Cobweb

ActiveSync (beta) for Andriod HTC Magic

If you have bought a HTC Magic or HTC Dream you can get a free beta ActiveSync client from http://www.dataviz.com/products/roadsync/android/.

You get Push email with HTML formatting, calendarand contact synchronisation including caller photo ID integration.

For the security conscious a remote wipe can be initiated from Exchange Server should the device go missing.

The beta ends on 30 May 2009

Daniel
twitter.com/dannoakes

Tags: ActiveSync, Exchange, Anroid, HTC

The value of Twitter....

I love the diversity of communication methods that we go through and the really clever people that come up with 'the next big thing'. I remember back in the days of #iRC (Internet Relay Chat) and Bulletin Boards and looking at where things are now, how we've progressed. I've been through all the networking sites in some shape or form. Firstly with friendsreunited,which I never found very friendly. Then on to Facebook, now become a bit dull, and finally on to Twitter.

I'm not one of these people that follows people because they are there. I'm not a celebrity watcher who reads Heat magazine and the like but there is something about following a few select 'celebrities on twitter that I find entertaining. There is also the information aspect, which for picking up little snippets that are useful can be quite powerful. Like any tool it has its downside, but by and large it works well.

I thought I'd share some interesting people to follow on Twitter as well as some of the people from Cobweb you can follow too. I think if nothing else it can show we are 'real people' that do 'real things' rather than being faceless keyboard warriors or people on the phone.

Talking about putting a face to the name then the Cobweb CRM launch event (shameless plug!) is still taking attendees even though we now have over 100 confirmed. We'd still love more! Please contact us about this so we can make sure we can accomodate you. www.cobweb.com/crm_launch.aspx

Twitter links:-

This is me - http://twitter.com/dccarnage - Channel Manager and random witterings about nothing really important

This is Dan G - http://twitter.com/dan_germain He twits alot! CTO type stuff and bicycling type things :)

This is Dan N - http://twitter.com/dannoakes - Mobile device evangelist, action man and adventurer. Dan is your modern day (but cleverer) Bear Grylls

This is Mark A - http://twitter.com/MarktheMD - Not quite as prolific as the rest of us on Twitter but he is very busy with other things!

My choice of celebrities to follow purely down to quality of their updates:-

Stephen Fry - http://twitter.com/stephenfry

Jonathan Ross - http://twitter.com/Wossy

Alan Carr - http://twitter.com/AlanCarr (Comedian so caution advised!)

If you haven't got on Twitter yet, give it a go. It takes a while to get going but once you do, you'll wonder how you communicated without it!

Have fun!

Mark

Integrated solutions and service - iSaaS anyone?

Dale Vile, Founder and Research director of Freeform Dynamics, recently attended a Cobweb event and has written a great peice that sums up the Cobweb approach to SaaS, well worth a read, at

http://www.openreasoning.com/

Pay Once BlackBerry from T-mobile

If you use a BlackBerry for email and web T-mobile could have the deal for you. For £179 you get unlimited data (Pay as you Go talk/text) for 12 months and a BlackBerry Perl, that is less than £15 per month.

More details here, http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/mobile-phones/phones/blackberry/

Daniel - twitter.com/dannoakes

Cobweb CRM Launch Event

At the back end of last week, we quietly launched a new hosted service, Cobweb CRM, built upon Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and the Parallels Automation system. On Wednesday 27th May 2009 we are holding an in-depth launch event at the Microsoft offices in Central London (Cardinal Place on Victoria Street) and we're giving all existing partners and customers a unique opportunity to discover more about the service, meet some of the project team and interact with Cobweb.

On the day you'll hear all about the Cobweb CRM service from Ian Stobie, our man in charge of the sales team. Also presenting at the event will be John Pearson, the Sales Director at ConsultCRM, whom Cobweb have partnered with to develop and active the CRM service.

It's a morning event, so this won't take up your whole day, and there's a lunch for attendees too. If you're interested, there's more information and online registration here: http://www.cobweb.com/crm_launch/crm_launch_event.aspx

Hope to see you there,

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

The Best Support Representatives.

In Support World March/April edition the following statement was made:

"The best support representatives have extensive networks of contacts internally and externally, and call upon these self-support infrastructures when they are required"

This got me thinking; how does this statement fit into Cobweb's operational structure and do we really have the best support agents?

It is standard that most managers in a service department will state that their agents are the best equipped to service the organisations customer base; it is a natural loyalty to their staff.

However at Cobweb I really do have this belief and it is supported by the following facts:

The Cobweb service desk has three tiers of agent which all sit together which improves knowledge share and communication.

Every single agent has direct access to the Exchange and Windows engineers, for immediate escalation.

Each agent has access to extremely robust partner escalations, for example with Message Labs and Tiscali, which have been built up from years of service. Giving us highly streamlined support functions to our external partners.

A passion for customer service; many of our big customers know our agents by their first names and get the chance to meet them when they come for an office visit. 

As with anything there is room for improvement and we always strive to better ourselves, but I have one question.

What do you think makes the best support representative?

Thanks,

Russ - Service Desk Team Leader

Knowledge Base is under construction!

Hi all,

Most people are aware that Cobweb has a Service Desk where we can offer both support and advice on customers current services and future options; however were you aware that we also have a Cobweb Knowledge Base.

Here you will find documents on all our current services from ADSL through to the Hosted Exchange 2007. One of the projects that I am undertaking at the moment is to revamp and improve the content of the existing libraries, adding video guides and updated FAQ's.

One major new library under construction at the moment is Hosted CRM which is a new service Cobweb has released this week.

Take a look at the following link and let me know what you think.

http://www.cobweb.com/knowledgebase

Thanks

Russ - Service Desk Team Leader

28 April - European BlackBerry Outage

At 13:34 yesterday we received monitoring alerts that BES servers across multiple sites had lost connection to the RIM network, all BlackBerry traffic in Europe goes through this. Reports from others across Europe started appearing shortly after. By about 15:00 this was mostly resolved.

This is the latest in a string of major BlackBerry outages across the globe in the past 12 months, which are completely out of the email adminitrators control. BlackBerry is quite a complicated solution behind the scenes when compared to other push email technologies such as ActiveSync Direct Push. A top level comparision is below.

-With BlackBerry you have an email server, a BlackBerry server, an internet connection, the RIM network, the mobile operator and the device.

-With ActiveSync you have an email server, an internet connection and the device.

As you can see the BlackBerry solution includes 3 additonal points of failure, all of which are managed by seperate companies. Both use the internet and although ActiveSync devices may connect through a mobile operator, it is just standard HTTPS traffic.

Big day - 3 trade shows in London

#1 InternetWorld

Dressing down and facial hair seem to be the trend at InternetWorld, plus marketing lovelies a plenty on the stands. I think this is a new show in the UK - I haven't seen or been to this before, it wasn't here with InfoSec last year. It's a big show and it's surprisingly well attended. There are a number of European and US guys here, with some international pavilions for networking, and a couple of US faces I recognised from our S+S stand at the WWPC in Houston last summer and Microsoft WW Hosting Summits in Seattle.

   

Peer1/Server Beach were there, fighting it out with a big brash show stand, right next door to an equally flashy Rackspace stand. My inflatable airship and flashing lights are bigger than yours and all that. When I left they were doing their best to ignore each other, ha ha, all good fun, they were having a good time.

   

I was somewhat amazed at the number of traditional web hosters with stands at the show- web, dedicated servers, domain registrars were very present here. The majority of the rest of the exhibitors are web marketers - search optimisation, email marketing, conversion tracking, web marketing etc. I've picked up lots of cards, brochures and left my cards with some of them.

   

Had an interesting conversation with Huddle (online collaboration workspaces, all very social web 2.0). They have decided to become a Strategic Alliance Partner with Microsoft I believe, with the aim of working with SharePoint solutions (a good idea I think.) So they are building a Huddle service that sits with SharePoint and joins them together. They are looking for ISV opportunities and reseller partners. They have my card. A trendy flexible Huddle service sitting on top of a managed SharePoint platform sounds ideal.

Also spoke to Red Ant whom are doing some work around social media and networking sites for businesses. They have interesting ideas (and probably the coolest shiny white minimalist stand in the show) and I can't help but feel we might chat some more.

   

I finally caught up with Kyle York - this is him (http://twitter.com/kyork20) and his global dynamic DNS services at Dyn Inc. http://dynamicnetworkservices.com/ they are so like Cobweb is lots of ways by keeping it personal and building trust, by trying to beat the big guys with great technology, and by flexible with customised solutions that their customers want. We're going to give their DNS load-balanced services a trial.

   

#2 The Service Desk & IT support show

This is a smaller and quieter show that the others. Made up of regular show stands and sales people in business suits, none of the Internet hairy high-five US dudes in here! If you want a new service desk system or training, then it's a good place to look at the marketplace. Most of the presentations, as ever, are vendor based so are biased towards their product. I sat in one from ITSB about best practice, ITIL etc. was good but then I'm already a believer of ITIL and using standards to get it right.

   

Finally saw Bomgar in action. It's slick remote desktop, works pretty well and is lightweight. They recognised Cobweb immediately as we've looked at their solutions in the past, we'll see what happens there.

   

I saw a couple of knowledge management solutions in action, cool stuff, but in talking to two different vendors about this it's clear that the content, user adoption and management of the solution is what drives success. They don't really claim to have a magic bullet for that other than one guy who said "make it a critical part of someone's existence within your organisation. Make it so they MUST make it a success - make them Knowledge Manager - they have to succeed to exist!" he has a point.

   

#3 InfoSec

The daddy of network and security shows in the UK with all the big name vendors from the globe here - Symantec, HP, MessageLabs, F5, CheckPoint etc.

For some of the new or quirky gadgets, BBC News Technology have something from today.

   

For me this was a good opportunity to catch-up with our vendor and resellers partners, so spoke with Security Partnerships about the new CheckPoint firewalls (you know that CheckPoint recently purchased the firewall part of Nokia right?) and saw some half-width (two side by side in 1U) firewalls suitable for WAN/private links that need firewalling.

Caught up with MessageLabs (provider of perimeter email security AV/AS to all Cobweb Hosted Exchange customers as standard), big stand with lots happening, but nothing really new around the Symantec relationship yet to talk to. Check out MessageLabs Intelligence if you get the chance, it's scary yet comforting.

Had a long chat with Craig from F5 Networks about their load-balancing solutions for servers and data centres. Big bucks but nice features if you need them. Turns out he plays rugby with a friend of ours in the Cobweb alumni.

   

Cobweb are at InfoSec again tomorrow as there's still more to see, including virtualisation and network monitoring amongst other things. If you're there, say hello to Matt MacAulay and Paul Green.

 

Back in the office tomorrow. There are some pictures from today on http://twitpic.com/photos/dan_germain

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

The Joys Of Technology

Now I'm not a technology nerd by any stretch of the imagination. I don't have the latest phone, TV, DVD, camera or anything that would be classed 'cutting edge'. I do however love technology. I love reading about it in the Sunday papers (Times of course). I love walking in to a tech shop and looking at the latest gadgets and I love seeing other people getting excited about their latest gadget they've bought. Technology is fun.

Those are the physical devices but the way that technology has really showed me it's value recently is coming to the end of my degree. Firstly, without Google or search engines I never would have researched so much on Information Security as I did. I had a secure connection from home in to the University network so I could work as effectively from home as I could from being sat there.

The second thing that made a huge difference was when we had to do our consultancy project. Four group members that lived in fairly disparate places that had to put together a high level piece of work for a car park company with assets of over 3 billion euros. We weren't presenting our findings to any people in the organisation, but the exec team. This needed to be good, no not good, great.

Organising ourselves was obviously fundamental to the success of the project. We knew that meeting once a week was going to be a challange. We all worked full time, we all had dissertations to write, we all had families complaining of not seeing us enough already. We needed a tool that could help us collaborate effectively without needing to get together all the time. I needed to see when the others had modified or added something. The same for them when I did anything.

A good collaboration tool, that is easy to maintain document control, that is easy to alert the users when things are add / modified, that has granular levels of security so you can allow external people access to some documents but not all your work, that you can have discussion boards on to keep a log of discussions and have them in your own time. In the words of Rolf Harris, "Can you tell what it is yet?"

We used Sharepoint. I knew it well, the others didn't but with 30 minutes overview they were convinced. I won't bore you (more than I have) about the ins and outs of exactly what we did but I will with the end result.

The project was completed two weeks early.

We presented to their Exec board our findings to glowing praise. (One Exec member who hadn't been told who we were actually thought we were a professional team of consultants bought in by the company). Our score when it was marked was 88%. The highest in the Universities history within the business school for a consultancy project. Obviously we were all immensely proud of the work we'd done and the outcome.

Would we have done it without the technology? We don't think so.

Technology. Love it. Use it. Reap the benefits.