The Challenge

Dearneside Fabrications Ltd are a specialised steel fabrication business based in South Yorkshire. They work on contracts all over the UK, have some prestigious clients and are continuing to expand in their niche market.

They have over 60 full time employees of which 13 of those are office based. Each office based staff member had a desktop PC. The PC's had been acquired over a number of years and had different specifications and different versions of Microsoft Windows installed on them.

Files were shared through a peer to peer (P2P) network with users saving their own files on their own PC's. This was becoming increasingly inefficient especially if someone hadn't turned on their computer that day, and was extremely difficult to manage. Staff were finding it increasingly difficult to locate and manage the files they needed.

Backup and security was also becoming an issue. The backup method was unreliable and file sharing on each PC was leaving them wide open to computer viruses.

Only some staff had email accounts and the ones that did had individual POP3 accounts supplied by their service provider. There was no flexibility to add or change email users easily and any changes they wanted incurred an unreasonable bill for doing so.

Managing contacts was also becoming problematic as users would maintain their own computer or paper based contact lists. Many contacts needed to be shared so an easy to use method of finding and sharing contact details was required.