Riverbank It management

 

Delivering a PowerPoint presentation can be stressful. Then the presentation starts going wrong, your mouth dries up and your pulse rate goes through the roof. Commit these tips to memory and they might just bring your heart rate down.

 

Start the presentation

Just press F5.

One of the magic formulae for business is to grow your sales without growing your costs. One contributor to this magic can be IT. If you make better use of what you already have you will get more done in less time, making you more effective and your business more successful. See if any of these practical tips could work for you.

 

Improve teamwork

The Oxford and Cambridge boat race is an event that rams home the beauty of perfect team work. Business teams operate at a different level but the same rule applies; a well-coordinated team is gong to do better than a shambles of eight people all rowing at random.

Sophos currently has some great special offers if you are due to renew your anti-virus software licence, or are thinking about upgrading from another product.

The following offers are available on a range of products until 31 March:

• Take a 2 year licence and pay for just 21 months (i.e. get 3 months free)
• Take a 3 year licence and pay for just 30 months (i.e. get 6 months free)
• Take a 5 year licence and pay for just 48 months (i.e. get 12 months free)  

If your renewal is due this year why not consider renewing early to take advantage of this special pricing?  Your new licence will not start until your current licence expires, so this is a great way of saving money.

Riverbank clients are starting to be upgraded to the faster broadband service, ADSL2+. What it means is the prospect of a faster Internet connection at no extra cost.

Whether you will actually see a benefit depends on a number of factors including the distance from your office to the telephone exchange and the hardware in your office. All Riverbank-supplied hardware is ADSL2+ compatible.  

The upgrade should involve no more than a disconnection of 20 minutes. We are advising each client of the date of this upgrade. But be aware that with any change there is a risk of disruption, so if the date assigned to you for upgrade is a particularly crucial day it might be safest to ask for a different date. 

Many businesses are seriously under-powered when it comes to home broadband. Our experience in the small business market is that many firms expect their staff to work from home and just assume that any cheap broadband connection is fine. Staff then have a poor experience working remotely on their office network and everyone is unhappy.

What these businesses forget is that working from home often means that a lot of data is going upstream from home to office. Staff are quite naturally expected to be productive. So the information they produce has to go from home to the office network  - when a user saves a document for example. 

This is the reverse of the way that ADSL broadband was designed, which was on the basis of much more information coming downstream from web sites (like a video) than going back upstream (like "next page please"). With ADSL it doesn't matter how fast the promised and much-hyped downstream  performance is; almost every ADSL connection has a very dreary upload speed. Because of this it's vital to squeeze every bit of performance you can from your home ADSL line.

To get that performance you need high quality broadband. Cheap broadband means crowded broadband which means poor performance. You are in the queue with all your neighbours and every school student chatting to their friends online. The result for someone working from home is that they wait for an age while their computer tries to save a document. It is not a good use of expensive employee time.

Last week Microsoft slipped their 'browser choice' into Windows updates. It was forced upon Microsoft by the EU as part of the settlement of a long-running legal dispute. It has created very little excitement in the business community but here for the sake of completeness is the Riverbank line on the matter.

Riverbank's recommendation is to stick with Internet Explorer for the following reasons:

1. Internet Explorer is not a bad product. It works ok.
2. Internet Explorer integrates very well with other Microsoft products such as SharePoint. If you are using SharePoint, stick with Internet Explorer.
3. We've all got better things to do than experiment with browsers, such as making our businesses a success. Changing browsers is unlikely to impact on your bottom line.

Add your comment if you disagree with our view. It would be interesting to know that there is some excitement around the choice of web browser.

Microsoft announced its Office 2010 Technology Guarantee last Friday, 5 March. If you buy Microsoft Office 2007, with or without a computer, at any time up to 30 September you are now entitled to a free upgrade to Office 2010. The upgrade period starts when  Office 2010 is launched in June and will run until 31 October. 

The offer applies to fully-packaged products and to Office pre-installed on new computers. It does not apply to volume licence purchases. 

If you would like more information please contact Chris Jones, Business Development Manager.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at a brilliant clean tech symposium hosted by VenCap. Lots of very interesting people there, from venture capital people from around the globe to CEOs of spin-out companies and 'about to be spun out' companies from Oxford University.

One clear message was that there is investment money out there and clean tech is seen as a great place to invest.

A second message was that clean tech is a way of thinking, not a market sector. One speaker said that "If you’re not clean you’re dead." The speed at which government policies are changing around the globe and the shift in consumer demand means that we all need to have businesses that are clean and green.