Recent
Updates.
Jul 2010 - hart-fenton.com Website now live!
Apr 2010 - gaoh-offshore.com Website now live!
Feb 2010 - Agreed to Host Houlder
subsidiary websites: hart-fenton.com &
gaoh-offshore.com.
Sep 2009 - NEW Houlder website launched on
our High Quality Hosting.
May 2009 - We are developing the new
Houlder website and will be Hosting it on our
High Quality Hosting.
Contract
Period: 5 Months. 2006-7.
Houlder invited us to look at their systems as they had
recently parted company with the IT Director and wanted an
outside opinion on their setup and how to upgrade and bring
order to a fairly ageing system. This is a classic scenario
that most small to medium size have either come to resolve
or are still awaiting a solution.
Houlder has around 65 staff spread over 3 offices, 3
Servers in London were Windows 2000 with Exchange Server
5.5 and various packages designed to run on Windows 2000.
Desktops were predominantly Windows 2000 with some XP on
later purchased systems. They also had various rolling
contracts for software & hardware support, as part of
our contract we would look through all the existing
invoices and contracts with third parties to see if they
really needed to be paying so much or anything at all.
Start of
Process.
Initially we speced up the new Server and highlighted a few
bits of hardware required to do the job, while we waited
for those to be delivered we delved into the paperwork.
We managed to cancel a number of contracts, one of which
was for supporting hardware which no longer had retained
its value and thus they were paying more to support it than
it was worth! We also wanted to shift their communications
to another provider as under the existing setup it was not
functioning as it was intended, and although they had an
inter-office VPN it was extremely temperamental and for
each time they required to call their support company to
inform them of the problem - they were charged. Overall in
that process we saved them around £3000 - £5000 annual
charges which they were paying unnecessarily, along with
explaining what all the remaining contracts were for and
what they covered.
In this situation we recommended an upgrade to Windows
Server 2003 R2 with Exchange Server 2003. Auditing of the
existing Server hardware we were able to make only a single
Server purchase and keep value in Houlder’s previous
hardware investments by upgrading the components instead of
making a new server purchase. We deployed the 2003 R2
servers initially, taking the upgrade of Exchange Server
2003 as primary importance. We had to upgrade the Active
Directory schema for the existing system to 2003 R2
revision and then proceed to build the Exchange Server
migrating the data over a weekend.
Completion.
Houlder suffered no downtime in this process and most of
the staff were unaware that any change to the systems had
taken place. This we believe is how IT maintenance and
upgrades should be performed, its almost always possible to
do, it just requires proper planning and diligent work
processes.