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Hightrees Organisation has been involved with Castledown Radio, a local community radio station since they first started in 2004.  We try and work on a volunteer basis wherever possible.

Recently we have donated time to helping with some “behind the scene”  work to help make life a little easier for the volunteers and listeners.

Castledown Radio’s internet radio feed was prevously limited to RealPlayer, however we have now enabled an MP3 stream making the station available to more internet users.

We’ve been making some changes to their website, by adding a new Events Calendar which will help both volunteer presenters update the website and listeners to find out what local events are on the the broadcast area.

We are currently testing a new server based systemto help centralise file and music storage to a Fedora based server which will allow more control over content as well as providing extra tools and utilities to the volunteers to assist with running of the Castledown Radio and its radio output.

The website is now enabled for Twitter allowing website updates and news to be followed by anyone with a Twitter account.  We shall be setting up a Facebook page in the very near future to help Castledown Radio reach an even larger audience.

Hightrees Organisation Limited have recently helped Ayrmer Sotware with upgrading their VoIP system.

Orginally we worked with Ayrmer Software in 2007, trialling an in-house VoIP server using the open source software Asterisk to enable them to decide whether moving to VoIP would save money on the telephony costs.  The initial project went well and the trial system was enhanced with Digium cards to allow the VoIP system to handle both VoIP and traditional PSTN (landline) calls.

One of the main issues we that faced was that with Ayrmer Software being a busy bespoke software development house, their internet connection was often the weak point when it came to ensuring call quality on VoIP calls.

Ayrmer decided that with the cost savings they had made with VoIP meant that installing a specific ADSL connection for all VoIP traffic was justifible as well as giving extra resilience to the current office infrastructure.

Hightrees remotely configured  new Asterisk Servers in both the UK and their new office in Slovakia and upgraded their call handling mechanisms to allow seamless integration with their offices in the UK and Slovakia and by utilising a dedicated internet connection for VoIP traffic, call quality has improved drastically.

Some of the new features include :

• Call transfers between the offices, enables their customers to talk to any of their members of staff, regardless of location at normal telephone rates.
• Internal calls between the Ayrmer offices are free.
• Call Queuing to minimise delays in answering incoming calls.
• IVR System (Interactive Voice Response) allowing customers to contact members of staff directly by using a menu system and extension number.
• Email notification of new voicemails, including attaching the voicemail message to the email allowing telephone messages to be picked up and listened to without being in the offices.

All of the upgrade work was carried out outside office hours to minimise the impact to both Ayrmer and their clients.

One of the advantages of VoIP, apart from the reduction in call charges, is the flexibility that is available to the end user, dependant on the specific requirements.  Hightrees were able to configure the Ayrmer VoIP system to take into account their remote offices and staff, inter-server call handling etc with very minor changes which is not something you can normally do in a traditional Office PBX system without incurring large costs.

You can read Ayrmer software comments on their Blog which is available here

The Goa Balti needed to make some changes to their website, but unfortunately whilst they still had a live website, their hosting reseller had ceased trading.

Hightrees Organisation helped take a backup of their current site and then tracked down the current hosting company and domain registrar to enable Hasan Ahmed from The Goa to regain control of their website.  Unfortuantely due to the Data Protection Act, it took around 3 weeks to finally be able to bring the all of the accounts under the customers control.

The Goa Balti website and email is now hosted with Hightrees Organisation, and the website is currently being updated to take into account menu and pricing changes along with new imagesfrom their stylish restaurant.

Ashine Cleaning Services are an established business in supplying cleaning staff at affordable prices in the Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire area’s.

Having recently used VoIP for the first time and being impressed with the low call charges and services available compared to traditional POTS, A Shine have just moved premises and decided to take their VoIP services with them.

Hightrees Organisation helped with moving their VoIP number as well as provisioning new geo-graphical numbers to increase the local presence in surrounding areas along with installing Aastra IP phones in the new office.

As you may or may not be aware, Hightrees Organisation Limited has recently suffered hardware problems with the server which we use to host websites and provide some clients with email facilities.
Below is a timeline of the issue from start to finish

Wednesday October 29th circa 23:54

The web server was discovered to have faults on reading/writing to the hard disk, so the system was taken off line.

Thursday October 30st 8:00am

Contact was made with the hosting company to establish why the none of the services hosted by Hightrees Organisation Limited were available. We were updated with the issues that had occurred overnight.
10:30am
A replacement server was on site and the core operating system was being installed.
2:00pm
Server was briefly online whilst the operating system was installation was verified and firewall services were
configured.
6:00pm
Underlying Web hosting Software, Database Applications and additional services (mail, FTP etc) were being
installed and configured.
10:00pm
We were informed that the server would be on-line in the early hours of Friday morning. Data recovery would be started as soon as possible once the server was fully online.

Friday 31st October

00:30am
We had limited access to the server, but verified that core services were up and running. Temporary workarounds for certain email systems whilst waiting for the system accounts to be restored.
07:00am
Some basic accounts and services hosted by Hightrees had been restored.
10:00am
The failed hard drive was being analysed by hard drive specialists to see how much data could be recovered. This is a very time consuming process as the drive is examined at a low level, using specialist
software.

Saturday 1st November

02:00am
Installed empty holding pages for those sites still offline whilst waiting for results of data recovery.

Monday 3rd November

10:00am
Hard Drive contents had been examined, showing 40,000 files are technically available, these need to be
sorted into which data files belong to which accounts.
21:00pm
Attempted recovery of an old backup failed, due to corruption in file. This is most likely due to the hard disk
starting to fail and corrupting minor data before failing completely.
Minor configuration changes made to server with regard to setup of some services.

Tuesday 4th November

Waiting for an update with regarding to alternate data recovery method.

Friday 7th November

Those files that could be restored have been, however due to the level of corruption this has been fairly
limited. Any data which has not already been restored is unlikely to be recovered.

Outcome and Resolution

Hightrees Organisation Limited is not happy with the recent problems we have experienced or the loss of our customers data, and whilst we have tried everything feasible possible to try and recover any lost data with our service providers this has not been possible in some cases.
As these problems have have been beyond our control, we are actively looking at the best solution to prevent these type of problems occurring again.  As such we are looking at implementing a backup service, which is setup in such a way that we are in full control of the backups and their storage. These are likely to be held on an alternative secure server on a completely different internet service and are monitored on a daily basis with reports being emailed to a designated contact within your organisation/company.
We can only apologise for the inconvenience and we will be sending full details and summary of the backup services out as soon as we have finalised the details.

Whether you are a home user, a home office user or business – the data stored on your PC means something to you, it could be personal or it could have a financial value.

Hightrees Organisation can offer you a 1Gb or 20Gb fully functional online backup account, FREE OF CHARGE for 30 days so that you can use to backup your data.

Please contact us for more information – we are sorry but this offer is only open  to New Customers.