The second one from me....

The second posting on a blog feels very similar to what you get in a sequel to a movie, the back story is out of the way, you've been introduced to the character(s) and now you can come out all guns blazing. Think Lethal Weapon 2, The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek - The Wrath of Khan, Mad Max 2 and you know what I'm talking about. Forget about Speed 2, Basic Instinct 2 and Matrix Revolutions, I'm hoping not to go down that route.(I'm not even going to bother with linking those films!)

Quite a few people witin the company have now started doing their blogs and obviously will have a different style in how they look to present. I'm going for the relaxed film nerd type approach so will reference them when I can as it makes sense to me. I've had some nice comments about the first blog, thank you for those.

Two of the things that I'm working on at the moment (amongst many others I hasten to add) are how we can look to use our Gold Partnership with Microsoft more effectively and also how we implement ISO14001, an environmental standard. I've always been a terrible stickler for turning lights off in rooms when I leave them, not leaving the tap running when I brush my teeth and other environmentally friendly actions. I thought 'thats fine, we should be able to get this standard (ISO14001) without too many problems'. How wrong could I be?! There is absolutely masses of documentation to go through and so many changes that we can make that will enable us to become a greener company and 'do our bit' for the environment.  We might not make a whole lot of difference just ourselves but at least we'll know we are doing all we can. It's my plan to have this implemented within the next six months. If you know of any environmentally friendly plans we can get involved in, let me know!

The Gold Partnership with Microsoft is a funny thing. We spent three years as a standard partner and then decided that we could achieve far more as a Gold Partner. The Gold Partnership was the same cost to us as a company to register but we wanted to get more customer feedback, more case references and the like. We had the technical people required internally to meet the requirements, we had the services needed for competencies and we had some great references from customers! Why not? It was, as they say, 'a no brainer'. What we are looking at now is how we can get even more from this relationship. Microsoft have some great resources but because there are so many it's difficult identifying all of the ones that will be of some use! If anyone out there can help me more with this or even if some bod from Microsoft happens to read this and can help I'd be happy to hear from you!

Mark D

Comments

[James H]

For me, environmental issues are likely to become one of the top reasons why organisations should consider hosted services or Software as a Service as it seems to becoming known as.

I think anyone who has worked in the IT industry for any length of time recognises how power hungry and energy inefficient it is. Add into this the scale of duplicated and wasted resources typically present in an average medium sized organisation's IT infrastructure and multiply this hundreds of thousands of times and it's easy to see that any effort to share and maximise resources in the way that hosted services does is a good one.

Beyond this it seems, based on events over the last few years in particular, that global warming is resulting in more unpredictable and extreme weather patterns. When you see the extent of the recent flooding in Yorkshire, as an example, you really hope for the business owners who were suddenly flooded out that they have 'business continuity' plans.

For me, hosted services really does provide peace of mind in this respect as you know whatever might happen to your physical premises, much of what you need to conduct business in an increasingly electronic environment is safely and securely managed elsewhere.

[Mark Davies]

I completely agree. I also think that we can get a bit too caught up in all the hype around global warming and the information that is given out can be very confusing. Some data says we are on a road to destruction and some say it's just a natural cycle of events for the planet.

Ultimately if we treated all of our natural resources with the same respect as we do with food for example (make sure you eat all your dinner etc) then I think people would be far less wasteful than they are. We've been bought up to use resources with impunity and if we can educate children earlier as well as educating businesses then we can stop the wastage and save money too. It makes complete sense if we can get round peoples inate laziness.

We are making a huge effort internally to try and reduce the amount of electricity used with servers and using VMWare are consolidating mulitple servers in to one box. Time will tell if what we did made a difference. (I love cheesy dialog, it's like something out of the film Armageddon!)