Local Authorities have embraced mobile phone, satellite and “location based” technology which told residents about council services.

The technology helped increase council productivity by £230m, the Local Government Association found.

If you’d like to talk to someone about using mobile technologies in your organisation – public or private sector - give Hartwin IT a call on 01480 640150. We already work with a major Borough Council to implement these technologies, so we will be happy to help.

Windows XP Mode is designed for small and medium-sized businesses to help ease the migration process to Windows 7 by providing additional compatibility for their XP productivity applications.

If you’d like to talk to someone about Windows 7 / XP compatibility in your business, give Hartwin IT a call on 01480 640150, we will be happy to help.

The latest research conducted by Sybase 365, shows that demand for mobile banking services has exceeded forecasts, with around 30 per cent of mobile users currently use banking services on their mobile device, far exceeding expectations that by now it would be just 16 per cent.

The research surveyed over 4,100 mobile phone users across the globe and found that the mobile phone market has matured significantly in the past three years.

This is another example of how mobile phones have evolved from being simple telephone communication devices to becoming life and business management tools, entertainment systems and virtual wallets. Almost half of all mobile users use their handset to access the internet every week.

As use of the mobile phone – and particularly smart phones – evolves in personal life, so its applications become valuable extensions of an organisation’s infrastructure. Smart phone technology can be integrated into your overall IT infrasstructure to create significan enhancements in the effectiveness not just of field based sales teams and management, but also of any operational process that involves off-site staff, including delivery drivers and engineers.

If you’d like to talk to someone about integrating smart phone technologies into your business, give Hartwin IT a call on 01480 640150, we will be happy to help.

Changing the way Google indexes sites – and thereby changing how they rank websites – will affect the ranking of the majority of websites. To maximise the effectiveness of your search engine optimisation efforts, you now need to weighting your SEO efforts towards:

• Regular fresh content – including blogs, tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Video – we may not like it, but video content is definitely starting to make a difference to rankings

If you want help understanding how to optimise your website for Google Caffeine, give Hartwin IT a call on 01480 640150, our team will be happy to help.

The idea is simple. Instead of keeping your programmes and data on a local computer or server near you, you store them instead of – or as well as – in the Cloud. The Cloud is a huge number of remote servers kept in innumerable locations. From back-ups to applications, programmes and all your business data, including email, everything is held remotely.

Well established in the US, Microsoft recently released a Cloud version of its Office suite. Accounting and CRM systems can also be held in the Cloud. Cloud computing will alleviate the need for time consuming back-ups, and helps with version control on documents, as anyone with authorised access updates the same version of the document.

Is it secure? If you choose the right provider, absolutely. Full data encryption is the norm, files are continually backed up, and information stored on up to six different servers to make sure you’re never without a back-up.

If you want help understanding Cloud computing and how it can save your business money whilst improving data integrity and security, give Hartwin IT a call on 01480 640150.

Appealing to businesses to be transparent with consumers about why personal information is collected and how it will be used, he commented: “Get privacy right and you will retain the trust and confidence of your customers and users,”

Companies who mislead their clients or gather information they do not need are likely to diminish customer trust, and such actions will also risk enforcement action from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Organisations that adhere to the good practice set out in the new code will enable consumers to make an informed choice about whether they sign up for a particular online service, helping reduce spam levels as well as potentially dangerous information and identity theft issues.

To read the code as it applies to small businesses, click here. If you need help making sure your organisation is complying with the new code of conduct in terms of storing client data, talk to Hartwin IT on 01480 640150.

Not sure what you should be buying? Talk to Hartwin IT on 01480 640150 and we can help you plan your systems around the needs of your business – now and in the future, so your new systems can accommodate anticipated growth and other developments within your company.

Add to the equation, that mobile networks are maintained by a single company – Ericsson – whose engineers are distinctly disgruntled at the proposed redundancies and suddenly traditional comms companies don’t seem the most reliable.

So what are your choices? At first sight it seems paradoxical that a relatively small company like Cloud Net can actually give you a greater degree of resilience than telecoms giants. However, Cloud Net’s systems are based on the internet. The essence of the internet is its robustness. Initially it was designed to withstand a nuclear blast by having multiple routing options so if one part goes down, others pick up the load. This is an ideal modus operandi for a robust phone system which is not dependant on location and is exactly what you get with Cloud Net Connect. If your local connection goes down – simply pick up your phone and plug it into the internet using another connection.

Consider what happens you have a fault on your BT ISDN line your phones die. If you have a Cloud Net system and a fault develops on a line you simply switch to another broadband line – if you have one – or take your phone home for the day. There are other options as well. Cloud Net will divert any call to any phone anywhere with no divert fee if you want or you can use their live answering service to field any incoming calls if you want to with no subscription fee.

The great thing is that you can keep all of this flexibility and resilience comes at very little cost. If you want a standby power supply in case the mains cuts out, it costs a fortune. If you want a standby phone system in case of strikes, there is no capital cost from Cloud Net and a very low monthly subscription. Additionally, you have options and solutions (plus a superior primary solution if you choose it).

It does take a few days to configure your system which is a few days that you won’t have if the worst comes to the worst so it may be a great time to take action whilst the BT Engineers are still working!

If you want help preparing for what happens to your business if your telephone lines develop faults, give Hartwin IT a call on 01480 640150.

Just as legitimate advertisers jump on the World Cup bandwagon, less scrupulous operators are generating their own mountain of junk to fill our inboxes. Online users can expect to receive many variations of spam types, with offers of fake game tickets, malware distribution via fake videos purportedly showing highlights of the games and fake FIFA product offers.

While the fake ticket offers are relatively harmless to anyone with half an ounce of sense, screening out the malware you or your staff may unwittingly download as football fever reaches its peak in the next few weeks can at best slow down your systems and at worst represent a real security threat.

So how do you cope with with the volume of spam that hits your company’s inbox on a daily basis without blocking genuine emails from business contacts and prospective customers? If this is a concern for your business, give us a call on 01480 640150; we can provide an audit of your anti-spam and security software to help you filter out the junk without missing any vital communications.