News RSS Feed Reading this blog you might start to think I am an Apple fan, and in fairness I probably am. The products just work, the rate that they refresh and innovate puts most companies to shame, and they have a sound business model. They do have faults – stock supply being the number one issue. For some good commentary on all the new Apple TV, Nano, and iPod Touch have a look at the following article from CNN Money.

]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:00:42 GMT The iPhone 4 – a nice little evolutionary product, that is both hard to resist and has the right mix between business and personal usefulness. We are currently replacing all iPhone 3Gs with the iPhone 4, and by the end of the year hope to have migrated the whole firm over. iPhone 4 is a step up in terms of speed so we think it is worthwhile from a productivity point of view.

The iPad has been slower to roll out, essentially we are waiting on application support for one of our line of business apps. When that happens, I can see that the team will definitely each want one.
 

]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:58:27 GMT A lot of firms, especially banks at the moment seem to be doing a lot of advertising and trying really hard to communicate how they are better, friendlier, and more flexible. I think a lot of it is rubbish, and actions speak louder than words, and as such BNZ should be given credit for its business banking “Partners” concept, and Rabobank for its being very clear at what it is about.

At IT Partners we also try not to follow the herd, and do a few things differently. A big part of our difference is our people and how we develop them. It is not all IT focused; a good example would be the Roger Steare Seminar later this month – have a look at the following YouTube video as to why.
 

]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:46:22 GMT My experience and feedback from the tech team is that best practice is often easier to implement at clients rather than internally.  We have always thought we were reasonably good at keeping our systems at a reasonable level, and certainly from a hardware perspective with both Cisco and IBM equipment it looks pretty good.  However we did get application sprawl especially with all the growth we have experienced and my willingness to try new applications.

This month with the move to some new internal management systems, we have managed to turn off a whole lot of legacy systems, thus reducing the number of servers and systems.  We also took the time to rebuild all the internal systems including new Active Directory, File and Print, Exchange, SQL and Terminal servers – great to start afresh!

Our Windows Server environment is now almost completely 2008 Server (all x64 and a mix of R2 and R1).  We have one remaining 2003 Server, which will be soon moved to 2008.
 

]]> Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:11:25 GMT Many people forget that Vodafone do residential homes and broadband connections. I thought about changing, procrastinated, but then saw the savings. For me at home, it was over 20% reduction in spend. Now Vodafone have added even more value into some of the packages with the ability to add a Vodafone or national number to your account and talk free for up to an hour.

For those of you hanging out for the iphone 4, you can pre-register at: http://www.vodafone.co.nz/iphone/

 

]]> Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:34:13 GMT A number of us have either been travelling or are about to travel. Greig has just got back from a virtualisation conference in Chicago, and I’m back to Boston in September. Some sites that we find are great for making all those travel arrangements easier:

Best Airline in the world: www.airnewzealand.com

Great site if you want to travel on the star alliance network and need to find connecting flights on other airlines: www.staralliance.com

Minimizing time spent in the airport, with faster connections: www.expedia.co.nz

Minimizing time spent at border entry: www.immigration.govt.nz/apec/

]]> Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:59:59 GMT Roaming data charges have come down – especially when going to Australia. However iPhones and BlackBerries can be data hungry devices, so the bill can add up.

In a lot of cases wireless access will be available, sometimes free, but most often requiring a fee and another username and password that you will soon forget. These are also costly, and then you get to the hotel to find out they want to charge you more than breakfast, lunch, and valet parking combined to use the internet. From my recent travel to Australia it seemed that, unless you were in an Air NZ Koru lounge, you were going to have to pay someone to access the Internet.

Some of our most frequent business travellers have just come back and reported great news about an alternative – Boingo Wireless. Essentially, you load the app on your mobile phone or laptop, pay one monthly fee (for mobile users USD$7.95 per month) and with one username and password you can use wireless without the hassles. In Auckland there are 142 compatible locations. In the Waikato, there are 22, Australia 2018. In the USA, there are over 25,000 – you get the idea, and can see locations here.
 

]]> Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:07:54 GMT A month ago we began working with Microsoft Online Services. It has gone better than expected and we are now accelerating our deployment of Microsoft Online Services, having achieved positive feedback from users.

The biggest uptake has been Exchange Online, especially with organisations that have multiple branches and/or a distributed workforce.

One of the more interesting projects that we have on the go is improving email efficiency for a business that was created as a result of combining four firms (each in different cities), using a total of six systems to manage and deliver email. Moving to Microsoft Exchange Online is not only going to save them on hardware and licensing (something they needed to do, due to the age of the systems), but operational costs are also going to fall due to us being able to eliminate five systems that previously required support, licensing, and management.

See the cost estimator here for how cost effective this solution can be.

]]> Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:05:16 GMT We love our clients. They are award winning, successful, and great to work with. Simcro is a good example. They have a great team, led by Will Rouse, that export worldwide and consistently win awards for their R & D. The company currently exports over 90 percent of its products to more than 65 countries. In the last year they have either won or been a finalist in four national and international awards. To read more, look at the following articles from: Scope, Bayer Innovations and IF Product Design Awards 2010.

]]> Thu, 27 May 2010 13:22:55 GMT Business planning, from my experience, is something we all want to do better! There are always shortcuts, simplified spread sheets, and the proverbial back of the envelope calculations to fall back on. However, when your business is growing, and you really want to have fact-based decision making, you really want to have great advisors and great systems in behind you.

We have always been fortunate to have great advisors (more about that in another blog), but our accounting systems have always lagged behind – never so much so that the wheels came off, they just lacked polish to them and involved a lot of manual report creation.

One of the tools which I have recently found to help is a product called Cashflowwizard from Decision Curve. It saved time, was really able to help with forecasting, and had the flexibility to be able to adapt to our business. Based on an Excel model, it is both intuitive and really quite logical in its approach – have a look at the video tour.

You will want to run it on a PC or Laptop with a good spec as it is quite demanding on processor power. We ran into issues running it on Windows 7 x64, so we would recommend Windows 7 32bit and Office 2007.
 

]]> Wed, 12 May 2010 07:41:17 GMT