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 Spring comes around again, after what has seemed to be an interminable cold winter though we have not seen as much snow as some of our readers. One, in the north of Scotland, has had snow cover continuously from December 18 to well into March!
For us, the relentless pace of business change has not let up. We now have a much extended server room that has quadrupled our physical capacity, and with the potential of server virtualisation the ultimate effective capacity increase becomes hard to calculate. Together with an increase in the capacity of our NHS N3 connection to give us a potential for 100Mb/sec and with hardware support from Dell we are now well placed to fulfill the increasing numbers of hosting enquiries. The interest in secure NHS N3 hosting shows no sign of abating.
We have also added full redundancy with a heavy duty backup generator that will allow servers to run 24/7 in the event of a supply failure. Coincidentally, within a week of commissioning, we had a significant power cut that provided an excellent "real life" test of the new facility! It was very nice for the system manager to be able to just sit and wait for the few moments until the generator kicked in, rather than go into immediate "power conservation mode" which used to involve a lot of manual running around turning non essential servers off (aka panic mode!)
Health Informatics Congress 2010
HC2010 is a 3 day conference and exhibition showcasing some of the best and most current technical systems, services and solutions used to support care and treatment in the world today. As well as current best practice, and examples of leading edge technology, the conference will include contributions from policy makers, and examples of innovative strategic and tactical practice across the world of health and social care informatics.
In view of the event’s target audience, we will be promoting our enhanced NHS N3 serviced hosting capabilities on Stand 162, together with our Dynamic AI and Eclipse-fm® products.
So whether you are seeking an accredited N3 hosting provider, a cost effective Business Intelligence tool or the market leading NHS based Estates / Facilities system, we look forward to meeting you on Stand 162 at the ICC on 27-29 April 2010.
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 NHS Internet and Server Hosting
As mentioned above, our NHS hosting services continue to expand, with our sales team fielding a steady stream of enquiries.
National Ophthalmology DataBase
The latest of these to start going into service is the National Ophthalmology DataBase, a major service which will be collecting data arising from Electronic Medical Records software systems relating to ophthalmological examinations. While a vital service by any standards, this is of particular importance in the long term management of diabetes, which can have disastrous effects on eyesight.
This data will accumulate into an extensive national resource which will enable ophthalmic clinicians to benchmark their performance against the actual standards revealed by the pooled data. This is a similar concept to the several databases that we already develop and host for the NHS in the area of Estates Management, and we have seen for ourselves how such data and comparative benchmarking facilities can be an invaluable aid in improving services and working practices (5 Years of ERIC on Line).
With this just starting to go into use, we already have a request to look at taking over the hosting of the Sharepoint based collection of documents used in the auditing of the local schemes. This will require extensive VPN access for a mobile community of auditors who need access to the central pool of documents from wherever they are when engaged in an audit.
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Eclipse-fm®
Our flagship Estates and Facilities Management system goes into Version 5 in April.
New features include auditable proof of taking notice of health and safety notices, and the handling of nested assets in an "Asset has Sub Assets which have sub-assets" relationship. Theoretically without limit, this is the classic "Start with a Boeing 747 and end up with a rubber tyre" bill of materials type of structure. It will be interesting to see how our NHS Hospital users put this feature to work.
One encouraging development since the last major release has been the attraction of Eclipse-fm® to specialist trades such as the management of the highly specialized Electronic and Bio-Medical Equipment (EBME) maintenance function. More often managed by a separate package, the benefits from bringing this all under one management facility are proving to be very attractive, especially as there appears to be no other FM system capable of doing this.
It now appears likely that we will be spinning off a separate "Special Interest Group" (on April 13) to develop EBME maintenance management features further. If you do not get our regular Eclipse-fm® and this is of interest to you, call us on 0845 2707747 for more information.
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 European DataFlex User Conference
Our Technical Director, Martin Pincott, was a guest speaker at the European DataFlex User Conference in Seefeld, Austria in early March.
Martin presented the UK Codejock library, its use and benefits and along with the Codejock authors themselves outlined a view of the future of the Codejock product.
 The Codejock range of Windows controls are much used by programmers around the world in creating visually attractive and user friendly Windows desktop applications. The VDF SIG Developers, coordinated by Asckey Data Services, have done an excellent job of making these easy to use within the VDF development environment. For more on this, see Martin’s Powerpoint slides.
In its next release, due around May/June, Visual DataFlex V16 will be implementing the Codejock Extreme Report Control as a new data entry Grid control. This will give VDF developers a state of the art grid control with big new opportunities to build new functionality and "state of the art" user interface provisions into their applications.
Web Applications and Web Sites also figured highly. Chip Casenave, CEO of Data Access corporation highlighted how the current release of Electos provides everything you need to easily add that vital "Search Engine Optimisation" material to your pages, right down to the individual page level which, as we have found, really does help to push your web site up the ratings. More on this here if interested
David Martinko, from Tracker Systems Inc. USA also highlighted Electos, this time as a vehicle for other web applications.
"Using a CMS system allows me to leverage the User login for securing my webapp, allows me to use the CMS system templates for look/feel, and it builds menus for me. So I can concentrate more on the building of the app and less on design. Crucially, I don’t have to re-invent security.
All I do is copy the HTML code into the content of a page in the Electos studio... and my new page is published!."
Mike Peat, Managing Director, Unicorn InterGlobal Limited, took up the Web Application development theme, with a potentially significant improvement to the way in which Web Applications could be structured.
"A set of linked Ajax pages is not a Web 2.0 application. We need to build entire applications on a single page; give up on ASP, Cookies and all that sellotape and string technology and just have HTML and JavaScript on the client and a web service on the server. We need to build "applications on a page" - Instead of a collection of pages, we have a full (seamless) client-side application"
The VDF AJAX framework has already taken us well beyond the "Submit - pause - get a new page" approach of traditional HTML web site pages, but we still tend to see single purpose pages linked by some form of menu which is a little reminiscent of character mode days. This approach has the potential to take our web applications another step towards the rich, functionally and visually integrated applications that Windows desktop applications have made us used to.
Mike has a very nice presentation on this which, if this is an area of interest for you is well worth a look at.
Somentec.
Lastly, (of these highlights, not the whole conference) it was nice to see Somentec, a German software development company active in the utilities business having great success with their XAP Visual DataFlex/Dynamic AI application
Somentec are an Oracle partner, and Christian Hartlieb, CEO Somentec Software AG, described how they have succeeded in taking XAP from 1994, when it was the first and only German billing system for community suppliers and energy companies built as a completely object-oriented DataFlex application that was operating system and database independent into the current Visual DataFlex/Dynamic AI powered implementation that has been able to successfully stand its ground in the highly competitive energy market, despite Somentec being being a relatively small enterprise.
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Dynamic AI
We are having a major push on increasing interest in Dynamic AI beyond our traditional the Health sector market. The web site has been expanded to include a set of "Dynamic AI TV" videos which provide on line demonstration of many of Dynamic AI’s features. Try the 5 minute demo of Automated Intelligence as a starting point.
The "drag and drop" design process is amazing given that this is a web application, and it shows how quickly you can develop a complete dashboard with graphs and even a world map link
This will be backed up with a Dynamic AI mail campaign beginning in the E Midlands and East Anglia geographical areas where we can easily pick up on the "local interest" with demonstrations or help with getting started
As a reminder, Dynamic AI is a "new generation" Business Intelligence reporting tool that uses the power of current SQL based databases (Oracle, MS SQL Server, postgreSQL etc) to provide rapid and extensive data reporting and analysis in a completely Web based environment.
Dispensing with the need for complex and expensive pre-processing of data into off-line databases ("Cubes") for reporting purposes, Dynamic AI is a web reporting tool that encourages ad hoc exploration of business data in a very user friendly environment.
The current version has introduced the concept of "Automated Intelligence" which, along with a drag and drop design interface can result in the generation of comprehensive data analysis reports and dashboards by users with very little previous experience of such reporting.
Dynamic AI is scalable from a single PC installation, through a server edition capable of supporting up to 50 concurrent users, to a multi-server capability for very large concurrent user counts. A free, full feature Personal Edition allows you to explore Dynamic AI’s capabilities without needing to refresh the usual evaluation edition time expiry, while the server edition is a highly cost effective solution for mid size businesses where full blown traditional BI installations may beyond their budget. Application developers can embed Dynamic AI into their applications at very low cost.
At Asckey Data Services we use Dynamic AI to monitor our support desk performance, and with its help have scored 100% adherence to our SLA targets for the last 12 months.
The NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care use Dynamic AI for in depth analysis of data relating to the management of the NHS "Estate" - the buildings, equipment and general Hospital Environment. If you ever see statistics on such topics they have probably been through Dynamic AI at some point! More here.
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 For expert business application
development, using virtually any
database format, specialist web
site and web application development
and hosting -
Talk to us! 0845 270 7747
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Church End Farm
Warboys Road, Pidley,
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