Earlier this week Steve called regarding a very important problem he had come across with his computer system. Steve's main computer had been playing up for the past few days when it finally died.

Steve has a regular backup schedule in place and rotates his tapes on a daily, weekly and monthly basis; he also replaces tapes when they reach a year old. Like most IT users we found that Steve had never actually tested restoring his critical data from any of his tapes or didn't monitor whether the backups completed successfully. 

 

We did manage to retrieve most of Steve's data, he was very lucky. Following our suggestions Steve has taken up our disaster recovery package and is happy with the system that has been put in place and tested.

Early Thursday afternoon Caroline, from the Parish Council, called with a very quick and easy question - "I am worried that the documents I put up on the website can be modified to change people's comments from meeting notes. Could we purchase something that will allow me to create PDF files and post this on the web instead?"

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Our customer, Penny, specialising in Kitchen Design, Bedrooms and Bathrooms was expanding the business premises, taking on an additional showroom across the street. They use Compusoft's Winner CAD software, which has a central customer database of projects. Any team member can access it. Naturally, the customer wanted staff at the new showroom to work seamlessly, accessing the database from the new showroom; and also the manager needs to be able to access the Winner files coming from the new showroom.

We've often installed Remote Desktop for Windows Terminal Server or Citrix, over an internet connection, and that's great for computer applications that aren't too demanding on graphics processing; for Microsoft Word, Excel, email, and the SMART system. But it's far too slow for CAD. The budget didn't extend to digging up the road so how could we solve the problem?

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