South West Law
- Company name: South West Law
- Company website: http://www.southwestlaw.org.uk/
- Date of work: 2002
- Case study type: New Business Startup
Company Profile:
Solicitors for the Community. South West Law was established in 2002 by experienced and specialist lawyers to help those persons who have a need to seek justice and legal solutions to their personal problems.
Existing IT Structure:
As a new business startup, no existing structure was in place. However, some data was held and a backend system was already lined up to be installed.
Existing IT Problems:
No existing problems as a new business startup.
EvolvIT IT Support Solution:
The proposed new building was not network ready, and as such had no structured cabling in place. We managed the building’s cabling to ensure that the hardware being supplied would work correctly once the building was completed and ready to move in.
Windows XP had just been released but was having initial problems, as most new operating systems do, so we advised, built and installed 22 windows 2000 client machines. The server ran Windows SBS 2000, on custom hardware that was picked and built by EvolvIT. All our servers, if custom built or from IBM have multiple redundancies, thus ensuring top level up times. We organised and assisted with the installation of all the network printers, also the database backend solution and other peripherals such as phone manager software.
Ongoing IT support was provided using our Virtual IT package, this ensured that all the hardware and software would be fully looked after for the years to come. All of the companies domains, hosting and email requirements were also supplied as a part of the Virtual IT contract. Within the agreement, we also developed and maintain South West Law’s website, with the flexibility of the Virtual IT contract allowing changes to the site to be made with no additional costs to South West Law.
Post Installation:
The original network was installed in 2002, and we have been looking after the IT needs for South West Law in the years since. With large volumes of documents created, three things
started to show signs of ageing after 3-4 years. Firstly the servers capability to handle the volume of documents, and its physical data capacity limits. And finally, Windows 2000 was beginning
to become unreliable as a client-side operating system. We addressed these items by replacing the server with an IBM based system running 2003 SBS and migrated the old system data across.
The client machines, even though almost 4 years old were all upgraded to Windows XP. Due to their initial high specification, they all ran perfectly even after this period of time. A network storage device was installed to cope with the large volumes of data that was now being created – removing a large strain from the server to allow other services to run more efficiently.
We continue to give IT support and network support to South West Law, and even after almost 7 years, the original client hardware is still in use, another demonstration of excellent value for money that can be delivered when your IT systems are professionally maintained.
