can also access their email via a website if they need to. Remember that this is one single mailbox that each user has access from many devices and regardless of how or where they use it the mailbox will always be in sync.
The next requirement is for Microsoft Office as they use Word and Excel heavily. These programs were installed to the Terminal server and available for all users to use. We also installed some basic utility programs like PDF, Zip, Silverlight and various others to allow the users a good experience with the system.
Once the Terminal server was built, configured and tested we moved on to preparing a Windows Server with SQL 2008 Standard Edition R2. This server was to run the companies accounting system, this particular client has a turnover in excess of £30 million so their accounting software is absolutely pivotal to the business, they cannot afford to be without it. Once we had prepared the basic server and SQL we worked closely with their accounting software provider to ensure that the application was installed correctly and worked according to their requirements. Once this was achieved we linked the user desktops on the terminal server to the SQL server and were almost ready to go.
After a successful parallel run with the new system and the old system we have now made the switch and the new system is live. This project was delivered on time and within the budget agreed at the outset. The client now pays a fixed monthly fee per user for the use of the system, the Office applications, Hosted Exchange, data storage, data backup and disaster recovery options. Everything is included with no hidden extras or nasty surprises.
The system runs within our Citrix Xenserver environment and is fully redundant with no single point of failure.
For more information or to speak directly to this client for a reference please contact us.