As a business, due to the current health crisis caused by the Covid-19 virus, we have already moved to working from home. During this period, we continue to support our clients remotely for those that need it rather than going out to client premises. We are fortunate insofar as this industry gives us all the…
We’ve heard quite a lot about the little Raspberry Pi palm sized computer in recent years, and with the recent significant hardware improvements present on the new Raspberry Pi 4 we thought we’d take a look to see if it was useful to us or our customers as a thin/browser client for accessing web based…
We recently had cause to celebrate the longevity of some of our early bespoke software development projects. One of our long standing clients asked us to install the bespoke Windows software we originally wrote for them back in 2001 onto their shiny new Windows 10 64-bit desktop machines, and we were happy to oblige. The…
Microsoft SQL Server Express is Microsoft’s entry level database server solution. It is available free of charge and as such has been widely adopted within many small to medium sized businesses. Microsoft have judged that offering a free solution will get their product in to the market with many users of the Express version inevitably…
Cloud services are massively gaining in popularity – but what are they and how might they be useful to your business? Essentially a cloud service is any IT service which is supplied remotely through the internet. These fall broadly into three categories: 1) Software that you access over the internet, primarily from a web browser,…
If you store personal data about individuals, you should be registered with the UK Government’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as a Data Controller. For example, a personnel system is an obvious example of a system which stores personal information. Whether you are storing the information on your own hardware at your office, using a hosted…
The UK government has recently identified a need for a broader range of IT skills and greater technical knowledge to be taught in schools, starting at an earlier age, including the concepts of computer programming or coding. The report commissioned by the government identified a skills shortage and lack of teaching in this area. The…
If you lay down the correct systems and infrastructure, recovery from serious IT problems can be made much easier and much less expensive. Take the fairly common example of hard drive failure. Once a drive has failed, and most drives fail eventually, it may not be possible to retrieve the data from it. And if…
Since we started trading as a software development company way back in 1996, we have found through experience that the key to a successful project lies not in a detailed and carefully crafted specification and design document, but instead in a strong iterative approach to development which closely involves the client at every stage and…
Client / server solutions Traditionally we have developed bespoke software for the Microsoft Windows platform. The client server model meant installing a bespoke database on an on-site server, which was then networked to Windows client desktop computers which in turn had our bespoke software installed on each machine. This worked well as it allowed businesses to organise…
