FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

I still do not fully understand what Office Consort can do for my business. Can you give a brief summary?
Office Consort basically provides all your database, document management and shared resources as a centrally hosted system on your computer system. This means your entire workforce can access this central resource from any Internet, or LAN network throughout the world. Everyone is looking at a the same database record, or document. Document management is also a key element to Office Consort, so you can effectively streamline the life-cycle of your documents. Integrated with this is the ability to store all your office records within Office Consort, be this an e-mail, fax, scanned letter, or digital camera picture, as well as any other type of file you may deal with.

What does this mean down on the ground? In short it makes your office available 24 hours, seven days a week to anyone in your business. All satellite offices and remote personnel have a unified and central system to work on. Office Consort allows you to fully realise the paperless office concept, as well as provide an affordable and robust remote workforce. Working from home, inside, or outside normal working hours provides a major step forward in office efficiency.

What sort of hardware do I need for Office Consort?
Office Consort is a client/server development, thus consists on 2 (or more parts): The central server and all the client machines. The central server is the main hub of the system and is more than capable on any computer, however as a guide a 3.6Ghz PC is more than capable of running a 30+ user environment extremely quickly.

The central server listens for client computers making data/document requests, accesses the underlying database and finally compresses and encrypts this information and sends it back to the client. Using commonly available PC’s Office Consort provides an inexpensive method which is both powerful and fast.

Office Consort can also be designed to use more than one computer, each running an Office Consort server, thus providing unlimited central server power to service a massive userbase. Give us a call, so we can better discuss your needs, as Office Consort can be configured to any possible user configuration.

Does Office Consort work with my existing office software?
Yes it does. Office Consort works with any office type software and hardware. You can use your existing spreadsheet and wordprocessors. Office Consort works with all and any file formats you may use.

Can I use Office Consort with my ADSL connection?
Yes indeed. Office Consort is specifically designed to run over broadband, as well as serve clients using a 56K modem, or ISDN. Office Consort uses fast compression techniques to use as little available bandwidth as possible.

The current UK broadband is limited to a 256 Kbs upload speed, which is the first limit Office Consort may encounter. With T1 leased lines and SADSL then this limit is not an issue. Office Consort can easily run a 30+ user environment over the UK broadband. While we always quote a “30+” user environment, Office Consort is more than capable of more users and in most cases the examples given here will easily support twice this number, or more.

How fast is Office Consort?
Extremely fast, however due to the nature of client/server applications and your Internet connection, speed can be a subjective, or relative matter. For example Office Consort will be faster if you are the only one using it at a specific time. The more users on the system at any given time will degrade the speed. This is due to several elements: The central server has to deal with more requests for CPU time. The Internet connection has a specific limit to bandwidth, so a lot of information will reduce the speed of each individual connection

Office Consort is designed specifically for speed. We aim to provide information in the millisecond range rather than the second time scale. In real-life tests on 30+ user systems we can locate the central server over the Internet, query the database to find a single record out of possibly 25,500 within 125 milliseconds. A normal MS Word document can be located and displayed in under 1 second. These are general times, as they can go either way depending on several aspects noted above. Our aim is to provide a performance akin to working on your local computer. Office Consort is designed so it feels as if the information and documentation is held on your computer.

At Co-ordinated Computer Integration we treat speed and usability with the greatest importance. So much so that Office Consort will constantly display to you the time each action took, so you can relate to speed very effectively. Give us a call to discuss your needs and we can better detail the speeds you are likely to see.

How much will Office Consort cost my business?
As a bespoke development, Office Consort requires us to discuss your requirements and quote a final price. Unless your requirements are far in excess of the standard Office Consort model the guide price is £950/user. For this price you get Office Consort developed to your requirements. As stated, it is best to give us a call to discuss your needs, however it would require a major alteration from the normal to alter the guide price. The per user price is also only for your internal business users. Office Consort comes with unlimited customer usage rights, so if you wanted to share your information with your customers you would not be charged for this.

Co-ordinated Computer Integration are here to help you make the most of Office Consort and the centralisation of your office functions and document management. We discuss your needs and provide a final quoted price. We are more than willing to negotiate specific needs and requirements and long term plans. We can provide training, consultancy, as well as application development. We specialise in bringing computers to smaller businesses than to charge small businesses out of technology.