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A Midlands based IT firm has provided a technical solution enabling staff at a local NHS Mental Health Trust to use an application on their iPads saving both time and money.

Micro-Business Maintenance was approached by South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to provide a specific technical solution. As part of its commitment to introduce new technologies to improve working practices and reduce costs, the Trust has recently provided Executive and Non-Executive Directors with iPads. One significant cost saving from the introduction of these iPads has been the reduction in both time and printing costs, as senior staff are now able to make use of digital copies of papers, automatically synchronised with content on the users iPad, whilst in meetings.

The Trust identified an application called GoodReader® for use on iPads which enables users to read and annotate PDFs together with other document formats. In order to distribute copies of necessary documents, the Trust needed a mechanism to allow hosted content in a folder on an external server to be synchronised with specific folders on user’s iPads. Because of the stringent NHS data security requirements the server had to be both encrypted to a high level and located within England, but still enable the upload of data by administrative staff from within the secure NHS network used by the Trust whilst evidencing and providing assurance of high levels of security.

Wombourne based Micro Business Maintenance has been providing IT solutions and support to businesses for over 20 years. Jason Timmins, technical director, explained: “We provided a test environment at no initial cost to establish if the Trust’s requirements could be met and ultimately we provided a solution that worked. After successful testing, the iPads are now being configured by the Trust to enable this secure data synchronisation.”

Pete Kendal, Head of IM&T Development at the Trust explained: “Micro-Business Maintenance provided a good, inexpensive solution and were responsive to our needs. We were particularly impressed with the speed and honesty of their advice and they further helped with another requirement to identify a third party, off-the-shelf product to support the upload of data. We’d certainly approach them again for any bespoke technical support we required relating to this project.”

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Contacts:
Micro Business Maintenance Limited
Jason Timmins, Technical Director
mbmltd.co.uk
01902 324494

South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Pete Kendal, Head of IM&T Development
01785 258969

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“Micro-Business Maintenance Ltd have been working to provide Strand Europe with mail systems, Internet access and server support since 1997.  The number of issues I have had on their E-mail system makes Microsoft Exchange look like a poor second. They are an excellent team providing clear and relevant communications, tenacity in problem resolution and a level of technical advice both in breadth and depth which I have not seen equalled in organisations 10 times their size.  I am sorry they are not nearer geographically to us.  I heartily recommend them as consultants and providers of relevant solutions to meet business needs.”

Peter Wells – ITC and Information Manager – Strand Europe Limited

Jason – A big, big thank you for pulling out the stops and helping to transfer a website to a new server at incredibly short notice. The transfer process has been extremely smooth and your technical guidance very useful. You’ve helped me keep a valued client happy. Thanks again!

Sharon Kendal, Blue Orange Marketing

From experience it takes 3 – 5 days to buy, setup and restore a customer’s fileserver, network and data after it has been stolen, burnt or had water damage. We know how frustrated customer’s get if their email is down for one hour! We want to stop this happening so please ask yourself this:  Could your business cope without your network, fileserver and data for a week?

Would your business suffer? How much business would you lose? Would your business survive? What would your customers think if you couldn’t process their orders?  Many businesses never recover from a disaster of this sort.

Think about the amount of time it would take you to restore your systems if your key infrastructure failed or became unavailable. Most customers agree that being ‘down’ for 3-5 days is not good enough.

We can get you back up and running in a few hours!

New techniques allow us to take an image of your server and continuously stream updates off-site to our local data centre. At the same time, we are continuously restoring your server as a virtual machine in the data centre. This means that if you suffer a serious failure, we can take your latest server image, marry it up with a loan server and bring it to your site within hours… not days!

This kind of continuous off-site server imaging has only recently been cost effective for small businesses. We are offering you this service from a local data centre so that was can react quickly and get you up and running in a few hours.

We believe our new server disaster recovery offering is a ‘no brainer’ for SMEs who understand the importance of IT to their business.

Remember, your server could crash tonight so give us a call on 01902 324494 if you want to talk about disaster recovery in your company. Or visit our IT continuity and disaster recovery page on our web site.

PS. Why not take a look at our new dedicated IT continuity site, www.ITContinuity.org.uk.

IT COMPANY SETS ITS SIGHTS ON CARBON REDUCTION

A West Midlands IT company is helping their customers with carbon reduction by transferring all their hosting to a carbon neutral data centre. This will help customers meet their carbon reduction targets.

Nigel Mills, managing director of MBM based in Wombourne, explained: “Many companies struggle to meet carbon reduction targets that form part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitment. We’re getting asked more and more about the carbon footprint of IT systems, so when we were looking for a new provider we included this as one of our criteria.”

MBM’s new data centre in Manchester is completely carbon neutral. In 2008 the supplier planted 150 acres of forestry on its farm in Scotland. These trees now carbon neutralise all CO2 emissions emitted from the data centre. In addition, the facilities are energy efficient achieving a power usage efficiency (PUE) rate as low as 1.32 against an average of 2.2.

Jason Timmins, technical director at MBM, said: “We host many customers’ servers in our internet data centre and, even with advances in power management, these machines consume a lot of electricity. A medium-sized web server that’s busy running your e-commerce web site could easily consume 500W of power all day, every day. Clearly, reducing the environmental impact of that is important. Our customers understand that servers consume plenty of electricity and, under pressure from demanding carbon reduction targets, they asked us to examine the power that is consumed on their behalf.”

He added: “We believe we have sourced an affordable hosting solution for businesses that neutralises its carbon footprint and provides all the technology, security and industry leading service level agreements that is fit for today’s business environment.”

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Contact:
Nigel Mills or Jason Timmins
https://www.mbmltd.co.uk
01902 324494