Hello

If you were going to start a professional services company from scratch, what IT setup would you use? What software, hardware, mobile devices…? What’s worth paying good money for, and what should be open source?

Requirements:
Secure – clients would be large organisations in healthcare, oil & gas industries
Facilitates teamworking – sharing of files, lots of off-site working around the world
Low cost – at a scale of say 5-20 people
Easy to manage – no internal IT expert, but a group of ‘IT-literate’ people
OS – as much as I’d like Mac, it would have to be MS on the laptops
Software – will need to include MS Office to make file exchange with clients easy, but what about finance packages, timecard and expenses packages etc?

Very vague I know, but I don’t want to prejudice suggestions.

Cheers!

Bob

Thats like asking if you were going to go mountain biking what bike would you buy!

Very hard to answer.

If you need a central storage server for sharing files. You could get away with a few laptops on a workgroup with a NAS attached to your router.

You can install Truecrypt on all the laptops to cover yourself if they are lost. Then you need to think about each machine having its own firewall, virus protection and maintain each laptop individually.

All the finance stuff and time cards you can do in Excel…

It might be worth looking at cloud based solutions such as Google Apps or Office 365 for your general Email/Office apps

Hmm ok fair comment – more specific questions then!

I use Dropbox and Google Docs personally and love the sharing/cross-device functionality, but we’d have concerns about security on Dropbox and GDocs doesn’t have the functionality we need from Excel. Assuming we’d mostly be using MS Office docs, what good solutions are there for sharing and (preferably automated) backing up?

Encryption, antivirus, VPN, firewall – what sort of setups should I be considering here? (Truecrypt I will look into)

If we run exchange mail, do we need our own physical server?

In terms of laptops, is it worth spending £hundreds extra on Thinkpads or will a bog standard Acer do?

If we decided to go the ‘bring your own device’ route, how easy would it be to maintain security? By that I mean own laptops and/or own iPhones/iPads/Blackberries.

Cheers!

Bob

Thats like asking if you were going to go mountain biking what bike would you buy!

Orange 5. 😛

It was all going so well until you said this:

Easy to manage – no internal IT expert, but a group of ‘IT-literate’ people

Buy someone in, don’t rely on non IT staff.

Find a recommended local (as in very) SME IT service company and use them, and I’d avoid outsourced H/W – just my preference.

Hmm unfortunately the reason I’m asking is that we’re trying to get away from the solution our SME IT provider has given us – too complex, too many issues, nowhere near the functionality I expect given what I can do with Dropbox and my iPad, and too high a fixed cost!

Give the guys at Hardsoft.co.uk a call, they specialise in IT solutions for small businesses

Cloud based is where it’s at but even if you cant’s afford proper cloud you should be looking at servers and thin client. MS Office is joke, you should be looking at BI solutions, Oracle Apex is a scalable low cost option. Also, Acers will last 12 months used every day but I’ve seen plenty of thinkpads go 5+ years.

google apps.

Now that google drive has launched it’s almost complete.

I run my company through google apps and as a partner in another company that also has google apps. I can use mutliple sign ons and can seamlessly move between the two whilst keeping a single inbox. Its fantastic.

The only additional software I need is MSOffice for Excel (hence the need for google drive as opposed to google docs which cant handle proper Excel files)

My colleague has an fruit based piece of junk phone, tablet and computer, but google works perfectly well for him too. I can access all my business on my android phone, tablet and PC and being cloud/web based on any other networked device as and when I need to, anywhere in the world. Shared contacts, files, email, documents, images.

No worrying about hardware, and networks. Just a wireless router and a wireless printer and anyone can use whatever hardware they want.

And all for around $50 a user pa I think.

Thanks

I guess my preferred approach would be to go with web-centric, simple options where possible.

I’m very pro-cloud, but some contracts may prevent us from storing client data on a non-in-house drive. There’s a perceived risk – whether or not that’s valid or not, I don’t know. This may be pretty fundamental to how cloud-based we can be, or if we’re always going to need an in-house server. How easy would it be to build an ‘in-house cloud’ with syncing functionality?

The majority of our clients – actually, every one I can think of, use Word and Excel. Hence we need to, too. Frustrates the hell out of me, but I can use them well enough.

Oracle Apex – will check it out.

How about mail – exchange server or Gmail with desktop client and appropriate domain?

I do appreciate the responses guys, pushing my knowledge which is exactly what I need.

Cheers

Bob

Office 365 with outlook gives you all exchange functionality for £4 per month, in cloud etc. Bonkers to have on premise for that amount of users, assuming your broadband is reliable of course.

We hav some clients that use jungledisk, syncs to cloud with networkish drive letters etc.

OP what are you offering us for advice?

@cynic-al: karma 😉

Once your set up, I’ll offer some of that in payment for your services, OK?

Cloud is where it’s at for small businesses, as stated above.

MS Office is joke, you should be looking at BI solutions, Oracle Apex is a scalable low cost option.

Comparing an office suite to business intelligence “solutions” doesn’t seem to help the OP much.
Comparing business intelligence platforms to Oracle Application Express (AKA Apex), a database hosted web development platform, is also rather perverse. Apex is only “cheap” if you run it in Oracle’s free XE edition.

Bob, may I suggest you read this article which should get you thought process kickstarted. Depending on your size and actual requirements as well as the cloud providers mentioned in the article you could look at SugarCRM, some of 37Signals products and/or sageone.

Also as mentioned above get in someone who knows what they’re doing unless you really want a dogs dinner of a company IT platform.

And lastly: Get some one in to do it. << This bit is really important.

Sorry, hadn’t occurred to me that asking opinions on a commercial issue was bad form. I guess so.

I do appreciate the comments! In particular I’ll have a closer look at Office 365 as the MS branding may be an easier sell to clients, should work well with regular office docs and work across mobile platforms.

Also gonna look at Spideroak, Jungledisk, Apex and Hardsoft.

It is Friday evening, time to switch the work brain off perhaps.

B

Cheers bearGrease, exactly the ideas I’m looking for.

JUst pulling your leg fella.

And suspicious that DIY will be crap – I work for someone that did it that way.

where are you located?

bearGrease – Member

Get some one in to do it. << This bit is really important.That.

That + 1

25 is a lot of machines and it sounds as though you will have several groups of machines like that. At a minimum you are looking at something like Office365 linked into AD somehow but with several domains it is messy unless set up properly.

Box.net is excellent for file sharing and collaboration

Office365 would be a cheap way to get collaboration, mail and shared workspaces up (plus Lync for vrtual meetings) but I think you’ll still need an Office install for Excel, Powerpoint etc. Probably get it bundled with the pc if you shop around.
Basically put the backend in the cloud, then you are free to use whatever good deal you can get for your day to day tool ( fwiw I have had many Thinkpads, and wouldn’t hesitate to get one as a work pc)

Our company is having a clearout of older systems – including a licensed SBS 2003 server….

And one Watchguard firewall….

And one CISCO switch….

And a few more servers too! DL380 G3s.

Let me know if you’re interested…. (Based in Lancashire)

Although speaking from experience (as the one who went in to clean up the mess), get a proper IT support company to get it up and running for you.

Again, I can recommend my previous employers (Based in NW London, but they spread further afield) as they do a damn good job at it!

Depending on the 365 plan you can get office pro plus included in the deal for 5 pcs per user account.

And one last thing, if you happened to be in Lancs (or surrounding counties…) drop me an email… I’m sure I can help with the setup if required. It’s what I do for a job 😉