User Friendly

Because of their success, Charter 1 needed to branch out in to new office space.  Working with some local vendors User Friendly installed a point to point T1 line and connected both offices.  This, along with Exchange 2003 and some custom scripts, allows their branch office to run just like they were sitting in the main office.

User Friendly has been able to work with the David Bragg Team to make the technology work for them to make them more productive and efficient.  An SBS2003 server was installed at their beach market location to provide a central storage facility and backup.  The agents also needed to be able to remotely access their email and data files from both their home PCs and Windows Mobile phones.  User Friendly was able to install their five new computers and server system as well as provide the above services for them in a timely fashion.

Project time: 2 weeks

Upcoming projects: Connecting their branch building and setting up 3 new computers.

Disasters can happen.  As the week was starting to end the server at the main office had hard drive problems.  It was decided that a new server made sense due to the age of the existing server.  User Friendly, partnering with Dell, was able to get a new server in 3 business days while keeping their existing system functioning to prevent downtime.  The new server was migrated to the new Small Business Server 2003 at the same time so that they could take advantage of some of the newer features.  This project was done over a weekend so that there would be no downtime for the user, and on Monday their users only noticed that things were faster and were not aware of the swap.

Project time: 1 week

You have to be flashy in real estate, that's part of the business.  And the Bragg Team was able to do that after User Friendly installed and implemented a new Dell 42" plasma television in their new rotunda office.  This TV can show websites, PowerPoint shows, and other files saved on the server.  This is a big plus for their clients who can see properties and listings in real time on the big screen.  When the conference room isn't in use it can play slideshows of newly listed properties.

To connect this office to their main office we used fiber optic cables and fiber modules in our Dell Powerconnect switches.  This allows high speed connections from one office to the other as opposed to solutions such as wireless or VPNs.

Project time: 3 days