New Managed Office for McGrath O'Toole

As you might already know, McGrath O'Toole have been the creative agency rebranding Network Integration. Well, like all growing companies they needed to move offices. They've taken some space in Leeds and have naturally asked us to help them with this process. We'll be making sure that they are warm and comfortable in their new home, with the latest wireless and wired networking, cloud services, managed services and managed voice. They are taking technologies that will specifically help them grow their business and enable them to be more efficient.

Solarwinds Orion Network Management

As our WAN and LAN managed services portfolio have been increasing in recent times we took the decision to invest in the best network management suite in the market at the moment. We'd been trialling Solarwinds Orion for the best part of a year, and we have taken the decision to roll it out across the whole of our estate, starting with our own equipment and then rolling out to the rest of the world during the Summer of 2011. We're very impressed with Solarwinds as a company and their products are very detailed (also read expensive!) We can monitor pretty much anything, and also manage our Cisco estate very well from one location. I can't see Orion replacing some of the other monitoring we already do for example Nagios, but augmenting it and giving us reporting and detailed analysis. I have to add that we have no plans to give our customers access to it yet, we have a lot more trialling to do, and because of the costs involved it is something we are reviewing financially as part of our managed services offerings in the future.

What I think of Microsoft 365 (Simon is Away)

Simon's away at the moment, so my name is Jonathan Riley and I'm a Professional Services Engineer here at Network Integration. I have signed us up to the Beta of Microsoft 365 beta today as we sell Google Apps and should definitely be aware of what similar products are offering within the market place in the way of features.

Now, I know a number of people will roll their eyes at this point at the word Microsoft, however MS 365 is an amazing product it is as if you have stepped from your laptop or PC into an exact copy of all your Microsoft applications and they all work flawlessly for a cloud application.

As I have now worked with Google Apps for a year now and experience the other side of the coin. Sure they have a few bugs here and there but it’s a beta at this moment in time.

MS 365 could be a serious contender for Google Apps so watch out Google there's a new kid in town...