Success Stories: Network Implementations

Living Choice Australia (Customer since May 2004)

Australian owned company Living Choice has come a long way since its first retirement village opened in Kincumber on the picturesque NSW Central Coast in 1992. Today Living Choice villages can be found throughout the Central Coast, in Sydney and Queensland, offering the best choice of retirement lifestyles and homes in great locations and providing quality service and care.

Computer Image won the NSW tender over local IT support companies. Computer Image’s strengths in using remote access techniques showed Living Choice that all sites within NSW and Queensland could be supported centrally by Computer Image.

Two senior staff completed a 6 day trip to NSW to implement 2 new Compaq Servers which was to provide central information sharing for all 8 sites located on the NSW Central Coast and in Queensland's Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast areas.

The Internet was used as a wide area network backbone along with Smoothwall firewall and quality of service products to provide security, consistent link speeds and virtual private network tunnels between sites.

Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 and Windows 2003 Terminal Server were used to provide these services. Software such as SharePoint and Exchange 2003 means staff can easily share information from anywhere providing they have a connection to the internet.

Users experienced little to no downtime while their existing Novell server was decommissioned and retired from service. Users experienced an upgrade from dated versions of Office to the latest that Microsoft have to offer with Office 2003. Centralisation using Terminal Server meant that user workstations could be rebuilt to a standard quickly and easily as only the operating system was required in the rebuild.

Living Choice are not a company that stands still and continual improvements and further development continue along with providing Helpdesk Services and system Maintenance to their new IT Infrastructure.

Grounds & Gardens Pty Ltd (Customer since November 2001)

 Since its establishment in 1995, Grounds & Gardens has developed a national reputation as a specialist in the commercial sector for horticultural maintenance construction and management services.

Computer Image designed and implemented a network solution to connect all branch offices to the Adelaide Head Office by means of ADSL connections and virtual private network (VPN) tunnels.  A Windows 2000 terminal server was also installed to allow staff in branch offices and roaming users to easily and effectively access data centrally stored on Adelaide Servers.