More Internet Hosting from Asckey Data Services
Every day we seem to find more opportunities for overcoming the geographical limitations of the corporate LAN.
More and more we find ourselves capable of providing not just web sites, but interactive applications, sharing office functionality and generally creating opportunities for new ways of working "any time, any place"
No bad thing either with the costs of travel rocketing on the back of the global oil price!
If you want to free yourself from the restrictions of local-to-office-working, talk to us and maybe we can give you some ideas.
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Welcome to our Spring Newsletter
We have had a busy winter, with our major Eclipse-fm® facilities management system seeing a new release in January, a new web site to develop, a successful major tender won, and a new Version of Visual Dataflex, our major software development tool arriving.
We have also welcomed Bernard Hill as our new sales manager. With many years of field sales experience, Bernard is busy with our Eclipse-fm® NHS facilities management system users and new users, and has been travelling the length of the UK (well, Truro to Aberdeen if not quite the traditional Lands End to John o’Groats, but nearly!) in the process.
However, the NHS doesn’t quite take up all of Bernard’s time, and he will be at Internet World (Earls Court 2, April 29th to May 2nd ) on Stand E580. If you have time, do come and meet Bernard who will be showing the latest version of Dynamic AI, our Business Intelligence reporting system especially suitable for the "SME" - Small to Medium Sized Enterprise - business. Plus the latest version of Electos, our easy to use web site management system, and the just released Visual DataFlex v2008.
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A new "Asckey Hosting" web site (www.asckeyhosting.co.uk) has joined our family of web sites.
Our hosting business has been steadily growing, to the point where it is much more than a minor aspect of our operations. Our client sites range from simple "open" web sites, through to high volume data collection and analysis sites that you need a login to access, and our clients from web shop owners to government departments.
We bill this as "Expert Web Hosting for active Web applications", as our speciality lies in hosting sites that are anything but the usual run of static sites, ranging from Content Managed websites based on the Electos CMS sofware on a shared server, to heavy duty transaction processing and data collecting sites using Web Services and usually the Visual DataFlex Web Application server as the primary powerhouse driving things along.
If you need more than just a simple, static web site, whether it is for a content managed site, a web shop, or especially a complex, interactive, website managing lots of data, talk to us. We can provide comprehensive hosting services and we are not afraid of interactive sites, databases, web services and all the other specialist considerations that mass market web site hosting service providers may not want to look at.
Our new site explains what can be done, and outlines some of the options and costs for doing it. We hope that it will give you lots of ideas for moving on from local, desktop bound applications and static web sites into a world where geographical constraints have disappeared, and keeping your web sites as up to date as you need them to be needs much less effort and expertise than it used to.
Do you need specialist Internet/Web site services?
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Internet Hosting for NHS Users and Suppliers
As well as our general interest in "active content " web sites, we are one of a very few Hosting organisations that can provide services across the NHS’s private " Connecting for Health" (CFH) intranet. Considered to be the largest intranet in Europe, the NHS maintains strict control over access to CFH, and we are fully authorised to host web sites, interactive web applications, and Windows Terminal Services applications over this intranet. This means we have had to prove our capability to maintain security, back-up and reliability standards to the CFH standards, which we apply to all our client sites. Back to Top
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The NHS Information Centre - a Tender Success
Achieving success in a full blown "European Journal" competitive tender, mandatory where tender values are over roughtly £110K, is a big hurdle for the smaller business, so our success in March at winning the tender to support and develop the efm-Information gateway and family of data collection and analysis web applications that reside behind it for the NHS Information Centre has been very exciting for us.
This is the first time that the support for the IC’s efm-Information applications was subject to a full blown tender, and the fact that the tender has been let for four years, with a potential further year extension is confirmation of our capacity to support complex, high profile public sector IT Projects in competition with suppliers from across the UK and Europe.
The NHS Information Centre "is a special health authority that provides facts-and-figures to help the NHS and social services run effectively. It collects data from across the sector, analyses it, and then converts it into useful information".
For "it collects", read "Asckey Data Services" collects, for at least some of this data. Our tender covers the data collection and analysis concerned with much of the "NHS Estate", including ERIC, the Estates return Invormation Collection, concerned with the condition of Hospital Trust buildings, PEAT - Patient Environmental Assessement Team, looking at the standard of the overall patient environment, and several others. The system we have developed provides analysis data back to the Hospital trust managers via a range of detailed spread sheet formatted downloads accessing live, up to the minute data, and the Information Centre uses Dynamic AI for heavy duty reporting within the Department of Health.
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 Subversion - a New Service
Subversion is an open source implementation of a version control and file sharing system that can run across the Internet, and which is becoming increasingly popular as a means of both simple to use centralised document distribution and back up services, and of organising multi-developer cooperation.
While of most interest to our developer community, our new Subversion hosting service will be of use to any organisation that needs to make any type of electronic documents available to a group of users spread out geographically. Some can have controlled and tracked editing access, others only read only access.
Organised by "Repository", we are offering 5Gig of file space per repository for as little as £100 per year with larger volumes/multiple repositories available on request. Your documents are available to your users "24/7", and we back up all such data off site as a matter of course.
Users can have read only access, or full read/write facilities with comprehensive tracking of editing available, up to complete version control including recovery of earlier versions of documents. The latter is especially valuable to software developer teams, but can find a place in managing crucial business documents that need to be available to a wider audience.
A PowerPoint Presentation of what Subversion is, with a series of screen images showing how it works is available here.
If you would like to discuss this service with us, email enquiries@asckey.com, or call 08701 634466
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The Virtual Office
Building on the Subversion facility, we are offering application development support at low cost by putting one of our developers at your disposal for a period of time.
Sharing source code via Subversion, and using a variety of other current technology to provide "virtual" face to face contact, our developer is under your full control - while having access to our whole team for ideas and techniques that would benefit your project.
Because we relinquish full management control to you, we can reduce our charges, and by remaining at home base, apart from occasional in-person progress meetings, the travel and accommodation charges that always inflate contract developer costs are much reduced.
If you need development help for a new or existing project, maybe we can help.
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 Visual DataFlex 2008 releasedThe latest version of the Visual Data Flex development tool, released this month, has been fully updated for the Windows Vista and is now fully complient with Citrix XenAppT (Windows Terminal Services compliance has been in place from Visual DataFlex v12.1).
A full skinning capability with the Codejock Xtreme Skin Framework gives even more opportunities for producing Windows applications that are of the highest visual quality, and automatic precompilation, an even smarter CodeSense facility and other development Studio enhancements, together with documentation improvements serve to further increase developer productivity.
Visual DataFlex is advanced software for building world-class Windows, browser-based and Web Services business solutions.
The Visual DataFlex framework provides application developers with visual design tools, wizards and code generators, a comprehensive class library, a compiler and debugger, connectivity for leading SQL servers, an embedded database and a scalable, high-performance Web Application Server.
Equally at home in building Windows or Internet applications, or in developing client and server web services, Visual DataFlex today powers a surprising number of very complex, professionally built business applications, yet is easy enough for the non IT specialist to handle.
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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! 08701 634466
Your individuality drives our excellence
Church End Farm
Warboys Road, Pidley,
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