Spam, spam, and more spam: it’s up to you to check

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Barrie Giles

SPAM… emails you don’t want and haven’t signed up for. They’ll always be with us in huge volumes.

But how do you make sure you get all the emails you want and none of the ones you don’t want? The most common approach is to use spam management tools such as Sophos PureMessage or cloud filtering services from providers like Symantec.

The problem is, these tools work on software filters that try to differentiate between spam and the emails you want. And because they can’t be perfect for everyone all of the time, they allow you to set for yourself just how ferocious you want them to be.

In practice this means you get one of two results:

Continue reading →

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Service Notification Alert: planned power outage: Friday 4th May

Posted on May 4, 2012 by John Crozier

Replacement Power Supply and Electricity Equipment

Maintenance Date: Friday 4th May 2012

Maintenance Timeframe: 15:30pm – 19:00pm

We are undergoing a power equipment upgrade in our facilities at Hamilton House (Oxford) which means our premises will be without power during the above time, it is possible that we could operate on redundant power during the scheduled window but we feel it would be safer to completely shut down all of our equipment prior to the work commencing.

This includes our telephone system and so therefor we will be without all communications during the shutdown window.

Impact

Downtime of all services will be experienced during the scheduled window between 15:30pm – 19:00pm on Friday 4th May

Services affected

  • All FirstLine IT Support Services, excluding emergency duty engineer cover – this service will remain operational but only by email tosupport@firstline-it.com and will only be in the event of emergency non-related to this maintenance window
  • All FirstLine Hosted Services
  • All FirstLine Online Backup Services

Completion

After the required work is complete all services should resume to normal operation.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this maintenance and should you experience issues directly related to this after the event please do not hesitate to contact us on 01865 260 220 or by email to support@firstline-it.com

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Are you addicted to emails?

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Barrie Giles

All the businesses we work with tell us they are totally dependent upon their emails. That it’s super-critical their emails never stop because they can lose business.

With the current technology available it’s possible not to have to suffer any interruptions in your emails and to keep the ones you have, for as long as you like.

Form an orderly queue, please

So if everyone’s needs can be met why aren’t people forming a queue at our door? Well, like all things in life it comes down to cost and expectations.

Do we believe that continuous email is a ‘human right’ that we are are entitled to, free at the point of use?

Someone has to pay for the massive technological investment that’s taken place and must continue to take place for these services to meet our expectations.

So continuous email is available to businesses together with unlimited storage but there is a cost: about £6 per month per user.

Is that too higher a price to feed our habit?

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Five ways to keep your PC in good working order: part three

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Ned Wells

In this third installation on how to keep your PC in good working order, we look at how to clear the history in Internet Explorer.

Now why would I want to do that?

Each time you visit a website, the browser you’re using does more than just display the site on your screen. Very often, it stores a copy of the site on your computer. It does this so that, assuming you visit that site again, the website will load more quickly next time you visit it.

After a while there will be a lot of information stored on your computer to do with the websites you’ve visited. This can slow things down rather than speed things up. The solution is to clear the browsers history; and here’s how to do it for Internet Explorer 9:

Continue reading →

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Helping people start their own business

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Barrie Giles

I went to a very interesting dinner last night. The purpose of the dinner was to introduce some local business people to a recently founded charity called Fredericks. www.fredericksfoundation.org if you’re interested in finding out more.

The idea of Fredericks Foundation is to help disadvantaged people set up or grow their own businesses by giving them loans at commercial rates, together with business advice. We’re talking about the sort of people that banks wouldn’t give more than a few moments consideration to, before they said NO.

A local fund is created by people who have some spare cash and can lock it away for 5 years. They’ll get get a 5% tax free return on while it’s in the scheme. There’s a some risk of loss but not as great as you may think.

While people who can invest are important, a steady flow of people who want loans is also a priority. This another area where local businesses can help. If you know someone who wants to start a business and needs some financial help then point them towards Fredericks.

If you are a local business person and want to know more then please get in touch with me.

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Limited Company – what’s the point any more?

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Barrie Giles

It seems that, as a small business I’m being asked to provide director guarantees more frequently and by more types of organisations. We are growing, profitable and have a blemish-free credit record. But nowadays that just does not seem to be enough.

We’ve got used to the banks asking for director’s guarantees for everything even though it annoys me when I think about it. I always thought they charged interest to cover the risk. Now when we lease equipment the finance companies do the same thing. The latest fashion is for large suppliers, who think they can bully small businesses, asking for guarantees as well.

I’m sure these large suppliers are taking their lead from the banks. And they do it because they can. These large suppliers take the view that since they’re so big, a small business account is not that important… so they can take it or leave it. Their attitude is ‘sign up or go away’.

I believe this practice may continue to escalate to the point where it will need to be unlawful to use director’s guarantees to circumvent limited liability to stop it. Otherwise what’s the point of being a limited company?

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Five ways to keep your PC in good working order: part two

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Ned Wells

In last week’s post on keeping your PC in good working order, we showed you how to Empty the Recycle Bin on your PC’s desktop, and how to empty the Deleted Items folder in Microsoft Outlook. This week we’re taking a look at ‘defraging’ the hard disk on your computer, another good way to speed things up if your computer’s grindingly slow.

3. Defrag the disk every three months

The ‘disk’ is where documents and files are stored on your computer. When your PC begins to ‘write’ a file to the disk, it has no idea how big the file is and it puts in anywhere on the disk it can find space.

Continue reading →

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Five ways to keep your PC in good working order: part one

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Ned Wells

First Line’s customers often ask our engineers for simple advice on how to keep their computers and other systems running smoothly. We thought this would make a helpful blog post but it turned into such a monster, we’ve divided it out into a series of posts.

Here are the first two of five things you can do to keep your PC in good working order:

Continue reading →

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Is the economy really in such a poor way?

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Barrie Giles

Reading the headlines and listening to the news can make you very depressed. You can just feel like battening down the hatches when you get into work and be afraid of continuing to invest in order to grow.

Yet I keep wondering whether thing are really that bad. Yes we are seeing large companies coming into our market trying to pinch our customers by offering silly headline prices and then whacking them with extra costs once signed up to a 12 month contract. Yes we are seeing customers trying to squeeze the lowest possible price out of us.

But despite all that we are are still winning new business and our existing customers are buying new kit and investing in their businesses. So I’ve decided we have to press ahead and to that end we have just taken on an apprentice. Yes I have increased my cost in uncertain times, but I hope I will have a well-trained and motivated employee ready to go when things really do pick up.

Most importantly there is one less 16 year old looking for work.

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Christmas opening hours

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Barrie Giles

Over the Christmas and New Year period our opening hours will be as follows:

Friday 23rd December

  • office closes at 4pm

Monday 26th December

  • public holiday – office closed

Tuesday 27th December

  • public holiday – office closed

Wednesday 28th December

  • office closed, duty engineer available 09:00 to 5:00pm
  • emergencies only, please call 01865 260 220 or email us

Thursday 29th December

  • office closed, duty engineer available
  • emergencies only, please call 01865 260 220 or email us

Friday 30th December

  • office closed, duty engineer available
  • emergencies only, please call 01865 260 220 or email us

Monday 2nd January

  • public holiday, office closed

Tuesday 3rd January

  • business as usual, office opens at 8am

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