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VC Warehouse and HeleMill are representative, rural, small enterprises with a big web presence. As such they do not need a full-time IT support person, but they need access to one.
Here’s some of the things we have done for both VC Warehouse and HeleMill:
Application Installation & Integration
Modern business applications come with reams of install notes, preconditions, and licensing decisions. Sometimes you want to get on with your business, and let someone else deal with these issues; then come in, do the job, check it’s fine, and go away - this is something we feel that we are good at.
VC Warehouse and HeleMill present a big presence by running best-of-breed small business application such as Sage Line 50 for accounts, Actinic for E-commerce, and Act for contact management. These are large, potentially daunting applications that when fully integrated can bring great benefit to your business.
Understanding these applications, we helped VC Warehouse and Hele Mill to use these flexible, powerful applications in the way they wanted to work - to chose and use some parts, and not others; to integrate some parts, and not others according to their workflow and preferences.
Using this approach VC Warehouse staff transparently access the same customer, financial, and e-commerce databases from Bude and their remote offices, and wherever they may be working (or holidaying)
Desktop optimisation and Cloning
One of the most common business (and home) PC scenarios is “Help my PC is going slowly”. And within 10-30 minutes of looking at your PC we will know why, fix it, or recommend how.
VC Warehouse and HeleMill had a strange, intermittent, slow-PC syndrome on one machine, and the best solution was to build an “ideal” desktop machine, and then clone it for everyone. Using this clone, and a knowledge of Windows-based network solutions, we completely reinstalled an individual PC and personal settings in under an hour.
Each cloned PC was clean, “ideal”, and should it go wrong again, then we will just reclone it again.
Server Builds and Migration
Sooner or later a server needs upgrading or replacing due to failure. This is not a trivial issue if your small business runs a Windows’ Active Directory domain such as Small Business Server or traditional Windows Server.: over the years crucial data accumulates, and a lot of tailoring to your work-place happens, these need to be replicated on the new server.
VCWarehouse and HeleMill previously ran their businesses from a single, unreliable Windows XP “Server”, but as they grew this solution didn’t. We provided a managed, ordered, staged migration to two Windows 2003 servers.
Email was also migrated from personal folders to Microsoft Exchange - allowing everyone to access each other’s contacts, calendar, todo-list, and when away, email inboxes - to ensure critical client emails are not missed.
Although we have over 15 years’ experience in email and server solutions, such as Exchange and Windows, we also have a similar, extensive experience in Open Source alternatives for when the software license costs preclude a Microsoft solution.
Mail Shots
Like many small companies, a myriad of emails are exchanged with customers, clients, and suplliers using Microsoft Outlook. With thousands of emails, each on a handful of computers, preparing a mailshot from Outlook was a potentially daunting task.
VC Warehouse commissioned us to develop of a small, custom application for this purpose that extracted, merged, and filtered the email addresses from tens of thousands of emails in a handful of minutes on all computers. Powerful filters eliminated addresses who did not want to be contacted in a mail shot, or clearly shouldn’t be contacted, and the results were generate din a format suitable for a commercial mail-shot application.
Using Rapid Application Development (RAD) techniques and a thorough knowledge of Small Business Applications, we are able to develop custom, line-of-business and/or bespoke and integration application without the traditional high costs of external development teams.
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