Desperately looking for IT support

Ella108

Here is the issue I am facing

Recently joined small admin business(2 employees, 2 part time), where client privacy is of utmost importance ( data protection, backup, files, GDPR etc)

The person who I work with does not want to invest in IT.

We have lot of scanning, printing jobs, and phone calls, bookings, etc. We have MS 365, reasonable laptops and internet connection.

However, our office phone looks archaic, we occasionally use fax and I was wondering if I could somehow upgrade to VOIP and eventually have it all setup so as to work from home ( some in same business have set up work from home, so it can be done )

How much would IT or telecom company charge

Ash.J.Williams

You can rent the whole shebang as a service and not require an infrastructure upgrade.

First Irish company I found

https://nuacom.ie/best-voip-phone-system/

Take a look and you might get a few ideas.

Regarding file storage, it's infrastructure vs cloud, depreciating assets vs pay as you consume, the cloud will give you the flexibility to work from home and not require an office

z80CPU

Over 20 years ago the outfit I worked for invested in a shiney website to sell their home user stuff on but seriously neglected the bandwidth. So that the website crashed when it was visited by a lot of customers. if the outfit wanted a better outcome, they would need to buy more bandwidth.

In theory, a voip could be purchased and installed for a fairly reasonable low cost. ... And that's not even considering the SLA - service level agreement with the provider. This is critical and I suggest you read up on this and google it.

Ash.J.Williams

set your colleague up with a meeting with an IT Security consultant too to show him the importance of investment if privacy is important 😀

Buddy Bubs

VOIP is relatively cheap to set up and pays for itself quickly, are you only talking about 4 phones? That won't cost much.

I set up approx 30 user VoIP system across 4 sites in 3 countries and I remember thinking it was cheap. That was 10 years ago though and our bills are relatively small each month compared to ISDN lines. VTSL is the company if you want a starting point, but there are loads of them..

As for your other IT queries, that's completely a case by case basis someone will have to scope the project.

You could combine your VOIP query into the general IT upgrades to get someone interested in taking you on as a client, small companies sometimes struggle to get an IT consultant interested in them

ItHurtsWhenIP

You mention you're using MS 365. There is a capability in Teams to include telephony:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/first-things-to-know-about-calls-in-microsoft-teams-2b883a81-dd15-41bd-a6ba-39deef141027

I heard about it from the folks in Diagtech, Thurles who were rolling it out for their customers.

dunworth1

really depends where you are based.

average hourly rate can be €120+ cheaper if you are not in Dublin

some companies have a monthly fee support offering which normally includes support and monthly/quarterly onsite preventive maintenance visits

most companies will do a free site survey where they will send an engineer out to identify faults/potential upgrades.

the big issue though if the business does not want to spend money which i always find hard to understand as most businesses would be crippled without IT infrastructure. yet in these businesses you will see directors driving around in €100k+ cars etc. but wont spend a few hundred euro a month on IT.