Tom Parker joins our marketing and sales team as a product manager for spider office. Tom has recently finished a degree at Plymouth University.
You can follow Tom on Twitter at http://twitter.com/TomParkerSG

Jess Baker joins our admin team to assist with day to day operations. Jess is an apprentice studying for an NVQ in Business Administration.

James Cook decided that graduate schemes and ready-made careers weren’t for him. So he started up his own IT consultancy, Spider Group, fresh out of university. He explains his story.

Article can be found here:

http://www.smarta.com/advice/starting-up/student/just-the-job-i-started-my-business-straight-after-graduating

Post Bristol 10k

Chris and I are both on Twitter, why not follow us: http://twitter.com/CFalconerUK & http://twitter.com/JamesCookSG

The new phone itself isn’t much different from the older 3G version, boasting a very similar look and feel, but packing a few extras under the hood:

• Quicker processor
• Double the memory (256MB)
• Updated camera that can do video recording
• Electronic compass
• Nike+

It is quite good that Apple haven’t updated the fundamental design as it means all the accessories and add-ons that were available for the earlier version work with the new one.

The interesting thing about this phone is that most people with the iPhone 3G will not be able to upgrade immediately, tied in as they are to an 18 month contract with O2. That said, sales of the new 3G S seem to have been pretty strong with many original version iPhone users upgrading (my wife upgraded on the day it was released) and a whole bunch of new customers drawn in by Apple’s impeccable marketing.

Of interest to all iPhone users is the update to version 3.0 of the iPhone software which brings with it a whole host of useful additions.

A few highlights are:

• Ability to use rotated keyboard in any app (that supports it) particularly useful in email app.
• MMS
• Copy and Paste
• Enhancements to activesync (main one is to allow push to other folders than the inbox)
• Global Search
• Enhanced bluetooth
• Tethering (ability to use your phone like a USB 3G dongle)
• Push notifications

There are a lot more, I have only highlighted the particularly newsworthy ones and the ones that I personally have found benefit from. The keyboard update and the general user interface enhancement have made the whole experience more aesthetically pleasing and more practical. This is quite impressive considering the quality of the previous version, but Apple have done a good job with the incremental improvements.

Of all the updates I would expect the push notifications to have the biggest long term impact as it will allow developers to build applications that appear to stay open on the device when they have actually closed, this is going to be extremely important for instant messaging and social networking type apps.

Overall the latest updates are a good addition to the iPhone series; I wonder what they have up their sleeves for next year….

Additional information available here: BBC

We have been trialing Windows 7 Beta and more recently Windows 7 RC (Release candidate) and are happy to report we are very impressed with the updates and changes from the previous version (Vista). We are looking forward to this being the stadard on all new PC’s.

One thing that can sometimes cause confusion is Microsoft’s re-branding efforts – what IS the difference between WSS, SharePoint Portal Server and MOSS??? WSS is the core building block of the technology and is included free on Windows 2003 and 2008 servers, it allows you to create sites and do the basic “SharePoint” stuff. SharePoint Portal Server (2003) is the old name for the full bells and whistles system which is now called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

Ok then, now onto the point of this post, MOSS 2007 can greatly improve organisational effectiveness, to such a degree that it matters to everyone who runs a business. As with most, if not all software, there is the caveat of the requirement for proper deployment and training, but that is another post all together.

I have just made quite a bold statement, which I am sure other people would love to debate so please feel free to comment at the bottom of the post. I will do my best to explain the core reasons that make SharePoint completely indispensable for SpiderGroup and our clients.

The first thing that I will cite is the ability to access vital company information anywhere you can get an internet connection, which in itself is not that remarkable seeing the current usage of the internet. I guess at this point I should let you into my own personal loathing of VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks), all of our support people here at SpiderGroup know not to answer any question I pose to them as “log on to the VPN”, with that in mind the network file store has never been a great solution for allowing everyone to access vital company documents. What’s more with a network file store there is the inherent problem with people overwriting important files and the hassle trying to work out which is the most recent version of a document. One of the core strengths of SharePoint is its document management features, fully integrated into the Office Suite (probably the main reason they re-branded it to MOSS). It provides you with a much better way of working, saving hours of wasted time and prevents heartbreak when you realise someone has overwritten the proposal you spent all last night working on.

Whilst we are on the subject of documents, I guess it is worth pointing out that 99% of businesses I know run on Excel. Yes they will have an accounting package that they use for their general ledger and do their invoicing from, but the real nitty gritty of planning, budgeting and management reporting is done in Excel, whether you like it or not Excel has a fundamental part to play in modern business. With that said, one of the “killer” features of MOSS is something called Excel Services, which is a way of presenting real-time excel information through a web page without the need to have Excel running. This might not seem particularly noteworthy, but it actually provides a critical bridge between operational documents and live reporting dashboards.

Meeting workspaces are an area worth mentioning, if like us you having repeating weekly or monthly meetings, you can create a meeting site that has a list of all the dates of the meeting allowing you to easily navigate forward and backward to see what was done in the last meeting. This is really useful as it is a single place for reports, minutes and actions and easily allows people that are joining the meeting over the phone or video conference to see the same information as everyone else.

Due to the way that security is handled and coupled with the system being web based, it is relatively simple to create special sections for your clients, supplier and partners. We use this extensively with our clients, allowing us to collaborate and share vital information whilst we are working on a project with them. What kind of added value do you think your clients will perceive in your service if you are able to provide a simple, attractive repository of all information related to your work together. When a client says, where is that document that you were talking about? You can direct them to the relevant section of their portal. One killer feature added in to this is alerting, with a couple of clicks you can make sure that when any content is added or updated that you receive an email informing you that there has been a change. This is particularly useful if you have lots of areas that are important to you.

The last key benefit that I will highlight in this post is that SharePoint should be considered to be your Official Company Knowledge Repository. The system should be setup so that all policies, procedures, templates, contracts … in fact anything that is important for the company to function. This then allows any member of staff to find the knowledge they require to properly perform the companies business, the way to best think about this is, if the office we are in burnt down could we continue to do business. If the correct knowledge is stored in SharePoint, then once people have somewhere to sit, a computer and a phone (at home?) then your business will continue.

There is so much more to this technology that i don’t have time to go into now – such as personal sites, custom databases, intelligent forms and workflow management and of course the live reporting dashboards that get managers so excited. There will be more about these to come in my next few posts but hope you enjoyed the intro to one of the most visionary products from Microsoft.

You may notice that we have implemented some new ideas to ensure that we communicate better with our audience such as a blog to work alongside our news letter. We hope that the blog can server to inform people about important issues in the IT industry and keep people updated with exciting things that we are getting up to.

Enjoy!