Riverbank It management

We live in an era of too much data – there’s more ‘stuff’ than you can ever hope to read or use. So how do you get it organised and how do you keep a focus on what’s important to your business? This is the topic we’ll look at over the next three months.

New data in – old data out

Your guiding principle should be “new data in – old data out”. Too many people see their company data store as a one-way flow of data. It just comes in. New e-mail is piling in every day and employees are creating new files every day. If old data never drops out of the system your data store will just grow and grow.

The costs of this unmanaged growth are two-fold. The first cost is financial. It costs you more and more to store more and more. The second cost is reduced productivity. The bigger the haystack of data the longer it takes to find the particular needle you need.

Styles are a great feature in Microsoft Word. If you have a house style for everything you write you will immediately be at home with styles in Word. If not, here is a paragraph of explanation.

Every publication has its own style. The style of the Financial Times is different from The Sun – each has their own unique and identifiable style. It’s not just their style of writing, it’s also very practical things like the font they use, the types of headline they use and so on. It is this consistency of style that creates an identity. The same applies to any serious business. Your house style reflects the image you want to create. It has to be applied consistently across everything you write. That’s what Word’s styles help you create.

Create your first style

In Word you can define styles for headings, for normal type, for tables and so on. Without styles you would have to craft every heading individually; you would have to select the font, the font size, is it bold, italic or underline, its colour, etc etc. You would be there forever. Encapsulate all those settings in a style and you can set everything with one click. Let’s look first at a simple heading.

Microsoft has announced that the end of the road for Windows XP arrives on 22 October when it will stop supplying it as an option for new PCs. No-one is expecting a rush to snap up the final few copies though - its successor Windows 7 has proved to be popular and uncontroversial.

Support for Windows XP is scheduled to continue until 2014.

Update 23/7/10: This change applies only to factory-installed operating systems. There are still 'end user' downgrade rights, ie you are free to downgrade from Windows 7 to XP if you do it yourself. These rights are really on relevant to large companies with policies applied to thousands of PCs, or individual PC users who don't have enough to do. Downgrading from one perfectly good operating system to another has to be one of the least rewarding uses of time.

Did you know that you can now rent software licences from Microsoft instead of purchasing them? Renting often seems like a bad idea - cheap over the short term but expensive over the long term. But we're discovering that rental can make good sense for Riverbank clients.

Take a Microsoft server licence as an example. What we are finding is that over three years the software rental costs are tending to be slightly lower than the price of purchasing the licence. The crossover happens in year four. Given a server life expectancy of around four years it's a hard call to say which is better. But by renting you also avoid the cost of the initial cash investment - and in these post-credit-crunch days that's worth quite a lot.

So if you are thinking about replacement servers think about renting.

You don't like spending money on computers during an economic downturn. I can sympathise with that because we don't like doing that either. But beware of creating a problem for yourself further down the line.

One Riverbank client recently complained that their computers were running slowly. One of the reasons behind this was that many of the machines were over five years old. Because the company doesn't have a programme of regular replacement of ageing computers they have reached a point where they will soon be forced to spend a lot of cash replacing around half of their computers.

You need a policy for computer replacement. A reasonable policy could be a life span of four years for desktops and three years for laptops. If times are hard you can then stretch that by an extra year. But at least you know what you need to budget for every year and you avoid a pile-up of costs.

Since April this year the Information  Commissioner's Office (ICO) has had real teeth. It now has the power to fine companies up to £500,000 for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act.

Common breaches of the Data Protection Act include:

• Loss of laptops, disks and data sticks containing client data.
• Insecure transmission of personal information.

Simple steps that you can take:

"I was sitting at home one evening working on the computer when they phone rang. It was Microsoft warning me that they had a report of a virus infection on my computer. They would like to run a free scan on the computer to check it." So began the lament of a friend who got caught by this scam.

With 20:20 hindsight it's obvious that the call wasn't genuine, but it's not so obvious if you are taken by surprise. This particular episode ended with demands for money to remove the alleged viruses. Refusal to pay led to threats and obscenities being written on the computer screen by the people who now had remote access to it - very disturbing when it's happening in your home.

Six months on this scam is still running and yesterday made an appearance in the national press. It seems that the frequency of calls is increasing.

Would you like lunch or dinner for two at Le Manoir, with the compliments of Riverbank? That’s our reward to you if you introduce a new client to Riverbank.

Growing Riverbank’s business is important to us, and a lot of our new clients come via referrals. It is important to us to make the most of that goodwill. So if you know of someone whose IT support isn’t as good as it should be, please tell them about Riverbank. As soon as they sign up for a Riverbank support contract, the reward is yours.

Choose from any of the following rewards:
• Five-course lunch or dinner for two at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons
• Fortnum and Mason hamper
• Half a case of champagne

There is plenty of hype around cloud computing, but are companies actually doing it? Many large firms are apparently holding back from making a drastic change to their IT systems, preferring to wait until others have gone before them and made their mistakes. Many smaller businesses are hesitant about making their entire business dependent on a single Internet connection. They are also worried about security – why would they place their intellectual property in an environment where they have little or no control?

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing delivers an entire business’s IT via the Internet. Drivers pushing companies towards cloud computing include the need to reduce capital expenditure and the desire to cut out complex IT installations from their offices. There is an undeniable attraction in never having to buy another server, and instead just paying a single monthly fee for a guaranteed IT service.

Others companies might adopt cloud computing for the flexibility it offers. If they have a seasonal or variable business it makes a lot of sense to use a service that can be turned up and down as required.

Every cloud has a silver lining, so they say, and if there is to be a double-dip recession we’d all better start looking hard for that lining.

If your customers are feeling cautious they are likely to want to avoid large capital expenditure. Can you help them with this? In Riverbank we can provide hardware and software as a service so there is zero capital cost. This even applies to traditional high-cost items like servers. It’s proving to be an attractive option for clients.

Can you offer flexible payment options for your customers? If you provide a service, offering an option for monthly payments might make it easier for them, or conversely they might choose to pay for a year in advance to get the attractive discount you offer. Either way, you offer flexibility and you offer choice to your customer making it easier for them to say “yes”.