Rye St Antony

CASE  STUDY:  Rye St Antony is an highly regarded independent girl’s school in Oxford. Educating approximately 400 girls from the age of 3 to 18 and boys aged 3 to 8, the school places great store on personal development and the value of each person as an individual.

Background

The school needed to develop its IT capability in line with current government guidelines and demonstrate to prospective parents that they had state of the art ICT facilities.

Boffins Contribution

Boffins have been working with Rye St Antony since the summer of 2001 when we were first asked to help the school renew its ICT teaching equipment. Boffins has since upgraded both teaching and operational servers, and the networks to develop an integrated and secure networking strategy across the entire school.

Today Rye St Antony School has over 200 workstations and 8 servers operating in a single homogenous yet firewall protected network covering eight buildings over the 12 acre site.
This network provides the infrastructure for students, teachers, and staff supporting interactive smart boards, electronic mail, safe internet browsing, and the bursary needs, as well as standard file and print functions.

Key issues that have been addressed by Boffins are network performance, network security, safe Internet access, data integrity, system resilience, and disaster recovery.
Boffins have provided all the hardware, system software, and know-how necessary to support this dynamic school environment.

Outcome

Since discovering Boffins, Rye St Antony have revolutionised their use of IT. “Since using Boffins the effectiveness and reliability of our ICT resources have improved dramatically and the confidence of our teaching staff in using it has grown accordingly” said Drew Pocock, Rye’s IT Manager.

“By adopting the professional business approaches and standards that Boffins have introduced we have been able to rely upon our IT investment to perform at all times.”

Wise & Co

CASE STUDY: Wise & Co accountants are a local practise based in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire. The business is based around a single practitioner, Chris Wise, and three administration staff.

Wise & Co offer a wide range of business accounting services, including tax planning for individuals, partnerships and limited companies.

Boffins Contribution

Boffins relationship with Wise & Co goes back ten years. At this point, Wise & Co were using 2 disconnected PC’s for basic administration purposes; invoicing, Excel & Word documents. It wasn’t until Boffins suggested developing the current system did Chris Wise really understand the benefits to his business.
Boffins developed a number of email accounts via a ‘Small Business Server’, a document sharing facility and networked printers, scanners and copiers. Boffins were also well placed to advise Chris on how to set up an efficient electronic shared filing system.

Today, each staff member of the Wise & Co team is connected to a single homogenous network enabling them to communicate freely and share company and client data.
Key issues addressed by Boffins were network scope and performance, network security, safe internet access, data integrity, system resilience and vastly improved communications.
Boffins have provided all the server hardware, system software, local area networking and importantly, the know-how necessary to support this dynamic services business.

Outcome

Since Boffins and Wise & Co started working together. Chris has revolutionised his business.

“Since investing in new technology, we have increased our productivity and been able to effectively communicate internally and with clients via email” said Chris Wise. “It has meant that we can take on new clients without worrying about the additional work load. We’re also able to share each other’s calendars and schedule meetings.”