How to Design IT & Telephone System from Scratch
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Have you ever sat there and thought about what your IT systems would look like if you just started again from scratch? Let’s face it; it’s a nice thought to have especially in those moments of your computer not doing what you want it to do. Likewise, designing your IT from scratch again feels like a luxury that no business has right? Well, let’s look at whether this is the case.
Radical Change in Circumstances:
We have a customer that had finally secured a significant amount of investment for a patented product they have been developing for years which required the business to change its focus to concentrate on this new product area that was utterly different to their primary workload so far. When a radical change in your circumstances happens like this, it naturally makes you start to challenge how you do things. Is it that difficult to completely change your computer systems? Is it that costly? Surely it will be too disruptive even to consider? It’s not common to completely revamp your whole approach to technology but who wants ordinary!
The Original Setup:
They had a traditional setup like many offices across the country:
- Onsite File Server
- An office full of PCs where everyone operated from
- Traditional email stored on these PCs
- A conventional analogue business phone system
When You Need to Take The Office IT System With You:
This traditional office space was no longer going to work for them. They needed to go from a single office setup to a business that can operate from multiple locations which included the addition of a ‘work from a home office’ marketing director, a new workshop 10 miles away and a luxury flagship showroom in London. It is apparent that their original setup was never going to work. They reached out for our advice, and we worked on redesigning their structure. The key to a successful migration for any IT upgrade is the right balance between an imaginative design and maintaining a realistic grasp on costs. We could flip their business on its head, but it needn’t cost the earth.
The Total Opposite
The customer holds everything locally, and this was the barrier to a flexible and multi-location workforce. So, let’s not keep anything locally! The Cloud is more affordable than they have ever been. We Do Your IT are experts in migrating to the cloud too and have perfected the process. So even our labour cost is no more than keeping everything onsite and just updating it.
Email:
The first step was to migrate their email to the cloud. We utilise special tools to be able to complete a pre-migration stage that clones 90% of your mailbox to the cloud before you even start using it which allows the final 10% migration to happen in a convenient small-time window where there is next to no disruption. Likewise, the individual tools we use to minimise how much labour is needed to complete a migration resulting in reduced costs.
Files:
The Office 365 includes the facility for hosting your data for no extra cost in most cases. We can continue to get all the benefits of our unique tools reducing cost and time disruption in migrating to this cloud storage. However, the most significant difference is in our approach to how we structure your files. Change can be very positive but naturally makes a few people nervous. Genuinely caring for the impact this has on our customers, we put a lot of effort into enabling the benefits from cloud storage while maintaining similarities to how the end user views it. Done correctly, you can access the files on your PC how you always have but with the magic happening behind the scenes storing these files on the cloud which gives you all the benefits without any extra stress for your staff!
Small Office Business Telephone System:
It’s all very well being able to access your files and emails from anywhere, but this often doesn’t help if you can’t obtain your inbound calls as well. As a technology group of companies, we can help with the communications side of the business as well as the IT. Through We Do Your Communications we were able to facilitate the move to a VoIP phone system for this customer giving complete flexibility to work from anywhere. They can pass calls between the office, workshop and the London store as if they were all in the same location. They can answer their London number in Bristol and vice versa without the customer ever knowing the difference. They can get statistics on calls to help them understand when their busy times are and plan the correct amount of staff cover. If they are out on the road one day it isn’t a problem; A mobile phone app allows them to answer landline calls and transfer these to the right department no matter where they are. All of this and they saved money on their call costs!
Communications:
Most IT companies would stop there. The ‘big project’ work is complete, so that’s job done, right? Wrong! We want all our customers to be as active as they can be. Which means we actively find and recommend the small changes knowing that together these changes can make a big difference too. For example, there are several free business apps in the Office 365 ecosystem. There is an app for informally chatting, sharing files or video calling between each of you. When working separately, this can help you maintain a collaborative approach and sense of being part of the team. There is a mileage app which seems insignificant, but if you are now travelling and working from more locations, it is just as essential to saving time by making your mileage claims as comfortable as possible. How much time do you waste trying to organise a meeting? Doesn’t seem much of first glance but when you consider all the emails back and forth trying to work out who is available when it soon adds up. Office 365 has a feature for easily suggesting several different times that each invitee can vote for their preference in order which automates the booking of meetings and schedules a final time that is then suitable for everyone, quickly and easily.
Your time is important. Don’t just stop at the significant changes challenge us to save you time through the small changes too. We know you will be amazed at the difference we can make.
The result of not settling for the conventional approach:
- They can now work from anywhere with access to their email, files and VoIP telephone systems.
- Even if they are all working separately in different locations, they have all the benefits and strength of working as one team:
- Their telephones work as one big one rather than several little telephone systems
- They will benefit from quickly and freely video call between each other
- They can easily share files asking for quick opinions and input like they would if sharing one office
- They can work on the same record at the same time, professionally collaborating on documents and getting all the benefits this has to offer on the quality and efficiency of they work.
- There is no onsite server to maintain, repair or replace.
- Many of their ongoing costs have reduced.
- Everything is backed up in the cloud offering less risk of data loss and faster recovery time. All without the need to keep changing any onsite backup drives every day!
Which has made a considerable amount of difference for this customer? They have managed to significantly change the way they work for no more than the cost of replacing their old system with another onsite style system. In the instances of the VoIP phone service, they have even saved money — a radical change at a ‘not so radical’ cost. With our help, they have achieved a new level of efficiency and ability to be able to respond to market or customer demands even though they work miles apart from each other which has given them a solid base to work from on their new and exciting venture.
We believe everyone deserves to have an IT system support company that genuinely wants to help you achieve your goals by removing the burden of technology. If this sounds like something you would like to have, please contact us by clicking here
