Technology:

The technology behind it

Expert Agent is entirely based on the web, which means:

you don’t have to buy and maintain expensive servers or maintenance contracts more >>
you can access data from anywhere – the office, home, vendors’ premises, your car, from holiday more >>
what someone inputs into Expert Agent is available to all other users instantly they push ‘save’ – wherever they are.

It also means that you actually have fewer potential points of failure than with a PC-based software. Let us explain: with PC or server-based software, if either your PC, or the server or the software stops working, so do you! With Expert Agent, there are no servers in your office to break down, and if your PC stops working, you can work from any other PC with an internet connection. And if your internet connection fails, just decamp to the local Starbucks or your home and pick up where you left off.

Note that web-based is different to web-enabled. The latter still means you have to download software onto your PC. So if you want to work at any other PC, you’ll have to install the software on that one too, perhaps with the cost of an additional licence, and there can be a lag for data that’s input on one PC before it’s visible on another – particularly important when co-ordinating diary appointments, or if two people are telephoning their way through the same list of applicants, for example.

Secure infrastructure for your peace of mind

Expert Agent is built and hosted on the most secure systems possible. We understand that you are entrusting us with one of your most important assets – your records. We know that you, quite rightly, demand the highest standards in this area – our equipment is worth in nearly £¼million and our monthly hosting charges are, well, vast.

For the technically-minded her is more detail on our systems.

ASP .NET – Expert Agent is written in Microsoft’s ASP .NET environment. Our developers are partners in the business and very experienced. We have a formal development-test-release process that uses Microsoft Sourcesafe, separate development and separate test servers.

SQL Server Databases – we have shunned the free open-source database products such as MySql in favour of Microsoft SQL Server. This decision has committed us to considerable expense ongoing but also guaranteed stability, security and a ready availability of talented, qualified professionals to help us.

Hosting – we host Expert Agent in two locations. Our primary servers are the very latest high performance Dell units located in a hosting building called Blue Square in Maidenhead. There, we host four separate racks of equipment – each comprising separate web servers connected to a very high powered database server with 32-disk RAID array for high-speed primary storage and a separate SAN drive secondary storage. We have carefully calculated the maximum number of users per rack so that we can scale up as we grow without any performance impacts. We run at about 50% of our current capacity. Each rack connects to backup web servers, backup power supplies and a backup device. We have multiple firewalls, routing and routing devices. All of this is designed to ensure that we do not have a single point of failure.

Our second set of servers (six high specification Dells) are located at JPCI’s bunker in Wiltshire. This uses SQL log shipping and is permanently updated, ready for use. We’ve never yet had to use them…

We have a comprehensive disaster and failure recovery plan that includes 24/7 server monitoring and support via alertsite.com. Robots log into Expert Agent every five minutes from multiple locations and look up particular data records. If any fail to see the required data, text messages are sent to all of our engineers who respond like a fire engine or lifeboat crew.

Finally, we have a third backup used as a testing and staging environment at our offices in Frome.

If you would like to know more please don’t hesitate to call
Tom Levitt on 01225 303500.