ITs been done before

On a recent social outing I noticed a friend of mine deleting emails from his Blackberry - ‘Mail box Full’ emails actually and over 50 of them clogging up the small screen. For the purpose of this post however, I’m ignoring the irony of mass emails to alert you to a full mail box, a mere nod should suffice.

The process was click, scroll, delete, yes...click, scroll, delete, yes.... click, scroll, delete, yes... ad infinitum, not easy to ignore, especially as he could do this without looking. I had to ask why ……

“Shift, click, scroll, click, delete does the same thing” I said.

The original thumb breaking process had now been reduced from 300 clicks to 5 clicks and we could enjoy the evening. Now I know that some readers might call me a “Smart Ass” but sometimes we all need the assistance of a Smart Ass. In fact, for centuries people have been requiring the services of Smart Asses. Just the other day I had a Smart Ass come to my house to repair my fridge! Some new parts and some professional services (Smart Assed Services) and my fridge is once again fridging!

I’ve always liked the caption above. Day to day business can feel like a battle and in fighting these battles we often overlook available resources that can have a dramatic effect on the outcome. If you find a task arduous and time consuming, like my blackberry friend, there is a good chance that others have too. There is also a good chance that some Smart Ass has a solution. No-one would consider creating a spreadsheet without using Excel or trawling through hundreds of websites when you can just “Google it”.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems provide many business solutions. The good ones are developed around real businesses that have faced real business problems. The best ones can be tailored to meet exact requirements. The doyen of this elite, Intact Software, has provided thousands of solutions to real business problems. Many of them having been solved with an out of the box Intact solution
and some that have required a ‘perfect fit’ tailored Intact solution.

There are many ERP solutions available to choose from but it is important to ensure that they are backed up with more than adequate Professional and Customer Services. Many faceless companies can offer a system without providing you with a solution. Experienced ERP providers will avoid offering services to a potential client if their system is not a perfect fit. Unsuitable systems are often ‘found-out’ during implementation…. if you’re lucky.

Intact Sales Director Mark McArdle has often stated “Give me one hour of your time and if you are not impressed with this solution, you can invoice me for your time!” A statement not to be made lightly; and certainly not made if the solution is not a perfect fit. Its not rocket surgery when you know that implementing systems like Intact can assist you in ensuring you are not over or under stocked, you are receiving correct payment for the supply of goods and services, your customers are being looked after and you are buying product at the best prices. All of which result in a more successful business and healthy margin.

So the next time you are carrying out a tedious task, consider that somebody somewhere has also had this problem. Pretty soon you may have your very own smart-ass with a smart-ass system, resulting in clearly defined processes & greater productivity.

Ireland - A Blacklisted Nation

I'm not talking about FIFA's decision to allow Thierry Henrys goal stand and eliminate us from the world cup, or even our Ladies Bobsleigh team under threat of expulsion from the Winter Olympics for whatever reason. Nor am I referring to Roddy Doyle’s dialogue in the Commitments referring to us Irish as, well 'Outsiders'!!

Modern day communication in our country is under threat. As a nation we send hundreds of thousands of emails every day. Some hoping to generate business for our ailing economy, some to catch up with distant relatives or long lost friends, anyway you catch my drift..... But are these intended recipients actually receiving our emails as we would expect? Maybe not!

Regular email is considered HAM and unsolicited email SPAM, so let’s get that out of the way and move on! Thankfully procedures are put in place on the internet and within companies to try and differentiate between Spam and Ham so we are saved the task of siphoning through our inboxes for mail we want to read. Super! However, what if the person you are trying to send an email to has a system in place that thinks your Ham is Spam? That couldn’t happen surely, you're not selling Viagra, Cialis, and Rolexes etc. Well mail systems need to be more clever than that because if they weren’t, how would Pfizer ever send an email to anyone? They're a pretty big company!!

Many anti-spam products use a technique known as blacklisting. I won’t bore you with the exact details but basically if you're name or number (IP address) is on a black list, there is a good chance your mail won’t be received by the intended recipient.

Some recipient’s mail servers check your name and IP address against a number of blacklist servers and if you appear on one of them, your mail gets sent off into cyber space never to be seen again!

I don’t send spam emails, how can I be blacklisted?

Well, up until recently, the most common way to be blacklisted was for your computer to become infected by a mass mailing worm (virus) which acts as a spammer on your computer. If you didn’t stop it quickly enough, you would eventually end up on a blacklist.

That is up until recently (I eventually get to the point)!! When I say recently I mean in the last six months, Irelands leading ISPs have now found themselves listed on Blacklist servers and the moderators of these servers are refusing to take them off! Germany based UCE are refusing to remove blocks of Eircom’s IP addresses from their blacklists. Barracuda, Spam Cop and Abuse At are also blacklisting Eircom’s mail servers but will accept requests by individuals to remove domain names and IP addresses. And it doesn't just stop at Eircom; O2, Clearwire, Vodafone/BT are all there too!! You can check it out for yourself at www.mxtoolbox.com where you can type in your domain name (yourcompany.com) or IP address and see where you are listed.

This is a result of poorly managed networks; trying to charge people for anti spam systems when they should have been stopping it themselves. Allowing their mail servers relay mails at will just to make selling their products that bit easier. Not having the brains to differentiate home users from business users (they know how to differentiate charging them!!).

It doesn’t look like this will be resolved soon though they have at least admitted to the problem which is a big step in the right direction.....

Maybe we should revert to fax or Skype and start talking again!!!

Changing Broadband to save money?

First may I wish a happy and a prosperous 2010 to everyone... 2010; the year when companies that have survived the onslaught of recession will be looking to become stronger and to do so will strive to reduce any operational costs even further.

Is broadband one of those potential savings? Well the broadband companies claim so, but will it save your company money or will it cost you?

Here’s what you need to look out for:

Types of Broadband (Ireland):
In Ireland there are 2 primary means of supplying broadband to a premises; DSL and Wireless – which usually present themselves in your office COMs room as phone Line or Ethernet respectively.

The question you must ask here is “Will my existing equipment support the new connection type?” – the prospective supplier will offer you free equipment to support the new connection, but will it support any features you may have setup e.g. email, content filter, on-line backups, remote access, remote support, CCTV ?

And if it does, who is going to configure it for you and what will they charge?

IP Addressing:
Changing providers will inevitably result in a new pool of IP addresses being assigned to your router. The IP address can be seen as a modern day phone number for your computer network. If you have a remote office, remote users (sales reps), work from home, centrally managed email e.g. MS Exchange, CCTV, VoIP connections etc. a newly assigned IP address will result in all these features requiring to be reconfigured. This is time consuming and costly not to mention the downtime during the changeover.

Email Relaying/DNS:
While this topic is usually less severe and less common than the above, it should still be considered when making the change. Changing broadband provider in Ireland may also require local computer settings to change if you are relaying mail out through the original providers SMTP server, or if your DNS is pointed at the previous providers your internet may not work.

Internal IP Addressing
Your network has an internal IP range typically 192.168.1.x, where the first 3 parts of the address specify the network address and the x refers to your individual computers address in the range. Some broadband providers are shipping broadband routers (modems) with the address 192.168.1.1 which in a lot of cases can be the IP address of your network server. This will cause an IP conflict on your network which will disconnect the computers from your server.

Final Thoughts:
While it is possible to make a saving by swapping broadband providers, the cost of changing should be considered before doing so. My advice would be to plan it and to discuss it with your IT providers to see the exact costs involved in preparing for a minimum downtime changeover.

Cloud Computing for Small Businesses

During a routine check of a client’s server and its backup facility I noticed that the amount data being backed up had reduced significantly.

As anyone would, I asked my customer where all the company documents had disappeared to. I will admit that I was quite tentative in asking such a bold question (as their IT provider) almost expecting the response "What do you mean?"
To my shock his response was (with a proud smile) "A computer genius friend moved them to the cloud". Which was then followed up with "I'm hoping to move my accounts system (INTACT) to the cloud too".

While I believe the "Cloud" offering does have its place in business IT, (I use it myself in the form of Gmail and Google Apps for simple things like notes) I believe the jury is yet to return on its long term viability.

Why? Just a few reasons in brief:

Legality – If you are storing your company records in the cloud, chances are you are storing personal information about your customers. EU data protection law would see this as a breach. Perhaps not right now as these laws seem only to come into play when information has been leaked, but you can be sure at some stage that it will.

Trust – Websites, Emails, Newspaper Articles, News Readers, Government Websites all preach to us about how never to give your banking details out to anyone. Do not tell anyone your address, your name, your inside leg measurements because as soon as you do your identity will be stolen and you will be wiped from existence. However, according to a marketing person you should put everything you have on your computer up to a place on the internet on a server that you have never seen and have never spoken to anyone that has ever seen where it is located. Ireland, France, UK, US, Cayman Islands, Iran or all of the above?? I believe there must be a question over giving all this information to a company like Google whos share price is based solely on the amount of information it can get its hands on.

Longevity – How long will it be before Microsoft takes over Google or Apple takes over Amazon, or Roman Abramovich takes over the lot! Where will your data be then? How will you access. Every had a domain name registered with an online company that were taken over by another online company….

Reliability - http://www.creative-seo.co.uk/creative-seo-news/search_engine_news/gmail-down-00174.php

It often makes me wonder how people can get caught up in buzz words like "Cloud Computing", "Virtualization", "Blade Systems" etc while real concerns such as Backups, Malware Protection and Internet Abuse fall by the wayside – Marketing budgets I suppose!

False Economy in business IT

Not too long ago you could buy a house in Ireland FROM €50,000. One assumes, as any sane person would, that when you go to take advantage of such a bargain, you may end up paying a bit more than advertised. If you feel that this is an incorrect statement I would suggest you stop reading right now

OK so you're still here and have realised that the bill boards advertising the prices should have been taken down because those offerings are all sold out. And as your "apologetic" Estate Agent comforts you by informing you that the cheap houses "wouldn’t have suited you anyway"; But while you're here, have a look at these nice houses for €300,000.

In the same land we have a locally written and published broadsheet newspaper called "The Sunday Business Post". It is primarily marketed at people in business, people that have an interest in business, people who work for a business and of course is headlined with obligatory political scandals of who is spending tax payer’s money on €11,000 curtains for their home. So everyone is fair game.

The first Sunday of every month features a supplement called "Computers in Business", which is what I have chosen to focus on today. Yes I do buy it and each Sunday morning I get frustrated with their so called journalistic approach.


This is copied from their site advertising their current issue

"While Irish companies brood about a’ high cost economy', the biggest-ever sale has been taking place in IT hardware equipment. On offer are computers for €250, laptops for €300 and printers and external hard drives for €50.This is no once-off extravaganza, either. Mass production and relentless competition have slashed the cost of IT hardware for Irish firms. If you're thinking of replacing, upgrading or adding to your company's IT prowess, now is the time to do it, writes Adrian Weckler"


Sounds like a very useful article alright. One particular item was a HP Proliant server for about €200 when bought from an online store (the one that probably provides the most advertising revenue for The Post). "Advice on how to save money" I hear you ask, "what could be wrong with that?"

For the thousand of readers that are told, "to run your new software you need a server" this is the ideal advice to follow if you are in the money wasting business.

What sparked this blog post was the recent site visit I had to a potential customer whom like many, had followed the advice of such insightful people as Mr Weckler.
This customer had requirements for 10 users. This server was to run MS Small business server, Symantec Mail Security, Symantec Backup Exec, share printing and file sharing duties and their new accounts and stock control system. The Owner and manager also wanted remote access to their files and their new accounting system using terminal services. The online reseller had as much knowledge of the product in the cardboard box he was selling as he had about his new customer! Zero!

I had the unfortunate task of explaining that you cannot plough a field with a Ford Fiesta and expect it to perform like a tractor.

It's not just servers, it's low powered PCs, with entry level processors and minimum RAM expected to run Windows Vista at an acceptable pace. It’s the masses of Windows XP home edition PCs scattered throughout the LAN unable to access domain shares and printers each time they expect to.

It's the leftovers that the manufacturers and retailers want to get rid of that are being pawned off on naive readers. The only benefit of these "articles" are for the publishers to sell papers, while selling advertising to the on line retailers that are only too happy to sell you a box, that may look like what you need, but is more often a long way from it.

I believe they make our estate agent friend appear quite helpful. At least amongst all the false advertising there was an option to purchase something that perhaps was more likely to fulfil the end users needs.....

It Begins

I've thought about doing this for a long time but used my favourite excuse of "not having any spare time" to avoid doing it. I want to put my thoughts on my day to day working experience where I interact with many people, their businesses and more importantly, their IT "issues".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all of a sudden I have loads of time on my hands but I spend most of my time working so I decided I needed a hobby. Anything better than a hobby related to work??