Opening a firm's first international office would normally daunt any IT director responsible for setting up the systems that would make the move possible.

But when Jon Gould, IT director at top 50 firm Charles Russell, was told that his firm wanted to open an office in Geneva within six months, he was unfazed - because, in a sense, he had done this before.


'We opened a small office in Oxford earlier on in [2005], and there we had the luxury of being able to put in a leased line. That's worked very successfully, and it was just a case of extending it across to Geneva,' Mr Gould said. 'That was a real confidence builder. Had we not had that, I think I would have been far more circumspect in the time-scales we were given for Geneva, and I probably would have begged a further couple of months.'


Mr Gould's technical team came up with an innovative method for ironing out any wrinkles before the office was occupied - they mocked up the Geneva office inside the London building.


The team set up the fake office with virtual private network (VPN) connections to the main office systems. Using a PortWise SSL VPN - a version of security that uses Web technology - over broadband in Geneva back to London was a cost-effective method of setting up the office, a leased line in Switzerland being a lot more expensive than it had been in Oxford.


'We knew cost was going to be a factor because this is a new office, and as such we wanted to control costs tightly to make sure that fee-earning capacity was as favourable as possible,' Mr Gould said.


His team also wanted to put in as little infrastructure as possible - on the premise that the more that is installed, the more can go wrong. So the file repositories stay in London, inside the network perimeter. Baseline tech support, for example for PCs and printers, is handled locally, with higher support done using remote control software.


This combination of remote control, minimal infrastructure, prototyping, and modelling the set-up on an existing project has seemingly allowed a fairly painless transition.


One problem that has come up was that call quality using voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) was not as good as Mr Gould team had hoped. This is far from an isolated incident - without significant bandwidth, usually a leased line, VOIP can be less than ideal and other companies have experienced the same issue. But, overall, Mr Gould is happy with the move.


'We've been encouraged by the success of the Geneva office, particularly against a tight deadline,' Mr Gould said. 'We hope this will pave the way for future satellite offices and will be especially beneficial as we move towards a home-office environment.'