Allen International was an International design consultancy based in Hammersmith, West London. I started work for them in 1997 as an Office Junior and within 2 years I was running all of their IT having displaced the IT consultancy that had been servicing them. It was an interesting time as I witnessed whole design teams migrate away from the traditional drawing board to CAD based applications on Power Macs. The team used applications such as Quark Express, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand and Mini CAD which later became Vectorworks. They also used 3D applications such as Form•Z.

I left in 1999 to join Midsummer Books whose headquarters was also in Hammersmith but also had branch offices in Fulham.

Back in ’99, Allen International focused on Retail design with a special interest in Retail Banking and Duty Free but also had a Brands/Packaging department.

In 2004 I started back at Allen International as their external IT support and my first project was to migrate them away from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. They were on a mix of G3 PowerBooks and  G4 Power Macs with the old motorola/IBM PowerPC chip architecture.

Apart from providing general IT support I also handled several projects such as:

• Upgrade Server Backup Hardware
  • Implemented AIT based tape library with Retrospect Software.
  • Later upgraded this to a Quantun LTO tape library using Achiware Presstore.
• Server Upgrades
  •  Upgraded Xserve G4 to Xserve G5 with Xserve RAID.
  • Upgraded Xseve G5 to MacMini (if you can call it an upgrade!) with Promise Thunderbolt RAID.
• Email Migration
  • Migrated the entire company from an outsourced POP3/IMAP based email service by a Managed Service Provider to Kerio MailServer (Later known as GFI Kerio MailServer).
• Fibre Leased line installation.

The arrangement changed over the years but for the most part I was contracted to attend site every Friday and then be on hand for for emergency call outs and remote support.

A part of my function was also to provide support during the Information Security part of the RFP process. Often helping the company respond to questionnaires, dealing directly with client info-sec teams and putting in place remediations to achieve the client demands.

In 2016 the company was acquired by Accenture UK Ltd (later known as Accenture Song) where I continued to provide services until March 2023.

More detail on how I can provide you with Mac support for your business.