We think we have always been good at minimizing the effects of spam on our clients through mail filtering on our firewalls. It is always hard to measure effectiveness, as every client has a different spam profile, and we can only measure what’s been rejected and accepted, not whether we were accurate or not. All we know when working with clients is how much spam a client was receiving prior to us fixing their system and how much we are detecting and preventing – and the feedback has always been great in terms of reduction of spam being received.
What we hear anecdotally is that spam is on the rise, and we are seeing more spam being detected. Stats from Spamcop.net show the level of increase and 12 month trend. To increase the effectiveness of our spam detection we are rolling out two new methods of detection and prevention. The first is greylisting and the other is OCR of images. We will be rolling these updates out as required and as firewalls are upgraded.
So if you have spam issues, contact Greig McGill, Michael Pook or Andrew Johnson.
We use CampaignMonitor as a tool to communicate with clients and prospects, it is powerful, easy to use, and we have had great results! As well as a great product, they have a style of doing business which is inspiring. Have a read of their blog, especially on having lunch and their building refit.
Citrix Reciever for iPhone
Believe it or not, I’m not a Mac fan, but I love great functional design like the Apple MacBook Air, and technologies that just work like the iPhone! I think the reason that I am not a Mac fan is that I don’t see Apple transitioning from great single function/single user products to fully integrated business systems – time will tell and it would be great for me to be proven wrong.
On that note, if you needed another argument for the iPhone as a fully featured business class tool, there’s a new app from Citrix which will provide. Called Citrix Receiver for iPhone it allows you to access your company applications and documents from your iPhone. We intend to look at this closely, and we’ll let you know what we think.
As we have new engineers join the team, it is always interesting to discuss what we do that works really well, what we can improve on and how we can work smarter!
One of the things that amazed me was the popularity with our staff and our clients of Share Desktop - a tool that was created about five years ago by Craig Box. Share Desktop allows clients that we support to send their “screen” securely to the engineer who is helping them on the phone. This results in greater client satisfaction as it is easier to diagnose if we need to go on-site, saves on travel, and allows us to respond faster.
Because Share Desktop has become just one of the many fantastic tools that we use to support our clients, we forget to mention Share Desktop and our other tools as some of the many advantages of using IT Partners.
Progress in the Data Centre
The IBM Blade Centre had been moved to the data centre, bandwidth provisioned and a very cool internal tool developed by Carl Buckley to manage active directory for a hosted environment. One of the great new features to be experienced by our clients is our roll-out of Microsoft Exchange 2007 – have a look at the following demo to see the enhanced webmail interface: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/code/OWA/index.html