Riverina Group Training & Employment Ltd. is a local, community owned, not-for-profit group training company. Their Board of Directors are volunteers drawn from the business community and a General Manager with vast experience in working with small to large business.
We are GTES's IT partner!
From their network, to their web presence and IT strategy, we are
proud to have been able to provide this leading business with the
cutting edge technologies they need to succeed in their ventures.
We designed GTES's network to have multiple points of failure, so if a server was unavailable it wouldn't take the entire corporate IT services with it (which is typical of Small Business Server style setup).
This was achieved in a cost effective way by using Software as a Service offerings from Google and ourselves. While Google runs their communication, we run their web presence and Windows based terminal servers allow them to use the application they need in a carefully constructed sandbox.
We encourage web based applications, freeing the user of desktop and platforms.
All applications at GTES are either web based or accessible via a RDP connection to a Windows server. This provides GTES the freedom to run any operating system they wish on the desktops. GTES has a nice harmony of Ubuntu and OS X desktops and laptops.
A Linux box running SSLExplorer provides remote access to the GTES environment while the users are on the move. SSLExplorer delivers a VPN connection via a web browser, uses a Java based applet to launch a remote desktop connection. It's a no software or IT guy required solution for the clients.
Google delivers their email via web browser or mobile device.
Our search for a collaboration suite ended at Google Apps for Domains. Previously run on a Microsoft Small Business Server, we switched GTES over to Google's hosted collaboration suite to meet their business's growing needs.
The majority of GTES's staff are out and about in the field. Google Apps for Domains proved to be the most cost effective solution for mobile email and calendar access.
GTES's web presence runs on Drupal in a XEN virtualized sandbox. We used the integrated XML-RPC features in Drupal to exchange data between Sage CRM. A simple .NET application provides the GTES staff an easy way to synchronise data between their corporate environment and the GTES web site.
We developed a custom application for GTES that uses Google maps to visualise all the apprentices, each field officer (GTES staff) is denoted by a marker of a different colour.
GTES's servers are run as Guest operating system on XEN based host running CentOS Linux. We keep good known copies of these images (which is essentially their entire server setup) and mixed with a bit of networking magic are able to reproduce their entire corporate network off-site in no time.