The Waverley Lane Blog

Just finished reading “It’s Not What You Think” by Chris Evans.

The disclaimer – I would never have read it except that I came across a reference somewhere to his “surprisingly honest autobiography” and I knew I’d seen it going cheap in a remainder bookshop. It’s worth the fiver it cost – though probably not the £20 asking price for the hardback.

Some quite revealing sections bring out his absolute conviction that being on the radio is what he was put on this earth to do. The self-confidence that drives him to just go for it becomes very apparent – but it’s a self-confidence born of years of hard graft learning his trade, analysing what works and what doesn’t, and planning and preparing every link he presents on-air. A lesson for us all there.

There’s more to be told in the next volume – the book stops when Evans buys Virgin Radio from Sir Richard himself and he alludes to losing a spectacular amount of money later on – and even though he’s fairly candid I think there must have been more going on in his tabloid-paparazzi-target years. Read “A Bit of a Blur” by Alex James for a more revealing inside line on the champagne and cocaine-fuelled showbiz lifestyle.

I’m not a raving Evans fan – his current Radio 2 Breakfast show is great but it’s too up-beat for a time of day when I want to focus on what I’ll be doing myself – but the boy has a talent, works hard at it, and I think you can only admire him for that. The book’s a recommendation I’m surprised to be making.

Yay!

The schools are about to break up, and it’s nearly time to head off for more reliable sunshine than Scotland offers.

We reckon it’s got to be good for body and soul to forget all about business once in a while – but if you really want to keep in touch from the beach, can we ask you to let us know your plans two weeks before you go rather than two days?

Delivering your email fully synchronised to whatever you gadget you use and wherever you want to go is not too difficult these days but to set it up we need to deal with phone companies who move at their own speed and no-one can make things happen any more quickly.

The more notice the better please – and remember to send us a postcard!

Got an interesting situation with a client who have just moved office.

All of their phone and internet services have been ordered through business-class providers who are not part of the BT group, and all the services were installed and working in the new office long before our client moved in.

In the course of refurbishing the building – or perhaps even before, no-one knows – a telephone cable and distribution box belonging to BT have been removed by persons unknown. Even though it wasn’t in use then, is not required now, and was perhaps 20 years old I think everyone agrees it shouldn’t have been removed; the cost of cable and the distribution box might be £50 for new equipment; second-hand it’s worthless.

We would therefore love to hear from BT Openreach why they think they can try to charge £960 plus VAT to a company who have neither agreement nor contract with them to reinstate equipment which is not needed, and which would not be used even if it were to be reinstated.

The politest descriptions we’ve heard have been “chancers” and “jobsworths”. When will they learn that this sort of nonsense, including threatening legal action to a business which has no contract with them, does not do them any favours with anyone?

We in the business know they will tell lies to our clients to try to boost sales and do unnecessary work – we almost expect that behaviour from any part of BT – but it’s the unsuspecting business owner who believes their nonsense and pays up for whom we feel sorry.

Ultimately, the telephone system in this country means that BT will have a technical involvement in getting almost every telephone or internet service into your business. However, it is quite easy to get the services you need without having to deal with their slippery business practices; call us if you would like help.

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…