Consulting Services - Professional IT Services for the Small and Medium Business

Consulting services are explicitly directed toward supporting your IT organization. Whether we are delivering on the implementation of a new technology, providing technical assistance for a particular technology or simply filling in as part of your staff for a period of time, our focus is on supporting your team. We find that the better your team looks, the better we look.

Our engagements are customized to fit your particular needs. We identify four arrangements that describe the majority of our consulting work.

• Projects have a defined goal and duration. A project might consist of migration to or implementation of a new technology, or a study for your executive team defining a particular group of business needs and identifying technologies and procedures that can meet those requirements in a cost effective manner.
• Technology support. Many businesses have a first rate IT organization for handling virtually all day to day needs. Often such a team can benefit greatly by having an experienced consultant available for a particular technology. Windows Active Directory, Exchange, SQL and security often fit this category. Our organization is “on call” for many businesses throughout the metropolitan area.
• Recurring Services. There may be need for a consultant to visit your business on a regular basis, perhaps one day every week. An example might be a small organization that does not need an IT staff person on site every day. Or a larger organization that needs, for instance, somebody well trained with Exchange to be on site one day a week.
• Supplemental staffing. There are cases when a person is needed full time for short period of time. This could be 1 week, 2 weeks, even three months, most often to take the place of a key employee who is away, perhaps on leave, for training, or as backfill while a new technology is rolled out.

Project Methodology
We identify 5 phases of a project: assessment, design, testing and validation, pilot and implementation. We typically account for each of these in a project, regardless of size. In a small project the assessment and design phases may take only part of a day. Our experience has been that this process oriented approach consistently saves time and leads to a seamless implementation, generally with no unplanned down time.

The IT staffs of larger companies are often well qualified and interested in participating in the project. We welcome this, and typically structure the project around a series of meetings to which all are welcome. We see our role at these meetings as facilitators. We may choose to begin with your design, and proceed to discuss the underlying technology, how it works and how we expect it to behave in your environment. Our goal is to continue to work with the proposed design until there is agreement that we as a group have arrived at the correct design for your organization. We will then provide documentation defining the design, to be circulated and reviewed by all participants. This iterative process has consistently led to successful projects that may involve diverse groups, needs and opinions within an organization.

The project methodology that we bring to you will be customized to your needs, the people involved, the nature of your project and where you happen to be within the project cycle. Our pre-sales work is critical to getting this right. Over the years we have developed some creative and unique consulting arrangements that address particular requirements and constraints of our clients. Always our goal is to do our best to get you to where you going.

Technical Expertise
Collaborative Technology Services encompasses strong expertise with the traditional IT infrastructure services. Our focus is the Microsoft platform, though our consultants have a breadth of experience coming from many other technologies. We have strong technical expertise with the technologies listed below.

•	Active Directory	•	SharePoint Portal Server
•	Exchange	•	Storage solutions (local, SAN, NAS).
•	Workstation deployment and management.	•	Backup and recovery.
•	Security	•	Service availability and business continuance.
•	SQL server	•	WAN / LAN infrastructure.
		•	Citrix