We’re back! Although, we never really left. We’ve been a bit quiet as of late and we know it hertz to not know what’s going on. So, where have we been and what’s been going on?

Firstly, we’re getting bigger! We’ve had an office move that has allowed us to have a bit more breathing space and hire some new staff. If you’ve raised a support ticket at any point in the last year, you may have met them. As we continue to grow, you can be sure we will have a few more new faces.

We’ve had a few platform upgrades over the last 6 months. One noticeable upgrade is our Hosted Exchange platform which is now running on the latest Exchange 2013 build, introducing even more resiliency. We have put a new DAG design in place which increases overall performance and eliminates databases moving around our cluster. We have done lots of testing to ensure is compatible with the latest versions of Outlook 2019. We also plan to change how Outlook connects to our Exchange Servers, by replacing the legacy RCP connection with MAPI. This gives increased speed while using less overheads bringing this up to the same standard as Microsoft Office 365.

For anyone on our vDeskOnline platform, we’ve also made a few big changes to that! We’ve released version 3 of our hosted desktop platform which should make things even quicker for our clients. On a newer operating system with updated software, it’s been a much faster system for all.

To make our hosted desktop platform run smoother, we’ve also done a platform upgrade on our Citrix XenServers. Using the latest version of XenServer we are able to take advantage of storage improvements, faster provisioning of virtual machines and even higher resilience. Increased support for the latest OS including Microsoft Windows and Linux. We can also do live patching on our core network now without needing to restart the actual blades, thus minimising downtime for our clients.

Another great upgrade we made was to our Service Desk system. We’ve moved from our old Spiceworks system to a newer NetHelpDesk system. This makes managing and monitoring tickets much easier and will enable us to send reports on how and what we’ve been doing for you. This also includes an improved Service Desk Portal which gives our clients full visibility on all the tickets raised, but also the added benefit of real-time service announcements in situations where there is a service outage. Hopefully you love it just as much as we do!

Some may have noticed our new monitoring system too. We’ve introduced Solarwinds N-Central to our arsenal of tools. This allows us to monitor your servers and PCs a lot more actively, letting us know of things such as disk space issues and other resources so we can get on it before you even notice. We can also use it for Patch Management to automate updates and ensure your systems are as up-to-date as possible.

We’ve got a bunch of other things to come and more news on those to follow. Keep an eye out for some more updates in the coming future. While we may be quiet, we’re never actually gone!