A while back i posted and had a moan where i worried we may be losing customer for sticking to our principles (original post here) and was worried the client may end up getting a nasty sting if they went with what on the surface appeared to be a vastly cheaper quote
I then posted to say that the customer decided to come with us so all was good!
Well for the last week i’ve been doing the new SBS installation for that client
Now i’m not normally one to say “i told you so” but we got it spot on here.
We used just about the amount of man days we had quoted for and as we anticipated there were one or two issues that slowed us down but were covered in the days we quoted
What amazes me is the state the system was in when we arrived.
It’s a twenty five user system and the server was a Windows 2000 server (not SBS!)
The hardware was the scary bit. It was a self build, basically a souped up PC. The CD-ROM drive didn’t work, the USB didn’t work, the floppy drive didn’t work, the internal tape drive didn’t work.
The tape drive was replaced with an external DAT drive. When someone with a bit of common sense asked if they could test the tapes were backing up ok on a different server they were told “we don’t have anything that will take those anymore”
Storage was on a single P-ATA/IDE disk. It was on the point of failure once before so the drive had been replaced and the data copied to the new one. I say replaced but the old drive had just been left inside!
We took the drive out as we planned to take an image of it before we didn’t anything with it. I plugged it into my IDE-USB cable and fired it up. It started to spin up and i moved the disk as it was a bit close to the edge of the desk, i heard the drive stop, then start, then stop again. Real heart in mouth stuff
I put it back into the server in the end and it was ok, as long as you didn’t touch anything!
The PC’s were all on static IP addresses as the cabling was shared with a company downstairs! There was no central switch and it was all linked together with workgroup hubs. It also meant that they couldn’t use DHCP at all (we knew about this beforehand though and new cabling was being completed while we were onsite)
The only network printer in the building was the photocopier as all the printers were shared directly from the PC’s
I wont even mention the PCs as this post is long enough!
The single scary thing about this is that the client was generally unaware of all this other than the fact than the server locked up a several times a week. The server could have died at any point and the backups were “untrustworthy” and that would have been it everything gone. The client is a charity so mainly deals in information. There is no “product” to sell
Without the data on the server they don’t exist
Fortunately the install went well and other than a bit of downtime the users are using the system in pretty much the same way it was before
We’re giving them a bit of bedding in time to catch up after the disruption and then they will be introducted to RWW, OWA, SharePoint, Exchange, etc
As i said they deal with information so SharePoint is going to be huge here
As much as i love setting up SBS the satisfaction is when you see someones face the first time they see RWW, or when you actually see ideas forming when you show them SharePoint
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