Overview
This building services company with more than 25 employees needed a complete upgrade. They were still running a Windows 2003 Small Business Server, and many of the workstations were Windows XP. We upgraded all their workstations and the server, and saved them money in year one, even with that cost, compared to their previous IT support.
Background
This business had grown from a husband and wife business based in a home office in their garden to a flourishing multi-million pound business employing more than twenty office staff and a dozen site workers. Their previous IT consultant had retired, and took part in choosing a successor company. They chose us.
They had installed a Windows 2003 Small Business Server a decade earlier and had been reluctant to undergo the disruption of upgrading it. There was significant discomfort with the idea of change within the company. However, their data use and email use had outgrown the storage capacity of the server, so their support had to continually archive data and clear disk space. This meant a significant IT support overhead, and an unsatisfactory system.
Initial work
1. We migrated the company’s email system into Google Apps, but retained Microsoft Outlook as the mail client for reading emails to minimise the amount of early change. We did individual user initiation into the new system, showing the web email and calendar clients and installing the native apps on mobile phones and tablets. Within a month, half the employees had moved to the web clients voluntarily.
2. We installed a Network Toaster to replace the Windows server, and changed from a domain based system to a workgroup, moving the DHCP server (for automatic network configuration) from the server to the Draytek router to remove a single point of failure. This simplified the network while introducing lots of extra file storage, so archived data could be brought back. In the process, we revised the file shares and permissions structure, adding extra levels of confidentiality for senior management while removing access to large areas of unnecessary file hierarchies from users who had no need for them.
3. We set up an automated backup process to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage and linked this into our control centre so we could monitor the backup success daily.
4. We upgraded 18 out of date workstations to new Windows 7 machines.
The total cost of all the above work was less than they had spent on IT support in the previous twelve months.
‘Thin client’ laptop re-use
The move to Google Apps let us follow Google’s very successful ‘Chromebook‘ approach of using laptops for access to business email, calendars and documents. But instead of buying new machines, we took retired, out of date laptops from the company’s upgrades – machines that are not powerful enough to run the latest versions of Windows – and installed the lightweight Linux distribution Cinnamon Mint. This powerful operating system is so familiar for Windows users that site staff needed no user training, yet runs quickly and securely on older hardware. Running Chrome on these machines, with wifi, and accessing Google Apps, was no different for the users than operating Windows laptops, except that with its familiar ‘start’ button, many found it easier to use than Windows 8.
Development
We then looked at how we could:
– streamline their business processes with automation
– fit software and systems to the way they want to work, rather than have them adapt to the products they bought
Two initial projects emerged from this.
The first was to use some simple Google Apps scripting to automate the process of collating and distributing project folders for bids and development, as well as automatically maintaining document manifests, version and revision numbers and updates within the company and to partners outside when revisions took place. This labour-intensive work, prone to human error, was so time-consuming it had taken up several person-months a year.
The second was to develop a system for managing purchasing and comparing it to budgets, as well as permitting project analysis and project manager performance. This included integrating a leading database of building material suppliers, products and prices into the system.
Helping others
The company then donated decommissioned computers to our appeal for computers for schools.
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