What problem did the customer have?

A small shop in Switzerland asked us to provide in-house solutions for their daily IT needs.  They operate within their region on a relatively small scale (15 staff).

We identified their needs as follows: backups, e-mail, calendar, contact, internal messaging, file sharing and (shared) office document editing. They needed state-of-the-art security concepts and technology in place and needed to be sure none of their business secrets left Switzerland (as required by law).

What solution did we provide?

After careful elaboration of their needs we came up with the following offer, to be deployed by them in-house or on a trusted third-party's hardware:

General data management and backups of home-directories and shared working directories we set up a ZFS storage with hourly, daily and weekly snapshots. For e-mail, contacts and calendars we offered Zimbra, which includes a web-mail client with their usual IMAP (postfix) and SMTP servers. For internal messaging we set up a Mattermost chat instance. For file-sharing (both internal and with customers) we set up a Seafile instance paired with an OnlyOffice installation for editing office documents.

To guarantee remote access to their digital infrastructure we suggested setting up WireGuard VPN.

Was this a success?

After thorough consideration we agreed on hosting the Zimbra and Mattermost instances ourselves and set the rest up on in-house hardware acquired by the client.

The outcome is a success to the full and the solution is applied to other customers as well.

What does the customer say?

"Anfangs waren wir etwas zurückhaltend, vor allem aufgrund der aggressiven Werbung der großen Anbieter in diesem Bereich. Aber die eingesetzten Lösungen erweisen sich als stabiler und zuverlässiger, als wir es uns hätten vorstellen können. Und falls es doch einmal zu Problemen kommt, können wir uns darauf verlassen, dass das kompetente Team der Oetiker+Partner AG immer schnell zur Stelle ist und Lösungen bietet."