There has been a lot of recent press from Microsoft regarding the launch of their new cloud service Office 365. This service gives anywhere, anytime access to your email, documents, contacts, and calendars on pretty much any Web-enabled device.

Sirona are happy to announce that we have added Office 365 to our services and we are ready to advise you on how they can fit into your business.  Lots more information is available in the new Office 365 section of our website, alternatively please give the office a call on 0161 850 1000 to speak to someone in person.

We are pleased to announce the opening of our new office in Merseyside which allows us to better serve customers in Liverpool, North Wales and surrounding areas. The office is in Birkenhead, about ten minutes from Liverpool city centre and only half an hour from the Welsh border.

If you have any requirements in this area please do not hesitate to contact us.

Our Technical Director, Nick Lloyd, was recently interviewed by Microsoft for an article in their Small Business Newsletter.  This is a monthly publication which goes out to thousands of businesses around the country and the article focused on the different ways to buy IT equipment and support services.  To read the article in full please click here.

We recently migrated one of our customers from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 using our Zero Downtime Migration (ZDMT) strategy.  The traditional way of moving from one server operating system to another or replacing aging hardware is to take the network down completely.  This kind of work obviously can’t be done during the working week, leading to staff having to work weekends and increased project costs for out-of-hours support. 

Sirona are pioneering Zero Downtime Migrations (ZDMT) in the UK.  This industry leading strategy allows migrations to be done during working hours, with no server downtime and minimal staff disruption.  The end result is a stress free solution, with dramatically reduced costs. 

Zero Downtime Migrations (ZDMT) involve building a new network environment at Sirona’s offices, complete with all of your company data and line of business applications (LOBs).  The new environment is thoroughly tested to ensure no compatibility issues exist and that all LOB apps work as expected.  This testing can easily incorporate your own staff, so that you’re happy everything is working as you would expect.  This kind of testing can be very important with LOB apps, as you will often know them better than even our most experienced IT team.

Once the new environment is running exactly as it needs to we will transfer it from our office to yours.  The new server will run in parallel to your existing server, with all data synchronised between the two environments.  This ensures that whichever stage of the migration users are at, they will always have access to the most up-to-date data.

The result of the Zero Downtime Migration process is a stress-free migration.  Both systems can co-exist for as long as is necessary and if any unforeseen problems do arise it’s very simple to roll back to the old environment.  If you would be interested in learning more about this solution please contact Managing Director Alex Rimmer on 0161 850 1000.