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CS Davidson is a civil engineering firm operating in the Southcentral Pennsylvania area. Founded nearly a century ago in 1923, they manage civil, municipal, structural engineering projects, with 100 employees working out of three offices.
As an active firm, relying on resource-intensive software, CS Davidson requires a robust and reliable IT environment. That’s why they work with MicroXpress.
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“We were growing and needed more IT help,” says Jordan Good, Engineer, CS Davidson.
Around ten years ago, after a period of consistent growth, the leadership at CS Davidson realized they were reaching the limit of their current IT support capabilities. They had an internal IT staff member, who, until that time, was generally capable of handling day-to-day support tasks. However, as they grew, they began to outpace his capabilities.
“He needed additional help,” says Jordan. “So we brought MicroXpress aboard to assist with the day-to-day stuff.”
That’s when CS Davidson called MicroXpress. They knew that from time to time, their internal IT staff member would need to escalate certain issues to ensure the firm could maintain productivity. MicroXpress became a reliable partner for additional IT resources when required.
“MicroXpress has been assisting us for a number of years,” says Jordan. “But we weren’t fully utilizing their capabilities, because we had an in-house IT guy.”
Sometime later, CS Davidson’s IT staff member decided to move on. In considering whether to hire a new in-house staff member or simply hand over the management to MicroXpress, for Jordan, the choice was easy to make.
“Our in-house IT guy moved on, and all of that fell into my lap,” says Jordan. “I’m not an IT guy, I’m a bridge engineer. So that’s when we asked MicroXpress to provide some additional services for us.”
From that point on, in addition to daily help desk support, MicroXpress also handled the management of CS Davidson’s servers, and provided strategic IT consulting services as well.
“One of the first big things we did was move away from the in-house server we had and move everything to the cloud,” says Jordan. “MicroXpress helped us navigate us through that, and it could not have gone smoother.”
Over the past decade, the cloud has rapidly become one of the most integral technologies in modern society. Both for private consumers and business purposes, the cloud has offered a range of benefits, from convenient access to data to cost-savings in hardware reduction.
Unfortunately, harnessing the cloud means undergoing migration, which is a complicated process. An improperly managed migration can result in a range of negative consequences:
• During the transition, the business could permanently lose key data with no backup or redundancies to replace it.
• The migration, already expensive, could take longer than expected and add additional downtime to the staff’s work life.
• Once it finally gets installed and launched, the platform is overly complicated and difficult to learn, leading to more downtime for the staff.
An error-prone process like this requires expert planning and management — CS Davidson trusted MicroXpress to manage it for them.
“It was a huge pain for us, prior to that,” says Jordan. “It was the middle of the pandemic, and our email was constantly going down when we had the in-house server.”
Given that they were working remotely in the middle of a pandemic, email was critical for CS Davidson. Unfortunately, their unreliable onsite server kept failing, making it difficult for their staff to keep in touch.
Working with Jordan, MicroXpress managed the migration process, ensuring it went smoothly, and didn’t disrupt the firm’s operations. Everything was taken care of over the course of a weekend, and the new systems were ready for use Monday morning. The migration was so effective, in fact, that many CS Davidson staff members later asked Jordan when the switch was going to happen.
“I had several people come up to me and say ‘I never expected this to work’,” says Jordan. “Everyone was so pleased it went so smoothly.”
This is just one of the major projects MicroXpress has handled for CS Davidson. In addition to moving their email systems to the cloud, they also helped them deploy a firm-wide Microsoft Teams platform, and arrange a fibre internet connection.
“MicroXpress helped us work with Comcast, and we’re now on a dedicated fiber line into our building,” says Jordan. “We now have a reliable and faster connection for our servers on site.”
IT resources have never been as important as they are now as a majority of professionals work from home. In order for organizations like CS Davidson to stay connected and productive while working remotely, they need the right technologies and processes in place.
“It’s not uncommon for myself and MicroXpress to be troubleshooting someone’s home internet connection,” says Jordan. “It’s been a challenging time, and they’ve been very responsive.”
Due to how quickly the pandemic developed, many organizations were unable to prepare for the shift to a remote work setting. Doing so would have required careful planning, methodical execution of new processes, and expert implementation of new technologies. Fortunately for CS Davidson, they can rely on MicroXpress for expert assistance.
The MicroXpress team ensured that everyone working remotely for CS Davidson had what they needed to do so productively and securely. This is especially important for CS Davidson, given their reliance on robust engineering software like Civil 3D and Revit. MicroXpress made sure that even those solutions were easily accessible and optimized in the remote work environment.
“If we can get people access to those programs, it really doesn’t matter if they’re in the office or at their house,” says Jordan.
MicroXpress has been providing professional IT services to Central PA businesses since 1989. Watch this brief video to find out the Top Five Reasons so many local businesses are switching to MicroXpress for their IT support.
