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The Owl Barn case studyBackgroundEstablished in 1995, the Owl Barn Gift Catalogue is a mail order business based in Norfolk, England, which serves regular customers from around the world. The Owl Barn aims to keep their entire collection in stock, and will endeavour to ship customer choices from the catalogue as soon as possible. The Owl Barn manages an e-commerce website and it is vital that they maintain a policy of maximum confidentiality and security regarding customer data and transactions made over the Internet. The Owl Barns' Secure Server mechanism protects the integrity of any financial information a customer transmits through their site. Problem and solutionRobbie Murray of the Owl Barn met RapidHost at a specialist Filemaker Exhibition seven years ago. At the time, The Owl Barn was a fledgling company, with no web presence, managing a database with Filemaker 3. As The Owl Barn introduced their e-commerce site, RapidHost took over the central hosting of the website to ensure security and development of the site, but still had to transfer daily files of information from the central server to The Owl Barn's own server and vice versa. In 2005, The Owl Barn upgraded their entire system to Filemaker 7 running from a dedicated server managed by RapidHost. Robbie Murray comments: "This was a quantum leap for us and RapidHost was integral in making the transition as smooth as possible". The system upgrade meant that a single remote server could be accessed in real time from five different locations. Robbie continues: "We have a warehouse, a satellite office and various home workers, so it was great to be able to access one central database knowing it was live information we were accessing". OutcomeThe Owl Barn now uses Filemaker 8 and has a structure that will enable new satellite websites to be established from the same database and server as they expand their product ranges. Chris Astridge, MD of The Owl Barn concludes, "For the past year, our fledgling web business has been fully integrated into our back-end processes, which proved to be a smooth and robust development. From the point of view of ourselves as an SME, the facility to access the remote server from any location allows us to involve outworkers for order processing at peak times, and management to interrogate, maintain and develop the system at any time (even on holiday!). As self taught developers, working in partnership with RapidHost ensures that when we get out of our depth, professional help is only a phone call away". The Owl Barn Contact Details
The Owl Barn Rapidhost Contact Details
RapidHost Ltd
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