Most email systems are not geared up for sending masses of emails out, and what we find is our clients call us the following day to report that they are having problems sending email. We check in to their server and find there’s a backlog of several hundred messages all waiting to go.

Speak to us beforehand and we can advise the best way to do this, before you break your email!

The idea – having low-cost serviced office accommodation in easy-to-get-to suburban locations – might be a good one, but from what we’ve seen of Regus so far it seems that they’re expensive to rent space from, very expensive and restrictive on the IT services they provide, and their Edinburgh location is in the middle of the biggest rush-hour traffic jam in the east of Scotland.

It’s surely better to make sure that your own office is well-equipped with good IT connectivity and systems which will let your team work from home or on their travels, leaving them free to make their own arrangements for meeting clients and colleagues face-to-face wherever and whenever they want.

Our customer was looking to cut their telephone bill, and decided to transfer their telephone line to Opal Telecom (The B2B division of Talk Talk). The first we knew about it was the early morning phone call: “We don’t have any internet access today”. After checking the router and line were okay we spoke to their ISP, Lumison who were able to tell us that BT ceased the ADSL service. Great. We’re not in a blame game here, but surely there can be some procedure where Opal/BT/ISP flag up to the customer “You are about to kill a well used ADSL service, are you sure?!”

Anyway, the client had a “spare” BT phoneline, and we arranged for Lumison to reprovide the ADSL service on to that one – still, it takes a week. (Why so long? BT Openreach. It could easily have been more than two weeks if they didn’t have the spare line.)

In the meantime, since our client is on our Silver support package we provided them with Internet access via the Vodafone network. It’s pretty limited, but at least they could still send and receive email.

Moral of the story: if you are thinking about doing anything with your phonelines, speak to your IT company who might just be able to save you a week of downtime.