The Waverley Lane Blog

Saw this post (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”) on The Atlantic magazine website.

It’s reassuring to see I’m not the only one who wonders how people can make it through life without, at least occasionally, sitting down quietly, reading a good book, and letting the words and phrases run gently around one’s head until they bring a new angle to one’s view of the world.

Socrates worried about the impact of new media 2,300 years ago and we’ve muddled through not too badly ever since, but Dennis Healey deplored the lack of “hinterland” in the politicians of the 1980s and I can’t imagine that getting any better on a diet of textbites, Twitter and Facebook…

If you are thinking of sending a mass-email-out before Christmas, please speak to us first.

Most email systems are not geared up for sending masses of emails out, and what we find is our clients call us the following day to report that they are having problems sending email. We check in to their server and find there’s a backlog of several hundred messages all waiting to go.

Speak to us beforehand and we can advise the best way to do this, before you break your email!

The smart-phone industry has really taken off and providers seem to be increasingly pitching these devices at non-business users, selling you the ability to check social networking sites or pick up your personal emails on your phone.

We have found on a few occasions that clients have come to us with such a device they have bought in store and would like their work emails configured. Whilst the “man in the shop” may have sold this feature to you, your new device or in fact your company email system may not support this.

If you are considering upgrading your phone why not contact Waverley Lane first? We have configured many different smart-phones  will be more than happy to offer you our advice on which device best meets your needs, and then help you with setting this device up if required!

Most of you will have a handheld device of some sort – a Blackberry or a Windows Mobile device or a smartphone of some sort – great, aren’t they? You can have your whole life in the palm of your hand, until you leave it in the pub.

Found this on the Blackberry blog about keeping your information safe to start with, and what to do if you mislay it.

I’d emphasise the comment “call your IT company first” – if your device is synchronising with your server we can remotely wipe your information from it if it’s still connected, but not after you’ve asked Vodafone to put a stop on your account.

Call us first; we’ll remotely wipe your data from the missing device; then you (or we) can call the provider and get your service stopped until you get a new SIM card and device (which, if you’re with our Vodafone partner, might even be the same day).

Interesting to see in today’s Financial Times that Regus have high hopes for their serviced office business, as companies find the cost of city-centre accommodation inconvenient for their staff and too expensive.

The idea – having low-cost serviced office accommodation in easy-to-get-to suburban locations – might be a good one, but from what we’ve seen of Regus so far it seems that they’re expensive to rent space from, very expensive and restrictive on the IT services they provide, and their Edinburgh location is in the middle of the biggest rush-hour traffic jam in the east of Scotland.

It’s surely better to make sure that your own office is well-equipped with good IT connectivity and systems which will let your team work from home or on their travels, leaving them free to make their own arrangements for meeting clients and colleagues face-to-face wherever and whenever they want.

It’s not something our customers ever ask us, but it does happen, and can usually be avoided.

Our customer was looking to cut their telephone bill, and decided to transfer their telephone line to Opal Telecom (The B2B division of Talk Talk). The first we knew about it was the early morning phone call: “We don’t have any internet access today”. After checking the router and line were okay we spoke to their ISP, Lumison who were able to tell us that BT ceased the ADSL service. Great. We’re not in a blame game here, but surely there can be some procedure where Opal/BT/ISP flag up to the customer “You are about to kill a well used ADSL service, are you sure?!”

Anyway, the client had a “spare” BT phoneline, and we arranged for Lumison to reprovide the ADSL service on to that one – still, it takes a week. (Why so long? BT Openreach. It could easily have been more than two weeks if they didn’t have the spare line.)

In the meantime, since our client is on our Silver support package we provided them with Internet access via the Vodafone network. It’s pretty limited, but at least they could still send and receive email.

Moral of the story: if you are thinking about doing anything with your phonelines, speak to your IT company who might just be able to save you a week of downtime.

Our industry – the “IT industry” – is always looking for the next “next big thing” to sell.

Everyone got email in the late 90’s, then usefully fast internet acess in the early 2000’s, and now email everywhere has improved from lightweight consumer services (Hotmail, Gmail) to reliable and secure managed corporate mobile email.

This leaves marketing departments wondering “what can we sell next?” and one of the answers in our market sector is “online backup”.

The idea is appealing at first glance – use your broadband internet connection to run an automatic backup off to a data centre somewhere on the internet and hey presto, no need to worry about changing backup tapes ever again.

We don’t like to rain on someone else’s parade, but we’re not convinced it’s as simple as that when you look at time, cost, and quality.

Take time first – on a standard broadband connection the upload speed is perhaps one-fifth of the download speed, making it a slow process to get your data “up the pipe” to the data centre. We can get round that by running a full backup only once at installation time, and configuring the system to take a daily backup of only the data that has changed that day.

What we need to watch for are any databases (business applications and probably also your email message store) because these are usually very large files which change every day and must be backed up every day. To put numbers on it (always follow the numbers!) it can take all weekend to upload 3GB of data; we typically see clients with message stores of 10GB to 15GB which should be backed up daily; it just isn’t going to fly.

Online backup can be seen as “cheap” because you don’t need to buy a backup tape drive, backup and cleaning tapes, and the automation software. Following the numbers again, crudely I admit, an online backup service giving an automated backup to 200GB of data space on a secure server can cost £300 per month. We have architect and surveyor clients with only 10 or 15 staff who have more data than 200GB.

A good quality tape drive of 200GB to 400GB capacity including 20 backup tapes, a cleaning tape, backup automation software and our time to install, configure, and train you in operating the system will cost between £2,500 and £3,500. If you have a Waverley Lane Service Agreement we will monitor the success of your backup every day and physically test the system monthly or quarterly depending on the Agreement. Not such a bad deal compared to £3,600 a year to push your data slowly into a data centre.

And finally, quality – you need to know that you can get your data back when the manure hits the fan. We have one client, a one-person business working from home, who used to use a well-known online backup service of his own choosing. His laptop, with all his data on it, ate its hard disk and our client quite correctly replaced the disk and restored his system from his online backup service. It worked very well – he got all his data and his computer configuration back again perfectly – but it took two days. Can your business work with two days’ downtime for a network server?

These are all technical and financial issues I’ve raised, but you also need to think about your broader business requirements. Is it appropriate to have your sensitive information in a data centre which could be in a different legal jurisdiction with different disclosure legislation? Do your professional indemnity insurers have data backup compliance requirements to be met before they will cover you for loss of data and consequential losses?

All points to ponder before signing up for easy, cheap, and fast online backup.

PS – all that’s missing, besides “easy”, “cheap”, and “fast” are “fresh” and “organic”, but I couldn’t find a way to work them into this post…

What thanks do we get, those of us who run a business, for stepping out of line and going our own way? For taking on commitments and risk, working bloody hard, adding value, paying salaries and taxes, and taking responsibility for regulatory compliance?

Nothing, zilch, nada.

I do wonder if the powers-that-be and those who work for them remember that, without the business sector buying, adding value, and selling there would be no “non-commercial” funding of anything. That is, no public sector institutions or employment, no public services, hugely diminished support for arts and culture, and much-reduced funding for the third sector and the health services.

Julie Meyer started the internet and new media networking group First Tuesday at the height of the dotcom boom. I’ve not been persuaded that she has actually built any business and worked in it for the long haul, but she has hit the nail on the head with the concept of “Entrepreneur Country” – read about it here in The Independent.

Two points arise from this – firstly, I agree with Julie! The media needs to stop knocking business and realise that business pays everyone’s wages and much else besides, whether it’s trendy to admit it or not.

Secondly, how can we at Waverley Lane meet the needs of people who are running their own business?

What we do is help people work together, online and offline, whether in the same office or far-scattered around the globe. If we continue to do that effectively and efficiently and market our expertise to the right people, there will be a demand which we know how to meet.

Came across an article in the Times Online about the “Threat of Tangle with Outsourced IT“. It’s a short article and a bit lightweight for the complex corporate world it refers to, but one of the quoted comments is worth looking at.

David Bickerton is chief information officer for British Gas and he says in the article: “The investment is around having the right people and capabilities internally to develop the relationships and provide the kind of integration you need” and this just about sums it up from our side of the fence as well.

At Waverley Lane we ask that our clients nominate a single point of contact to work with us. That person doesn’t need to be especially technical – it’s more to act as a conduit for our client to raise issues with us and for us to work with either on immediate issues or, especially, on the bigger picture for the longer term.

Yes, of course we make allowances for people being on holiday and for emergencies when the contact person can’t be found, but the real point is that outsourcing your IT shouldn’t be a “pay the bill and forget about it” matter. As the provider of outsourced IT services we need to be gently managed by our client and a dialogue needs to take place; that is the way in which a trusting and productive working relationship gets to be built up over time.

Hello and welcome to the new Waverley Lane blog!

Why, you might wonder, do we want to add to the digital media overload – bloggers and tweeters all throwing their tuppence-worth into the great digital pond, mostly to sink without Google-trace?

Two reasons really – firstly, we hope our blog will give you an insight into our team here at Waverley Lane – what we do, why we do it, and the good ideas and some of the really stupid ones we come across along the way.

Secondly, of course, it might just be fun to have a platform for our thoughts and views!