Quantity Surveyors

A firm of Quantity Surveyors was moving from a small office, merging with another company and opening another office 30 miles away. They were increasing from 6 workstations to 30. They required:

1 Ground up installation of both offices
2 Reliable server based IT infrastructure
3 Comprehensive telecoms
4 Unified company email
5 Connection between offices for file & email exchange
6 Shared calendars & printers
7 Centralised shared scanning facility
8 Remote access for home workers

The Solution:
The main office was cabled with Cat5 RJ45 wall sockets running to a comms room containing a rack-mounted patchbay. A rack mounted Siemens digital telephone exchange was installed with extensions patched through the patchbay to the wall sockets. A rack mounted Asus server was installed running Windows 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2000 protected from power cuts by an APC UPS. A 3Com Gigabit/100Mb switch was mounted in the rack for data connections. Internet connectivity was taken care of with an ADSL connection routed by a Netgear router connecting to the network via a 3Com Office Connect hardware firewall. Shared scanning and printing was provided by a Ricoh digital photocopier that also acts as a network printer and document scanner with user scan directories located on the server. A global .com domain was registered for the company. All telecoms, server, ADSL and IT equipment resides in one floor-standing equipment rack.
The second office only had 4 users and workstations but was installed with an identical server and ADSL configuration.

The Result:
A unified IT structure with common file storage on the server. Internet connectivity for all users. All users in both offices use Outlook for email, Exchange Server with shared calendar, contacts and public folders. All company email is collected by the main office exchange server and propagated by a VPN connection to the other office exchange server. File transfer between offices is also by VPN connection. Network printing and scanning has proved to be very economical (about a quarter of the cost of a laser printer). Any employee can have VPN from home to collect email and work on files stored on the server. This installation has been working for a year with zero down time and minimal maintenance. All functions of the network are remotely monitored and regular maintenance is achieved without site visits.