For anyone who looks forward to their slice of ITbuilder insight each month, we apologise for remaining quiet through the month of April. It was a busy month for us project-wise, deploying a couple of new Cisco IP Telephony systems and a large hosted ‘cloud’ desktop solution.  Such is the buzz about all things Cloud, we’re going to have a crack at separating fact from fiction on this subject. The world of IT is, by very definition, complex and there’s no real reason why, as a business, you need to understand the ins and outs of how it works. You just need to know that it does work and that your business can run at optimum levels to do all those things that marketing people talk about – improve productivity, increase profits and have a team of motivated staff who are willing to go that extra mile for you....

We can all agree that nobody...

It’s March 2012. We are a little over four months away from what is being described as ‘the greatest show on Earth’.

It should be, it’s costing the business end of £12 billion and whatever your views on the Games, the disruption to London or the quite staggering £80 million cost of Danny Boyle’s opening and closing ceremonies, one thing is for certain, the IT infrastructure that is being put into place before and during the Games is going to have positive knock-on effects for years to come.

Perhaps the most wide-reaching benefit of having the Olympic Games in London is the introduction of a city-wide wi-fi hotspot being developed by mobile giant O2.

The deal, which O2 claim won’t cost councils or – crucially – the taxpayer anything, will see free access given to residents and visitors to Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea through a new wireless network infrastructure dubbed 'Metro' and based on hardware wired into street lights.

These are technologies that, if successful, have the...

It’s February. It’s cold, Fabio Capello has just hindered our chances at the Euros and The Queen has just celebrated 60 years in the hot seat. We’re only 10 days in. What else can we look forward to?

If recent views are to be listened to, we can look forward to the end of email as we know it.

More and more email we receive comes complete with a line at the end saying something to the effect of ‘reduce your carbon footprint by only printing this email if it’s absolutely necessary’. A perfectly valid point and one which very few can argue against, but what about a line at the beginning saying ‘only send this email if it’s absolutely necessary’?

  We did some very basic research in the office this week. We all measured how many emails we received on one given day (Tuesday). The winner got 59. Of that total, 28 were genuine emails from clients, suppliers or stakeholders that required a response. The rest were a heady mix of e-marketing, newsletters and the bane of everyone’s life, the ‘reply...

To ease you gently into 2012, instead of giving you relevant, thought-provoking yet hard-hitting information from the complex world of IT, we thought we’d introduce you to our six new staff members, all of whom have hit the ground running and are helping to make ITbuilder the best IT support company in Hertfordshire!

Without further ado, here they are –



My name is Ben Richmond

My title at ITbuilder is Support Trainee

In an average day, I get in, find myself a desk to sit at and then set about the tasks assigned to me. They vary so dramatically that a list would take up too much space. I’ll have a quick snack around 1ish, then I’ll crack on.

My career in IT has just started. I’d always had a keen interest in IT and I did my A-Levels while holding down a part-time job. Then I found an apprenticeship course which is when ITbuilder employed me as an apprentice on a 7-8 month course.

I like working at ITbuilder because it’s a friendly and motivated environment. As a new member of staff I was a little anxious at first but everyone made me feel very welcome and they are helpful if I have any questions.

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Since the day we started ITbuilder, our fundamental goal has been to ensure every client can go about their daily business knowing that their IT is solid, robust and scalable and can create efficiencies and streamlined processes that have a positive effect on their bottom line.

It’s not rocket science, it’s the beating heart of our service offering and we are proud of what we do for our clients.

That said, we are also a business and we also need what our clients have. A reliable IT infrastructure with products and services at great prices from some of the world’s biggest technology companies...which leads us nicely into the topic of this month’s post – Dynamics CRM 2011 from Microsoft.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is a Customer Relationship Management program, and in their words, it is ‘designed to give businesses like yours easy-to-use tools to deliver consistent, efficient service that enhances customer loyalty to sustain long-term business and increase lifetime value. Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a comprehensive customer service solution that is familiar to users, completely customisable to your business processes, and can scale to meet enterprise demands’.

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First off, we’d like to announce the winners of last month’s competition to win an HTC Radar handset – they were Zekarias Dubale from Westminster Electrical, David Matthews of Dutch & Dutch and Matthew Allen from Quattro Consultancy. Congratulations to all of you and we hope you enjoy using it!

Second, and on a slightly more sombre note, we’ve decided to dedicate this month’s post to a true legend of the computing world who died in October. It’s unlikely you would have ever heard of him but we guarantee that every single day, you use the technology he invented.

The world mourned upon hearing the news of the untimely death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, but the death of Dennis Ritchie, the man whose work shaped much of the modern technological age we live in went largely unnoticed.

Much of Jobs’ success was built on his visionary intuition to build products that people genuinely found compelling and wanted to use, but Ritchie, who was one of the co-inventors of the UNIX operating system and...

Welcome to October’s blog from ITbuilder.

This month we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of ITbuilder so we thought we’d give you a timeline of how ITbuilder started (and to remind ourselves how the company has grown) and if you read right to the end, we have a great FREE competition where one reader will win a fantastic new HTC Radar handset!

This also gives us an opportunity to thank our clients, present and future, for putting their trust in us to effectively and efficiently support their IT – we consider it an honour to work for you and look forward to doing so for many years.

The ITbuilder story

2000 – With ITbuilder a mere twinkle in the eye, friends James Naylor and Jon Myall started working on informal, small-scale IT projects for friends and family during evenings and weekends while they were both employed at 3Com, a global, multi-billion dollar networking company.

Early 2001 – 3Com’s main cash-cow, the network interface card business, was rapidly declining and the company started slashing or selling various divisions as well as reducing the workforce from over 12,000 to fewer than 2,000. Redundancy loomed for James and Jon (albeit with momentum growing in the pair’s embryonic IT support business) and at the same time, the first dotcom bubble was on the brink of collapse.

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We’ve been getting more and more enquiries for VoIP telephone solutions so we thought we’d explain what it was, and give you a case study on one of our clients who has successfully integrated VoIP technology into their business with amazing results.

This month, we want to tell you about a recent and exciting development at ITbuilder. We’ve entered into a partnership with Cisco Systems – one of the world’s biggest technology companies – to showcase their new range of network, security, telephony and wireless hardware specifically targeted at the SME market, i.e. you and your business.

Our newest recruit and quite possibly the nicest chap ever to install a Windows service pack goes under the spotlight in this week ITB-blog.