My son has a new laptop, and we had just set it up with a brand new installation of MS Office 2010, with Service Pack 1.  Windows 7 was similarly updated, and everything was about as clean as it will ever be.  I was surprised, therefore, when I moved his documents over from the old machine, where he had been using Word 2007, to find that there was a problem opening them in Word 2010 on the new machine.

When you tried to open a Word Document (either from within Word, or from the Explorer view) Word produced the helpful message that it had ‘stopped working’.  This was easily spotted, to be honest, given that the screen had whited out and the application had stopped responding.  If you clicked through the error message, it produced another warning that the Normal template had been modified, and asking whether I wanted to save the new version.  That would be a ‘No’, then.

Off to the forums, to see what the problem is.  As I say, it seems a few people have hit this issue, and proposed solutions ranged from deleteing the Normal template file and allowing Word to create a new one (tried that, even though it was obviously not the problem, but it made no odds) to removing a couple of Registry keys.  Again, given that the machine was brand new and clean, it seemed unlikely that there was a problem with anything in the Registry, so I didn’t bother with that one.

Reinstalling Office (the default position of a lot of forum posters, including some Microsoft people) seemed unecessary, given that the current installation was barely an hour old!

After seeing a forum post that suggested that an add-in (which I didn’t have) was causing a similar problem, I decided to check the rest of the installed add-ins out.  There weren’t very many, but there was one called ‘Send to Bluetooth’, so I disabled it as I couldn’t see a need for it anyway.   Happily, this resolved the problem and (as is often the case when you know what to search for) there are a number of forums that mention having had issues with this third-party add-in.

So – check your Microsoft Word 2010 add-ins and, if you have ‘Send to Bluetooth’ in the list, I’d suggest getting rid of it.  If it causes an error serious enough to corrupt the document templates and crash the application, I suspect you’re better off without it!

These are valid concerns, of course, but the move to cloud services is happening. Can you afford to ignore it, and are you missing opportunities by not considering cloud solutions, or “Software As A Service” (SAAS)?

As with anything you do in your business (I hope) you need to do a bit of due diligence, and I’ve set out a little acronym to help you with some of the key areas you need to consider – appropriately enough, it’s all about TRUST:

T – transparency
R – reliability
U – usage limitations
S – security
T – terms and conditions of trading

These five key areas give you a broad scope by which to measure potential providers, and cover areas that you need to be asking questions about. Here’s a bit more detail:

Transparency:

• Cloud solution providers should explain their information handling and data storage practices in a clear and concise manner.
• Check whether their websites and marketing material include information about the reliability of their services, preferably independently measured.
• A definitive list of countries in which customer data may be stored or where applications may be hosted should be provided, and this is especially important if you are concerned with any element of Data Protection.  Some vendors can’t or won’t guarantee which country your data will be stored in, which is not always acceptable.

Reliability:

• A clear indication ought to be available of the uptime and downtime of all the cloud services, as well as any security or system issues that may have occurred.
• If there has been any sort of security breach in the past, this should have been notified to customers immediately.
• Verify the backup policy of the provider, and the policy concerning the duty of care of the customer data should be clear and concise.

Usage Limitations:

• Providers of cloud solutions should claim no automatic rights of any kind over customer data. Data should be used purely to fulfil the obligations of the software – for example, calculations or other activities that form part of the provided solution – or to meet statutory or regulatory requirements, such as the online posting of VAT returns.
• All the data within a customer’s instance of the cloud solution should be made available for download in some standard format, should the customer require it.
• Cloud providers should disclose customer data to a third party only with explicit permission of the customer, or if required to do so by law. Any legal claim from a third party to access the data should be notified to the customer immediately and before any such disclosure is made, so the customer has the opportunity to challenge the request.
• Some providers may reserve the right to use some client data anonymously for bench-marking.  Make sure you understand what is involved here, and be sure that you are happy with the policy.  In general, it’s a useful thing to many businesses as a performance indicator, so don’t discount it out of hand, but be careful.

Security:

• Cloud service providers should protect customer data via internationally accepted and visible information security standards, like ISO 27002.
• All security management standards and processes should be audited by third-party auditors to ensure compliance, and the outcomes of these audits should be made available to customers, at least, if not publicly on the provider’s website.
• Such disclosures should also include information about how any issues raised in the audit are being addressed, and within what timeframe.

Terms and Conditions of Trading:

• The main message here is to actually read them!
• There should be a clear, concise and comprehensive set of terms agreed between the provider and the customer. These terms should set out defined areas of responsibilty and accountability, with the aim of avoiding disputes about who is liable shoudl some problem occur.
• Typically, these disputes will arise owing to either service provision or availability, or data loss or mismanagement. A key area, however, is privacy and security – the control of who has access to what elements of the system, and how that access is policed. The customer should be in control of the security relating to their own users, and the provider should deal with the wider issues of data protection and security.
• This agreement also need to make it clear where the responsibility for Data Protection compliance lies.  Be careful of the small print, obviously!

Hopefully, if you can satisfy yourself on most of the issues mentioned above, you should have found a competent service provider.  Each business has its own needs, however, and this list of suggestions is far from exhaustive, but I hope it will get you started, and will help you to build TRUST in cloud computing as a technology.

Happy hunting!

The response was that she had searched in Google for “checklist for IT Director”, and somewhere among the returned results was a link that took her through to my site, and as a result of what she saw there she very kindly got in touch.

Excellent stuff – we had a good conversation and, like with all these things, you never know where it may lead.

However, I was intrigued by the “checklist for IT Director” thing, because as far as I am aware, neither the term “checklist” nor “IT Director” appear on my website currently, and have not for some time.  So I decided to investigate further, with intriguing results.

A couple of years ago, I did do some marketing around the virtual/ outsourced IT Director model, and as part of that process I had a Twitter account in the name of @it_director.  I put out a couple of dozen tweets on this account over a few months, and the last one was over a year ago in January 2010.

One of the tweets I had put out concerned a checklist (can you see where this is going?) for various issues, in this case whether or not you should block automatic updates for Internet Explorer 8!  This was in March 2009, and contained a link to a long-dead page, on a website that I no longer use.

Happily, I had maintained the domain, and pointed it to my current site, so when the link was clicked, up came Expedio and the contact was established.  So the moral appears to be that you should always ensure that any domains you link to from Twitter, or any other forum postings or social media activity are redirected if you close the website.  You just never know – in a few years time, someone may stumble across one of your current tweets, even if it’s actually totally irrelevant to what they were looking for, and click on the link.

Stranger things have happened …

Perhaps I’m losing you, so let’s start at the beginning.  A few days ago, our oven stopped heating up properly, and we took the decision to replace it, given that we have already repaired it a couple of times over the seven or eight years we’ve been using it.

During the purchasing process it came to light that we needed to have it hard-wired into the electricity supply now, owing to changes in the regulations.  Our existing oven, along with its companion combination microwave, is plugged into a wall socket behind the fixture.

So a shiny new oven was delivered yesterday, and the electrician duly turned up to do the necessary wiring.  We switched off the 30amp cooker circuit at the fusebox, so you can imagine our surprise when on our return to the kitchen the light on the microwave was still on!

An investigation of all the sockets in the kitchen revealed that the dishwasher and a freezer were plugged into this 30amp circuit (with a socket intriguingly positioned beneath the sink), whereas the oven and combination microwave have been operating off the standard ring-main since the kitchen was installed! It also emerged that the electronic ignition for our gas hob was powered by this circuit too.

Well – obviously this will necessitate a slightly bigger job than anticipated in terms of wiring up the oven, but a number of things have come to mind since yesterday:

Firstly, if I hadn’t decided to do the job properly, and call the electrician, I could have just fitted a plug to my new higher-powered oven and started using it.  Besides invalidating the warranty on the oven, if I was unlucky enough not to blow the fuses I would probably end up burning the house down!

Secondly, the ‘professionals’ who installed the kitchen for the previous owners of the house were clearly muppets, having breached all sorts of regulations, I would imagine, even 10 years ago.  What sort of idiot would simply fail to move the supply approximately seven feet to the right?  It’s on the same wall,  so would have been very easy to do – it’s not as if you’d have a major issue running the cables.

So I can see some morals here, which do have a business application (so we get there eventually!) and are worth thinking about if you are embarking on something new, or planning some changes in your operation.

1. Don’t cut corners – plan properly, and don’t be tempted to take shortcuts.  If you do, not only could you have a problem in the short term, but also you will be discovered in the end, even if it takes ten years!

2. Make sure that the people doing the work are competent, and try and find some way of checking that they have delivered what they claim.  They will also be rumbled eventually, but after ten years you can’t do anything about it.

So, excuse a slightly bizarre post, but there is a bit of relevance there!

One common question is about web design, and the answers often concentrate on the distinction between designers and coders.  The generalisation is usually that designers are concerned with form over function, and developers or coders are the opposite.  However, the focus of both of these is on the creation of the site itself, in whatever form it takes.

Another common query is about CRM – how do you identify the best system?  Again, responses revolve around features of particular solutions, often based on the respondent’s experiences with a given solution.

What intrigues me about all of these threads is the fact that people are often not looking at the business for which the solution is required.  Websites and CRM systems are not like cars or washing machines – you don’t just buy one that you like the look of because you know that whatever you buy it will drive you from A to B, or wash your clothes.  The solution you need in terms of technology for your business is one that you can work with, and which will deliver what you need with minimal impact on the way you operate.

You have to start from the business end, and look at all the processes and aims and personalities involved (yes, personalities are important!) and then start to look for the solutions to meet the business need.   When you are buying insurance or a mortgage, you need a broker that has access to the whole of the market, and can therefore pick the best option to suit your needs.

Why then, when you need a new CRM system or website, do you go straight to the provider, rather than through a ‘broker’ who can help you to ensure that the final solution is a fit for the business?  Many business owners are not technologists, so this type of support is vital, and can save huge amounts of time and money in the end.

A year or two ago, I saw a statistic that said that a significant percentage of CRM implementations fail to deliver.  I suspect that this is because the systems selected were not a good fit for the business, as opposed to them being bad systems.  The advice of someone with nothing specific to sell, and an objective opinion as to the way to get what you want and need, could be worth more than you think.

The dreaded problem of inconsistent results reared its head on a project – sometimes we got the right and expected results, and other times it failed.  This is always a tricky one, as it often points to a data problem rather than a procedural one, and can be hard to track down.

So, I spent some hours going through all the queries and procedures – extracting the code for each one, and running them manually and all seemed fine.  I’d bung in the parameters, and away it went – no issues, and the correct result every time as far as I could tell.  Yet when the process was run through the application, we’d get wrong answers.

This morning I found the problem.  We had a query built within the application code, one element of which was to collect some data from a table based on the year.  The query parameter was built by appending a two digit year number to the end of the field name – so ‘pop09′, ‘pop10′ and so on.

The code contained a variable that held the year number selected by the user, and this variable was the problem.  It was defined as an integer, and not a string (a legacy from an earlier version of the code) so therefore if you selected 2010, it would store 10 and everything would be fine – however, 2009 would end up as 9 instead of 09, and the process failed.

This explained how the queries worked when I ran them manually, because of course I was providing the correct 09 parameter, so this bug snuck through that stage, but we got it in the end – it had nowhere to hide!

So a fine example of how a zero (especially a leading one) can turn out to be a lot more important than it looks.

I’ve taken the view that it’s about establishing yourself as some sort of credible voice in a particular field, so to date I have only submitted answers about Microsoft Access and Excel, and a few database-related questions.  I haven’t as yet asked a question myself.

However, I do see that many of the questions are really very ‘ordinary’ – the answer could be found in thirty seconds on Google, rather than posting on a forum and waiting an unspecified amount of time for an answer, if indeed one ever comes!  Perhaps I’m being unfair, and other people are dipping their toes in the water just like I am, and these questions are just stuck in to see what happens, but it makes you wonder what the value is in a question and answer system like this.

Many of the answers are easily available on Google (I have checked this be searching for some of the topics that I have posted on) so really Quora can only be about establishing yourself as the ‘go-to guy’ for a particular topic.  On a local level, I can see that working, but on a worldwide web forum?

The jury for me, therefore, is still firmly on its lunchbreak!

Come and join me at this exhibition, and meet a host of businesses that can work with you to improve processes and reduce costs and environmental impact.

We’ll be there from 10:00am to 4:00pm – see you there!

The idea is that you follow certain topics, for example Microsoft Access.  Every time someone asks a question about Access, you have the opportunity to see the question and provide an answer.  Other users can comment on your answer, or provide their own, and your answer can also attract votes (a bit like the ‘Like’ facility on Facebook).

I’m liking the idea at the moment.  It’s a good opportunity to contribute to a resource that the developers claim is aiming to provide the best answers to any question that you care to ask.  In that respect, there’s an element of the Wikipedia approach.  Questions and answers and comments appear in a kind of timeline, rather like Facebook, and you can follow users of your choice, and have people follow you, in which respect it’s a bit like Twitter!

I wouldn’t claim to be a social media expert, but I haven’t seen anything quite like this before, and it seems a good way of establishing some credentials as an ‘expert’, provided you [a] pick the right topics and [b] provide sensible answers!  If you haven’t seen it, do visit and have a look and, maybe, follow me?

The move is also prompted by the fact that both these applications are cloud-based, so I don’t need to worry about backing up my data, and I can access it from anywhere where I can get onto the internet – very handy just this morning when I needed to send a copy of an invoice to a client while I was in a meeting in Starbucks!

It’s also useful in that I can simply give my Kashflow login details to my accountant, and he can log on and do what needs to be done without my having to provide endless reports and bits of information.  It will automatically post my online VAT Return as well, which is a real bonus.  I know that there are many other applications that will do all of these things, but I have settled on Kashflow because it seems very intuitive to use, with a sensible interface, and so far I am impressed with the experience that I have had.

Capsule CRM is newer to me, as I have only just finished configuring it, but again it seems a very effective package for a very reasonable monthly fee.  It does all the things that one would expect – tasks can be created, and they show up in your Outlook Calendar, via iCalendar integration, so there is no need to look in two places for the information.  I am also sent an email every morning, with a list of the calls and follow-ups that I need to deal with that day, and the email contains hyperlinks back to the relevant data if you need to look something up.

In addition, there is the usual opportunity milestone type of functionality, along with the ability to create workflows (called tracks) to control activity.  Again, so far, so good.

I spent some time recently checking out a few of the integrated online solutions  that you can use, that support all business functions via a range of modules.  I have to say that I haven’t yet seen anything that stacks up against the likes of Kashflow in appearance or ease of use.  I personally would prefer to have a fully integrated system dealing with documents, emails, accounts and CRM, but have decided to keep on the road of buying in the individual services for the moment.  I think the online ‘suites’ will have their day, but most of them fall short in some respects at the moment, or are too expensive for small businesses.

A good analogy is that of hi-fi equipment.  For those of us that are old enough to remember those all-in-one music centres – there was always something that was a weak link.  Maybe you had a brilliant turntable, but the cassette or radio let the whole down, so the real afficionados went for hi-fi separates.  I think that is where we are with the cloud business solutions at the moment.

In the meantime – thanks to Kashflow and Capsule for making my life easier and (hopefully) more efficient!