Abtech

These guys don’t deserve a thoughtful review. I gave them two stars solely because I want to preserve the one-​star option for someone who punches my mom in the gut and then kills my dog.
I hired Abtech to do something I could have done, but didn’t have the time to do, and I agreed to pay them a premium because I assumed that if they charged $ 160 an hour, they’d know what they were doing. I think that’s the case with a lot of small-​biz IT gigs; maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, I hired them to migrate a Win2K site to Win2K3. One server, 12 or 13 workstations. They didn’t have a migration plan, but they seemed confident and wanted to get to work right away. I let them.
We’re a six-​day-​a-​week business, so we agreed to do the migration at close of business the day before our closed day. I received my first complaint from an employee the very next morning when we opened: permission problem accessing a file on the network. Five minutes later, we discovered that we weren’t receiving email on our exchange server (the lifeblood of our business), and hadn’t been for about 30 hours.
Calls to Abtech resulted first in an offer to log in remotely to fix the problems. After a short discussion, I found that Abtech had installed a VNC daemon on my server without discussion or permission, and that it was a *free version without any encryption*. It was set to the default port on one of my public IPs, just sitting there waiting for someone to talk to it.
I don’t really feel like elaborating more, except to say that after several physical visits to our site, a «senior» Abtech tech (it had been escalated) literally said, with regard to the ongoing permissions problems we had never had before, «Well, I could wave a dead chicken over it, that might help, *hee hee chuckle chuckle*».
Despite my generous offer to pay them $ 3500 for half of the time they said they’d spent (which amounted to $ 500 more than the original bid), they sent my account to collections for the remaining $ 2700 in billable hours they’d allegedly racked up waving dead chickens and searching Google and MSDN for answers — on my computers.
IT isn’t rocket science, and for something as routine as a server migration/​upgrade to the same platform, there are clear «best practice» paths and checklists. The fact that these guys didn’t know that cost me a lot of time and a few thousand dollars. My only regret is that I didn’t shell out a few thousand more to sue them.
Stay away from Abtech. You’ll save both money and time.