Surely instead:

Company A ships the server to Company B.

Company B does a health check and confirms it is good.

No one in their right mind commits to installing an untested brand new server on a project. Even if company A do everything, if you schedule a week-end of downtime, they turn up with the never turned on HP server, and it still takes 24 hours to get replacements from HP, then the project is at risk. Especially with a time sensitive migration, with no downtime projects it's less of an issue but even so.

There are SOOOOO many different things you could possibly audit and check on, and the tools to do that are changing all the time.

Come up with a wish list of areas you would like to audit and I'll put together a list for you.

Well we do that

https://darait.co.uk/network-auditing/

On a TLDR level, how it works is like this.

Find out what services you are there to audit, if you don't need to check their mail server, don't touch it. Create a clear scope of what to investigate and check.

Then, you either use tools or check it manually, so if it's a mail server.

Is there a backup SMTP service for mailing out in place?
Are we monitoring blacklists?
Health of the Exchange server as a whole? the DB? Number of accounts?
Exchange Cals in order? Y/N

Once the results are in, explain it to the decision makers, have the conversation with the people who need to know.

Then, what are you going to do about it? What is the action plan?

Hmm, at £0.32 pence an hour for

8GB Ram
Xeon E3-1270
Server 2012 R2
1TB Sata in Raid

For a server in Paris, looks really great

Just saw this:

https://www.softlayer.com/info/five-hundred?utm_source=spiceworks&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=500BUILD|Storage|300x600|GIF&utm_campaign=sl_branding_spiceworks_emea&utm_term={keyword}&placement={placement}#

Looks like an IBM hosting platform? And they are giving away $500 of credit on the system?

Is that right?

@mlnews said:

You can post about it over at Gamrhaus too!

I've got too many logins as it is

Been playing these games on and off, quite handy to be able to jump into a novel, mess around with the story whilst sitting on a train ect.

https://www.choiceofgames.com

A lot of the games are free to play for the first 3 chapters.

If you have seen the film "Chappie"

Then you might enjoy the game "Choice of Robots"

@garak0410 said:

Or perhaps some huge movie promotion that will go viral!

If anyone is responsible...it can only be:

http://michaelbay.com/

General gist seems to be one of the following.

We're going to impose martial law

We're going to rehearse imposing martial law in case we need to

China is going to invade

We're rehearsing in case China invades.

@scottalanmiller said:

@g.jacobse said:

However, there seems to be a number of sites that require it in order to function 'correctly'

Any good ones? If someone thinks that their own content is that worthless, I sure don't want to waste my time on it.

Ubiquiti controller

@scottalanmiller said:

Ummm...... yeah. LOL That's not going to fly. Unmanaged, should be like 5% tops.

It's a shame because they had the most beautiful proposal of the lot of them....

@scottalanmiller

$20 a box? It's closer to £30 a box from what I have seen in this market.

@scottalanmiller said:

I don't expect VARs to be rock bottom prices. The VAR bit has value. Pure resellers like Amazon or NewEgg can have lower prices but they can't get you two hour delivery, get the vendor on the phone, look up compatibility, etc.

You'll love this. Unmanaged Cisco switch and they doubled the resell price. I was not a happy bunny.

I agree with the the right reseller does add value.

@Carnival-Boy said:

Really? I'm surprised. I didn't think there was much margin at all on hardware these days.
Having said that, I once got a quote for HP workstations from my Autodesk guy and the prices were obscene, so I guess he may have customers out there who are happy to buy at his enormous mark-up.

You've just answered your own question - For a brand new office with 20x desktops and a server, you could easily make £1000 just on reseller margins alone.

If you don't understand what the price of something should be, you would normally trust your reseller to look after you. I've just had a stack of quotes from different suppliers for something and for a generic Cisco box, they added £100 to the sale price, when Misco and all the others are £100 cheaper.

I've seen quotes that are £400-800 higher compared with the price listed on their website for the exact same product and spec. Because they can get away with it.

@Carnival-Boy said:

@Breffni-Potter, OK, but according to @scottalanmiller the consultant is also a reseller if he sells the server as well the service. What do you do? Do you sell any product?

We'll help you research and choose the product, and give you a list of vendors who are good vendors Or we will have the conversation when ordering from a vendor, we'll act as your agent, the vendor invoices you directly.

Do you want us to be your supplier so you have one company to deal with? Yes we can do that but it's not free when purchasing product, it's a service you pay for.

@Carnival-Boy said:

I like to know that whatever goes wrong there is only one company to blame and one company involved in fixing it.

Yes...But that is also a problem. Lumping all your eggs in one basket. Might be better for another topic.

And you do have a fair bit of choice in the UK for non resellers, we're a minority bunch but we are out there. It's just so much easier to make a margin on desktops, servers, switches, anything really that many businesses set themselves up around that idea as a profit centre.

This has generated a lot of replies which has been interesting to read.

@Carnival-Boy - Let me explain a conversation between you and a reseller versus a consultancy company.

CB: Hi I'm looking to buy a new server
Reseller: Well we'd recommend the Dell FI"(SJK, fantastic performance, brilliant features.
CB: Hmm, well, I was thinking of something from HP?
Reseller: Oh no no no, you don't want HP, Dell is the best because reasons.
CB: Will it do everything I need?
Reseller: Certainly!

CB: Hi, I'm looking to buy a new server
Consultant: Great, what do you need it for?
CB: File storage, email, active directory
Consultant: Ok let's talk about that and then we'll find you the right solution.

Now this is a bit blunt, but this is how the conversation plays out most of the time. The key factor to look at with a consultant is, are they offering to "supply" you the server, or are they researching and helping you choose from another supplier?

@Carnival-Boy said:

Really tempted to go back to ISDN - I never had a problem in 20 years of service!

Or get a phone system separate to BT

Never would think of using it for project management. It does look like an internal version of Facebook but if teams are using it for project management and it works, why not?

@nadnerB said:

With that in mind, why didn't they just use Google Plus?

A company who supports gay rights? No strict membership requirements? No heavy content filtering and policing?

Plus the kudos of having your own 100k plus user website.

If his managers cannot get ahold of him via skype, they'll ask him why they cannot reach him.

This is a leadership issue not a technical issue