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Giving the IT Department a Complement
A department of full-time IT specialists is a requirement of all large cross-platform companies, right? Wrong. Not every business finds it beneficial to keep a full-time, onsite Information Technology staff. A cost-effective alternative is to make Pelarious your IT department.
Outsourced IT can be your cost-effective choice for computer support. Pelarious is your solution.
The Environment
Fluctuating deadlines, mixed schedules, out-of-town HQ — these are characteristics of Pfingsten Publishing L.L.C., a nationwide publishing company with offices in Ohio, Wisconsin, California, and Missouri.
The St. Louis office needs reliable, cross-platform support for the forty-person staff utilizing five servers, 23 Windows PCs, 12 Macintoshes, and a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connecting counterparts across the country.There’s one difficulty. The IT staff is located in… Cleveland?
A Winning Relationship
With no full-time computer staff in St.Louis, the Cleveland team relies on Pelarious Expert, Bill Barney, for onsite support. For the past few years, Bill has maintained a weekly schedule with Pfingsten for routine maintenance, troubleshooting, and administration of the entire St. Louis office.This allowed Bill to anticipate the needs of the staff. Whether he was preparing for upgrades, researching hardware needs, or reporting to the Cleveland IT office, Bill worked as a full-time member of Pfingsten.
  
Access to the Experts
When problems occur, the employees at Pfingsten-St. Louis can rest easy. The Pelarious Experts are just a phone call away – a mobile Help Desk for network, server, PC, and Mac issues.
Top-notch IT support doesn’t end with one Pelarious Expert. With a professional staff and a network of highly skilled specialists, Pelarious provides Pfingsten with an unbeatable package of on-demand manpower and focused skills that no traditional in-house staff can provide. For projects requiring several sets of hands or more specific expertise, the entire Pelarious group gets to work.
Windows Server Roll-Out
Pfingsten’s servers needed an upgrade. The job required the replacement of several NT file servers and the Exchange 5.5 server. Due to the fact that Pfingsten needed to minimize their downtime, the project had to be completed in two phases: phase one – the replacement of the file servers with new Windows 2000 servers and phase two – the replacement of the Exchange server with an Exchange 2000 server.
Phase One: Time constraints were key from the beginning. Bill Barney, Pelarious Expert, had only a few days to complete the first phase. The Pfingsten-Cleveland IT staff members would only be in St. Louis for a few days to see phase one through to completion.
At the job’s outset, the replacement servers were configured alongside the still-active Windows NT servers and duplicated their functionality. Once the new servers were properly configured, all data was transferred from the old servers to the new servers.
The old servers were removed and the staff was migrated to the new servers before working hours.
By making the transfer at night, downtime was minimized for the Pfingsten-St. Louis office. The users began work the next morning with few complications.
Phase Two: Phase two was a bit more complicated and was handled differently than the previous server replacements. The job required the Exchange 5.5 server to be replaced with an Exchange 2000 server running on Windows 2000. By configuring the Exchange server in Cleveland and then shipping it to St. Louis, Pfingsten-Cleveland completed the server migration without the cost of sending staff members to St. Louis. Once the server arrived in St. Louis, Bill added it to the existing network. All the mailboxes and users from the old Exchange server were migrated to the new server. The project was a success.
On the Job: Designer Updates
Pelarious performed a technology upgrade for the design group of this high-demand company. With Mac OS X, the graphics and design personnel will function optimally as full citizens on their newly upgraded, mixed-platform network.
The task was threefold: upgrade the Mac systems and software; minimize the OS X learning curve through comprehensive training for the staff; and integrate with the mixed-mode environment, allowing full integration with the Windows network including Windows servers and Microsoft Exchange.
The project was complicated by critical time constraints. Again, the IT staff in Cleveland were in St. Louis for only a short time to initiate the upgrade and receive training. Also, the various departments within Pfingsten-St. Louis required a transition with minimal deviation from their usual routine. Everyone was on a different schedule and Pelarious had to perform quickly and efficiently.
Pelarious customized this project with a combination approach. While highly skilled, certified consultants installed the upgrades, superior OS X training was performed onsite.
In the end the upgrade and training were completed with ease, and most importantly, on schedule.
For employees unable to attend the training sessions at the Pfingsten office (above), Pelarious provided an alternative to the onsite training.
Pelarious would like to say, "Thank You!" to the Pfingsten team for allowing us to tell their story.
For more information about how Pelarious can complement your IT Department, contact us to assess your specific needs.
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