IT services and support for local businesses

How do large companies manage their IT infrastructure? They either run their own IT department, or they contract another large company to run their IT department for them.

So how do small and medium sized companies manage their IT infrastructure? Well they struggle along and somehow make do until they are big enough to run their own IT department. Along the way they buy many boxes of software (which mostly stay on the shelf), download freebies from the internet (which is often when problems start) or try to get a member of staff, who likes computers, to sort out the problems. Then one day they find out that their company relies on software which no longer works on a new PC and for which they have no valid backups.

It doesn't have to be like that. We offer a range of services and support to cover most small to medium sized business. Our work covers a great range and we are always looking for the right solution for our clients as opposed to the easiest one to sell.

We regularly deal with cross platform integration issues. Things like your Mac OS X users sharing files and email with your Windows users and both of them being able to pull information from your legacy database.

Advising about, implementing and providing training and support on open source solutions. Open source software is software you can use for free! It has many other advantages, such as if you get a problem you can get it fixed without having to wait for a software giant to decide to add a fix to their software. It also means that nobody can tell you that you can't buy that version any more when you buy a new PC. We believe many small and medium businesses miss out on open source software. Open source is already in everday use. Emails will go through several open source mail servers on their way to delivery. Web sites will be running on the Linux open source operating system, hosted on the Apache open source web server, written in an open source development language such as PHP, Perl or Python and using an open source database engine such as MySQL. There is a huge amount of open source software available for Windows. If you need a office product (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, etc.) there is OpenOffice. If you need a graphics editor there is Gimp. The list is endless, and don't forget your server. Install Linux and Samba on some low cost hardware (you can even use an old PC) and your PCs will treat it just like a Microsoft server. You can even get free software which will give you all the features of Microsoft Exchange (including shared resources in Outlook). We can help source and install open sorce software for you which sould save you money in the long term.

We provide technical work on web sites to complement the marketing side of Ruffit Integrated. Everything from simple feedback forms to full content management systems to allow you to maintain your own web site from within your web browser.

We have experience of many different products and the necessary problem solving, so we can usually puzzle our way through getting something to work that has never worked properly because it wasn't configured correctly in the first place.

We are resellers of AVG antivirus software and other computer protection.

Though we provide solutions using a variety of software, we appreciate that Microsft products are part of the majority of small businesss and also provide trouble shooting on a range of Microsoft products, especially those more commonly used by small businesses.

We tend not to sell new PCs and laptops, because this is a high volume market more suited to large warehouse based companies. However, we do have access to a range of manufacturer reconditioned products at great prices.