Manufacturer

A firm who design small toys and branded merchandise for stores such as Superdrug, Matalan and BHS have expanded from 3 personnel 2 years ago to 17 now and an annual turnover in excess of £7million. They design products in the UK but manufacture in Hong Kong and China. They regularly travel to the Middle East and required remote connectivity to the UK office for email and file access. The graphics design department use Macintosh Computers and integration with the PC network was required for file and printer sharing. With the time difference and distance between the UK and the Middle East most communication was done by email and these systems had to be ultra reliable. Remote access for home workers was also required.

The Solution:
The existing Cat5 cabling system was expanded to meet the needs. A new server was installed running Windows 2000 Server and Exchange server 2000 with 240Gb of storage (those graphics files are big!). Email was collected from the company domain by Exchange Server. Two 1Mb ADSL lines were installed with Netgear routers and 3Com hardware firewalls. As a third line backup as ISDN line and router were also installed. The Macintosh computers were connected into the same network and store files on the main server using Microsoft AppleTalk facility. All workstations and Macs print over the network to 3 black and white Hewlett Packard laser printers, a Hewlett Packard colour laser printer and a Ricoh colour photocopier. All users - including he Macs - have Outlook for email using Exchange Server. In the Middle East VPN is used to connect back to the main server for email and file access. A Hotmail system is also installed on the server to collect email from any Internet Browser anywhere in the world. VPN connectivity was also provided for anyone who wanted to work from home.

The Result:
This is now a very reliable system with few issues in the 6 months it has been running. The second ADSL line and ISDN have both been used when line or ISP failures have interrupted email functions. Swap over time between systems 3 minutes. Remote connectivity has functioned well and email and file access from 7000 miles away achieved. In the last 3 months the Exchange Server has received and delivered in excess of 90,000 emails with zero failures.