“IT is the driver of our business. Our migration to SharePoint has been a tremendous step forward.”

David Anslow

Founding Partner

The Anslow Partnership

Building on Microsoft

The Anslow Partnership is a firm of building services engineers. If you have 20,000 - 100,000+ square feet of office space, they will tell you exactly how to cable, heat, light, plumb and cool it. David Anslow started the business in 2004 and it has grown to 22 people in London, with another three in their sister company in Dublin.

The company started with the most basic IT platform imaginable – a couple of laptops. However, as it grew, Anslow realised that IT was fundamental to the business. It helps them communicate with their clients, gives them access to specialist engineering software and helps them organise and tap into their vast knowledge base of engineering solutions.

Sharing the knowledge

The company uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to store the records of the hundreds of projects that the company has completed. These files are available on the intranet, which gives every member of staff access to all the tools they need to do their work. As it is consistent across the business, it helps ensure quality control.

“Everything that we do is, as far as possible, template-based,” says Anslow. Standardised documents give fee-earning engineers easy access to standard solutions for a lot of their work. Reducing the margin of error also benefits clients and saves everyone money. They save even more money because they don’t need to rent extra office space to store paper records.

The engineering approach

Working with EJCIT, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Anslow took a very pragmatic approach to deploying Windows Vista and the Office 2007 system. They started with three volunteers, one in each department of the business. These guinea pigs quickly became champions of the new products. At the time of writing, they are migrating Windows Vista and the Office 2007 system across the whole business.

They are particularly keen on one feature of Windows Vista. With much of their work being on site with clients, they use a lot of laptops. 35,000 laptops are stolen each year in the UK and only a handful of them are ever returned. Anslow’s machines contain lots of sensitive project information. This makes Windows Vista’s BitLocker feature very attractive because it encrypts all this data. If a laptop were stolen, the company’s reputation wouldn’t disappear with it.

According to David Anslow, the company has moved seamlessly from an old technology platform to the very latest one. It gives them a leading edge in their industry. “Our clients will take comfort from that,” he says. “It shows the world that we are leading from the front rather than reacting to the market.”

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Find out about the EJC IT Rapid Deployment Service for Windows Vista and Office 2007, including SharePoint Server.  Click here

Find out more about The Anslow Partnership, their services, clients and work.  Click here