We
are going through turbulent times. This year has been
a great experience for me and for the business. We
are growing in a steady pace. This has had particular
effect on Petra and me; we never have a dull moment.
In the beginning of this financial year we welcomed
Chris as first staff member. Due to family circumstances
and personal choice he did not stay and we quickly
had to find another employee. Since March this year
we welcomed David Galbraith in our business. David
is very enthusiastic and loves to learn in the world
of Information Technology. He will be trained by me
to become a certified Microsoft Professional.
Last year we invested deeply and acquired computer
equipment for our classroom. Due to the high demand
in support we have not been able to schedule a training
session. Till today! We will start our first training
session this month. Besides the classroom equipment
we invested in two new server systems. These systems
have been fully implemented with the use of Microsoft
Virtual Server technology. This will make it very
flexible for us to test and troubleshoot other server
environments without having to touch (break) our production
environment. We currently have deployed 5 Virtual
Servers running on 1 physical server box and it seems
to perform quite well!
As you are probably aware I am a certified Microsoft
System Engineer (MCSE+I) for more than 12 years. This
means I played with almost all the Microsoft systems
available. Recently Microsoft introduced a new certification/specialisation:
Microsoft Small Business Specialist. The focus is
on IT requirements for small businesses of up to 500
employees (not what I call small actually). The emphasis
is on Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. The larger
Windows 2003 environment is also a required area of
knowledge. I did the required exams recently and passed
with high marks. Bill sent me the new logo, which
found its proud location next to the front door and
in our e-mail signatures. There are only a few IT
businesses in the region which can show you this certification.
It just means we are ready to effectively advise and
support you with your Information Technology needs.
Before David joined the business I was constantly
running after the facts, in stead of the pro-active
mode you were used to.
We
made some considerable improvements in this area,
especially with the more flexible Virtual Server environment.
To highlight a few:
• All hosted customer production and design
websites are now placed in two separate Windows
2003 Web edition servers. Much more robust and easier
to manage.
• We are running a complete Microsoft Small
Business Server Premium installation, including
the Sharepoint portal and Exchange Server (e-mail)
with Service Pack 2, which has the new SPAM filter.
Before we received around 200 spam e-mails per day
and now only a handful. This will be implemented
soon in your server.
• Our Business Administration system has been
upgraded, with the most important addition for you:
Asset management system. We have already started
to add all PC and Server information into the database
of some customers. We can much better manage your
equipment and very quickly zoom in to the relevant
information for troubleshooting. This system is
implemented as a Client / Server system; the server
part is since last weekend upgraded to Microsoft
SQL Server 2005, the latest version of the best
database system around. The SQL server runs in a
separate Windows 2003 Enterprise virtual server.
All workstations in our office can access the database
at the same time. Our notebooks can do the same
and can also work off-line at your site. This means
we can work as efficient on your site as in our
office and enter all job information while we do
the work. All history, all previous jobs are kept
in the system for quick retrieval by our consultants.
• We were constantly overloaded with support
requests to the point I started to forget some.
Not happy…..
Using Outlook and the Exchange server we implemented
in Public folders a priority support logging system.
All support requests will be posted in this list.
Since Outlook automatically replicates this list
to notebooks, we can access this off-site as well.
Every morning we go through the list and re-prioritise
the support requests. This does currently not imply
a quicker response time, but at least we have a
clearer overview of all outstanding issues. In the
near future this should lead to higher efficiency.
• We are keeping our web-site (www.vanree.com)
more up-to-date and you will find useful information
about anti-virus and our services. A new section
is the HowTo’s, a collection of freely downloadable
documents with handy tips and tricks.
The training, overhead and travel cost in our type
of business are considerable. We always endeavour
to keep the cost for our customers as low as possible
and we did a good job in that in the past years. An
adjustment of our standard fee structure is needed
however. From 1 July 2006 the standard consultancy
fee will be $ 95 / hour (+ GST).
The end-of-the-financial-year is soon there. When
you are looking to spend some remaining budget for
tax purposes, please do not wait too long. The amount
of work we have scheduled in this month is filling
our available capacity soon. And please remember that
ordering Dell workstations will take about 2 weeks
to fulfil.
Many thanks for your business and we are looking forward
to a very successful new year.
