Case Study

Ethical Property buys buildings for use by Voluntary and Community Organisations (VCOs). They realised that many VCOs do not prioritise IT and so began to offer a range of services to tenants in one of their properties.

Tenants in one property were offered access to a comprehensive email system, including centralised anti-virus and anti-spam control; shared calendars and contacts; email access via the web, and back up for their email data.

Ethical Property are expanding the communal IT services offered through the introduction of central servers for use by tenants. The expanded services will include:

• Higher specification servers at a lower purchase and maintenance cost
• Reliable and affordable IT
• Improved communal services such as intranet, electronic room booking and competitively priced phone calls

Services offered to tenants initially are user account administration and support; Fileshare and email account administration.

They are able to take advantage of the high degree of technical knowledge Ethical Property have gained, ensuring they can take full advantage of the benefits a server can bring, and feel secure in the knowledge it is properly managed and maintained. The Ethical Property team recommends anyone exploring shared back office arrangements:

1. researches numbers of users and charges to ensure projects break even
2. ensures that the hardware is of a high enough specification to cope with future expansion.

They found themselves having to provide some additional memory/back-up hardware to ensure the servers could cope with the extra services added.