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Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year
Have a good break, and lets all make the most of 2009!
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Welcome to the
last Asckey
e-Newsletter of 2008
Despite the credit crunch and general gloom and doom that arrived with Autumn this year, we still seem to be hugely busy. As seems to have become a permanent fixture of the year end, we have a major release of our Eclipse-fm® Facilities Management software, this year with major provisions for covering the needs of the specialised equipment that is found in the medical world the EBME (Electronic BioMedical Engineering) equipment. In fact, the flexibility of this module allows Eclipse-fm® to handle a wide variety of specialist maintenance needs, extending Eclipse-fm®’s appeal in the Facilities Management world.
Other new features are
PAT (Portable Appliance Testing) test results recording
Critical Notices - when safety or other issues mandate that work must be done on specific types of equipment, a "Critical Notice" may be put into effect. This creates a set of tasks, one for each instance of such equipment, plus an overall controlling Critical Notice task. Only when all the individual tasks are completed may the controlling task be signed off.
Purchase Orders - heavily reworked to provide a controlled Purchase Ordering system that is focussed on providing a complete audit trail of purchasing, while making it easy for purchasing staff to manage the workflow.
Looking for a serious Helpdesk and Asset Maintenance system covering ad hoc and Planned Preventative maintenance?
Have a look at Eclipse-fm® as a serious Facilities Management system.
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ISO Quality Certification
Asckey has now been ISO Quality certified for three years, and with that anniversary came a much more searching, two day, certification check.
This means that every aspect of the business, from general management to detailed project management, and from the documentation of processes to the staging of internal audits is gone through from scratch - but with the expectation of much higher standards than at the first or intermediate checks. So October was a tense month with everyone gearing up for a "CO’s Inspection".
Much to our delight we passed with no non-conformances, a small number of "could do betters", and even some "good practices", particularly related to application development and testing. Taken together with a commendation for our internal training methods last year, a very satisfactory outcome.
So we can continue to show BS/EN/ISO 9001:2000 and TickIT certification.
Has ISO really improved us?
Despite being hard work, and something of a challenge to live up to, definitely, "yes".
Application Development
This is, of course, what Asckey is all about, so doing it to the best of our ability is important to us. The ISO process forces the evolution of a clear management strategy for application development, one which monitors development quality and conformance to initial time and cost budgets, both subjects of equal concern to our clients! While it hasn’t guaranteed perfect results, the ISO ethos has certainly helped us identify when we are getting it wrong, and made us pay attention to getting back onto the right track.
General Management
ISO Quality Conformance is not merely about project management and application development. Those areas of our business get the extra detail defined by the TickIT additions to ISO 9001:2000. General business management is also subject to detailed evaluation whether it be the delivery of software license sales, financial management, training (internal and external), IT infrastructure adequacy or even the updating of company websites!.
So an ISO certified business is one that has been qualified across the board of its activities.
Continuous Improvement.
This is perhaps the biggest challenge - and biggest benefit. ISO never assumes that good enough is adequate, and encourages continuing improvement. This has had a huge impact on the way we work, and has catalysed the development of our project management and support services well beyond anything envisaged when we first adopted ISO. For example, from being generally aware that our support services were adequate, based on an absence of any major embarrassments, we can now provide full statistics on our performance on demand. In fact, in order to be able to do that we have developed systems that allow us to look at the numbers in real time, so that we can see developing problems in time to nip them in the bud.
ISO certification - a good thing for us, and a good thing, we hope, for you, our customers.
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Electos - using Commercially Available templates
Our Electos Content Managed Web site system has usually been associated with its own small range of pre-defined templates.
Over the last few years, web site template design has become based more and more in the combination of "DIVs" and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the current generation of "Electos" style sheets have adopted the same change. This has meant that the adaption of either an existing "flat", HTML website design that you may already have, or of a page design that can be acquired, sometimes for free, from a multiplicity of commercial or shareware has become much easier, with the basic Electos template acting as a good model for basing a conversion on.
Some work that we did working with the Heart of England Foundation NHS Trust has shown that it is relatively easy to extend that to using any of a large range of commercially, and often freely available templates. The Trust originally chose this template (click on any picture for a larger image).
Which they turned into this via style sheet changes, colour and layout alterations, and of course, content, with us adding a dynamic "pop out" style menu to make navigation of what will be a very big web site as easy and with as few clicks as possible.
Further work created an "A-Z" feature
And went on to provided links into their Facilities Management system to provide enquiry access into to on-line job progress.
Much of the work, and all of the specification was done by Derek Virgin at the Trust, with help from Askey particularly on building in the Menu system and A-Z feature. As Derek was not by any means a web page design expert (though he may be now!), this is a nice example of the flexibility of the Electos system
For the complete story see here
The template chosen came from
http://www.webdesignboost.com
but there are plenty of other sites offering templates, very often at no cost. Two more
If you need a new, easy to keep updated website, including Web shopping facilities, talk to us about Electos. Pick from a new, free of cost page design, or perhaps we can use the one you already have to give you a new image for 2009
Talk to us on 0845 270 7747.
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Tuning Database Application Performance
Recent experiences of helping our application users in NHS Hospitals with performance issues have been very instructive, and we have put together a White paper on the whole issue, available here..
The areas covered are
Database server performance.
We are in the process of upgrading all our applications to use full server database technology, the older shared file database being no longer appropriate for serious business applications. At least for us, putting a server database such as Microsoft SQL Server into use with our applications, is an easy and inexpensive (actually, free for small business sized data needs) option.
Even then today’s "user friendly" database applications will work a data server hard, so it needs to have plenty of processor speed and adequate memory. For example, and as we have found, trying to operate MS SQL Server in less than 1 megabyte of memory on an older server, or worse, within a virtual server on a physical server already doing other things, will result in very slow application performance.
These days, larger businesses may already have a suitable, centralised database server. If the application database is to be installed to such a centralised enterprise database server, be sure to asses if there is enough capacity to take on the extra load. If performance is not adequate, particularly check that this central database server is actually providing the capacity and performance that you will need.
Network Speed and IT Centralisation
Corporate local area networks can be big and overloaded. Increasingly they may also be multi-site, as multiple branches are brought into one corporate database. You need the full bandwidth of a 100MBPS connection, and a Gigabit network backbone to run a busy database application. Longer distance connections typically implemented as 2MBPS leased lines will make the application unusable.
In such cases deployment via an Application Server, through MS Terminal Services, Citrix or the latest evolution, Windows Remote Application Service, will be needed, and will provide a very effective solution. In fact Application Serving, implemented over the Internet, removes the need to consider geographical location, and the application/database combination can be located anywhere. We host several NHS Trust Facilities Management systems at Asckey Data Services, providing equal or often better application performance that when run within the Trust IT structure, and requiring minimal technical support from the Trust’s IT service.
If not using Application Serving, look critically at the actual bandwidth available at busy times of day between database and the PCs running the application.
Poor Performance at particular times of the day
If performance is a problem at certain times of day, but otherwise OK, this will be as a result of either an overloaded server, or an overloaded network, or both.
For a full paper on this subject, click here.
If you need advice on application deployment, give us a call - 0845 270 7747 or email enquiries@asckey.com
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Windows Remote Application Service
For some time we have been advising windows application users to strongly consider running applications within a Windows Terminal Services or Citrix server, rather than as individual instances in local PCs. There are many benefits to this, ranging from reduced network traffic to "one place only" revision updating. A number of NHS trusts run our Eclipse-f m® system in this way, with better response time than if run in the usual manner installed to each PC on a Local Area Network More details on what this means are on our Hosting Services Website
The latest refinement to this is remote execution of applications as opposed to a remote Desktop with the remotely executing applications contained within it.
To Explain
Currently, with Windows Terminal Services, users have a remote desktop which they log in to. This then provides access to the applications, but as a second "Desktop" within their usual and familiar local PC Desktop, users then have to move between their local desktop and the remote desktop, which can be confusing
With Remote Applications, users only get new application Icons, , within their normal Windows desktop, just as if it were a local application. This makes life much easier for the end user, removing the potential confusion of swapping between two separate Desktop instances on their PC. In fact, now that this can be done, one wonders why the separate desktop method would ever be the choice!
Printing
Technically there is a big advantage as well, because organising printing becomes much easier. Providing the interface from remote desktop to local (PC connected or LAN) printers can be tricky, but a remote Application uses a new Simple Printer interface that will use the printers defined for the PC from which the remote application tasks are called. In our experience this is working extremely well, and is indeed much easier to set up.
To use Remote Application Services you need
- Windows 2008 Server in which to run the application instances
- Windows XP SP 3 and .Net 3.4 Framework on the Local PCs
The need for Windows XP on the user PCs will probably mean that this is something to be adopted slowly (until all your Win 2000 and earlier Windows running PCs are updated , and we are not ourselves fully up to speed on Remote Application Servinga s opposed to the current Terminal Services approach, but this is something to be thinking about for the future.
As noted, we are real fans of remote application serving, for ease of application installation and updating, saving on network bandwidth, the potential for using less highly specified user PCs, and enabling home working. If you want to know more about using remote application technology, just call us up.
Call us on 0845 270 7747
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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 2707747
Your individuality drives our excellence
Church End Farm
Warboys Road, Pidley,
Cambs PE28 3DA
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