Scenario 1 : Greenstart Legal

Greenstart Legal is a medium sized legal services company with offices in New York (30 employees) and Boston (15 employees). James Alfano, the chief admin officer, has been with the company from inception (5 years) and has overseen the information technology (IT) requirements of the firm.

History

In the beginning Jim did it all. With just a NY office of 5 it was not that bad: Email (from AOL at the time) was heavily used to share files back and forth. Computer problems beyond Jim's reach were handled as-needed by the IT consultants of the local computer store.

With a bit more growth Greenstart decided to add a bookkeeper / IT person (Susan) to work for Jim. Susan handled support calls and engaged in a number of projects including set up of a Microsoft Exchange server so that the company could have their own email and share calendars etc.

When Boston came on-line it became clear that Susan was being stretched too thin by the users and didn't have the expertise needed for some of the projects (Exchange and backups).

Rethinkit was asked to provide IT Support to allow Susan to focus on the books. After a trial period, Rethinkit was asked to provide the following:

IT Services (Fractional IT). Rethinkit provides first-line support via phone and emali to end users. Susan is copied on every issue so she's up to date. When required, users (both in NY and Boston) bring Rethinkit "onto their screen" for support calls. The file server folders and security were cleaned up according to the recommended clearances for each department. Backups were streamlined and verified via the CopyCube service - Susan takes a disk offsite once a week.

Email Services (M1 Exchange). When combined with the required Blackberry server, the in-house Exchange server was too complicated and often not available. Worse, once, inbound mail was inadvertently bounced back to senders when there was an internet outage. It was re-purposed to be a "terminal server" for the traveling employees or people working from home. Rethinkit now handles all e-mail services including new employees and terminations, new Blackberry setup, spam filtering.

Email Archive (Carbon Email). For compliance and discovery purposes, Rethinkit archives the entire corporate mail stream for 6 years. Greenstart has a web-based search tool to find any individual mail from this history.