Archive for June, 2010

IT Support for Estate Agents

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Estate Agents and real estaters are heavily reliant on IT Systems and the need to keep an up-to-date database of properties and clients contact details. Tasks such as printing residential contracts and the auditing of signing and archiving until the tenancy or property sale goes through put a quite high demand on IT Support. This also puts heavy strain on printing requirements and we work directly with industrial print companies such as Canon to make sure the company gets the best deal and support contract with their printers. This not only heavily reduces the overall cost per page but allows constant printer support throughout the week.

Estate Agents will usually have multiple offices in different counties and cities. Agents will need to hot desk in between each office as well as be able to upload and download information while on the road. The installation and set-up of a Terminal Server has been the best practice for this, as data can be consolidated into one office and backuped daily. If the user base exceeds 50-100 Users we would recommend you colocate your server to a Data Center on an internet connection of 100mb/s to meet the speed demand. Remote Desktop Connections support full USB mapping so agents can upload pictures direct from a digital camera  to a Content Management System while on the road.

We are always looking for ways to improve the workflow and flexibility of software for estate agents, and after demoing http://www.aspasia.net/ , we are really impressed on how this provides total growth and flexibility as will as a mobile phone application which is perfect for upload pictures on the road as well as adding and editing information

Soluto – Startup Monitoring Software and more T.B.A. I hope!

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

It’s rare but exciting to see some software come out to make a technicans life and users faster. When a computer itially starts, it starts up a load of applications in the background so when you do actually run the program it’s already waiting in the background so it opens faster in principle. However this does lead to a longer bootup time, and sometime you will only open the application once every few months. For example Adobe Reader, Blackberry Desktop Manager and Mircosoft Office Groove and the examples of the programs I stripped out of my boottime. Adobe Reader isn’t even my default PDF Viewer, Desktop Manager only needs to be used for the backup and switching of blackberrys and I don’t use Groove. Granted anyone who knows there way round a computer could of done this by looking in the Startup Folder, MS Config and even the low level registry however there has been no clear way before, to time how long each of these applications add onto your total boot time! Not only do they hinder the normal startup task of your computer but they also increase your memory useage of your computer, for some this can cause issues!

Welcome Soluto, a simple tool which you install , restart your computer , and it gives you a nice run down of what’s running at startup , how long it takes and useful advice of if you should pause items in startup or delay them. The software’s in beta and ready to download here

There is one issue I have found, installing Soluto, means it will need to run every startup , and at it states through it’s logging , it takes 5 seconds to boot. I hope this software/company will start adding some more features and functions to their software!