Riverbank It management

It's Microsoft. In a deal announced earlier this month Microsoft is outsourcing its own IT support to Infosys. It just goes to show that as a business model, outsourcing functions like IT can be a very effective solution, whether you are Microsoft or a small or medium-sized business.

...to improve the quality of our business. I'm at the HTG summit in Dallas, Texas, this week. It's the annual conference of a US/UK/Australian group of some 200 IT service companies, all dedicated to helping each other improve their service through sharing best practice and learning from leaders in their field. It has been a series of intensive 12-hour days, but well worth the effort.

It's a great example of "co-opertition". Any competitive feelings are put to one side in the interests of learning and giving. And it really does work. If something like this exists in your field of work I strongly recommend you try it.

There it is on your keyboard, down at the bottom – the Windows button. The button no-one ever presses. It does have some good uses as a shortcut key to help you speed your way through your work. So take a quick look at the list below to see what it could do for you.

The Start button

At its simplest the Windows button is the same as clicking the Start button. Just quicker. Notice that the Start menu doesn’t appear until you let go of the Windows button. That’s because you can do other things while you are holding it down. Read on.

“Only old people use e-mail”, said my seventeen-year-old son. The young are busy communicating via instant messaging, text messages, Facebook and through whatever online game they are playing. Business might have taken over e-mail as a major form of communication but many millions of people have moved on to other media – the social media.

Here are seven reasons why you might want to use some of these new technologies.

It's a time of some change at Riverbank. After seven years of great work Ian Heritage has moved on and is now working for Sophos. Marc Prole will also be leaving at the end of April to travel round the world. We will miss them both. Evidence of the sad farewells are on the Riverbank Facebook site.

On the positive side we are very pleased to welcome three new recruits - Kyle Allard, Oliver Tulloch and Anas Khan. Kyle and Oliver feature in the Facebook photo album too

Watch out for good e-mails being filtered out by the Outlook junk mail filter. The Riverbank service desk has seen an increase in the incidence of false positives over the past few weeks. Our thoughts are that this could be due to changes in a recent Office update.

The Outlook junk mail filter is good but it's not the Riverbank recommended anti-spam solution. We firmly believe that you should keep at ams length the rubbish that now makes up 95% of global e-mail. You do this by directing your e-mail through a filtering process before it ever reaches your own computer system. It keeps you safer and it makes best use of that precious Internet bandwidth.

Riverbank will be exhibiting again at BioTrinity, the region's biggest conference and partnering event for the bioscience industry. The three-day event is at Newbury Racecourse and starts today, 12 April.

We look forward to meeting existing and new clients at our exhibition stand.

Riverbank's new management system is finally ready to go live. Three of us have spent Good Friday transferring help desk tickets, entering contracts and testing the system so we can be ready for Tuesday morning.

It has been a huge amount of work so far but the new system will enable us to manage almost every aspect of our business in one integrated database. It has also been a five-figure investment in software that will take our business forward - a system we can grow into rather than out of.

We hope the benefits to us and to our clients will become clear over the coming months.