The most recent Features from Incisive Media

Are you sure you're not a pirate?

Mark Weston and Paul Gershlick — 2010-02-09T10:48:00.000Z

Mark Weston and Paul Gershlick, Computing, Tuesday 9 February 2010 at 10:48:00

It is alarmingly easy for an IT leader to unwittingly exceed the scope of a software licence, and the chances of being caught out have never been greater, as technology lawyers Mark Weston and Paul Gershlick explain

Let’s assume you’ve worked hard to build up your business. Let’s assume you needed extra employees to service your growing needs and that you trust the people you took on. And let’s assume that you would never consider using pirated or unlicensed software. None of these assumptions is far-fetched and they reflect the reality for thousands of businesses. So why did you end up having to pay substantial damages as a result of being reported by one of your staff to your software licensor, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) or the Federation Against Software Theft (Fast)? This has happened to many businesses, with the numbers being “caught” during the ongoing recession growing ever larger.

The enforcers

First, some background. Both Fast and the BSA are not-for-profit trade associations. Fast’s members include software publishers, resellers, distributors and law firms. Indeed, the Fast Legal Action Group (Flag) is a legal lobby within Fast that lobbies for greater legal protection for the software industry. The BSA’s members include many of the largest names in the IT industry, such as Adobe, Apple, Intel and Microsoft. Both organisations seek to protect their members’ interests through education, and through enforcement action against transgressors. Their enforcement letters are tenacious, can be aggressive and often create much hassle for recipients. More on this below. Fast and the BSA also set the tone for much of the remainder of the industry which is not a member of either – usually smaller software licensors.

Using the BSA as an example, being on the receiving end of one of its enforcement letters is a scenario faced by an increasing number of businesses. Every year, the BSA investigates hundreds of British businesses for using unlicensed software and many are threatened with legal proceedings. In 2009, the BSA received increased software piracy leads, which resulted in investigations. These leads are usually reports from inside businesses. For reasons we will see, there are many incentives that explain why the number of leads – and the number of successful recoveries of damages – has been increasing; but there are also good reasons why the number of successful recoveries may start going down.

New research from Forrester shows that software users faced increased software audits from software licensors in 2009 as licensors sought to collect as much money as possible. After all, there is a recession on and software businesses that are selling less software are looking to compensate for diminished revenue streams. Audits are possible because most software licences provide licensors with a right to check that users are complying with the licence agreements.

Are you a software pirate?

Returning to our scenario, that may be fine for the “illegal” businesses but how does this affect you, the legitimate user of software? You think you are a legitimate business that has nothing to do with software piracy. However, the BSA and Fast may take a different view.

Look at the BSA web site home page. You may unwittingly be what it, the software industry as a whole and the law, call a “software pirate”.

The BSA says:

“Software piracy is the unauthorised copying or distribution of copyrighted software…What a lot of people don’t realise or don’t think about is that when you purchase software, you are actually purchasing a licence to use it, not the actual software. It is that licence that tells you how many times you can install the software, so it’s important to read it. If you make more copies of the software than the licence permits, you are pirating.”

What may have originally started as a lawful right to use software may subsequently have become unlawful as your business has moved on. This often happens when a business experiences rapid growth and omits to update its software licences. If Microsoft’s software licence said you could permit 100 users to use it, that was fine when you had 80 employees. But when you had 101 employees, you breached the software licence.

Or take another common scenario. You may have decided to outsource some of your IT function, even if that has meant keeping your computers inhouse but having non-employed consultants coming onto your premises and using your computers. If you did not seek prior written consent for the use of the software licences by the outsourced service provider, you may well be in breach of the licence. Licences usually prohibit sub-licensing to third parties (which would usually include outsourcing service providers) without the licensor’s prior written consent.

Ensuring proper compliance is not always top of the agenda when a business is trying hard to achieve revenue-growth and cost-cutting targets. But it’s still important. Not only could failure to keep software licences up to date cost in terms of hard cash, but business reputation could be damaged if it is tarred with the label “software pirate”.

The return of “stiffing”

During the last recession, many software licensors were accused of a practice known as “stiffing”. This involved software licensors taking a strict construction of a software licence. For example, a piece of software may have been licensed for use on 20 processors (CPUs) at a time when one “desktop computer” had only one processor within it. However, when dual-core (and now quad-core) CPUs started to become available, people doing the “stiffing” sought further licence fees if more than 10 desktop computers (using dual core CPUs) or five desktop computers (for quad-core CPUs) were being used. This was viewed by licensees, and by the mainstream computer press, as a disreputable practice.

However, the recession is seeing more legitimate “stiffing”. It is now less about a disreputable reading of what a software licence may or may not provide and more about software licensors actively enforcing rights that they clearly have under a software licence.

Rich pickings for snitchers

So the BSA and Fast, acting on the instructions of their members, are actively pursuing a policy of discovering legitimate software which is being used outside the terms of the licence on which that software was originally supplied. The way they identify the businesses on which they turn the investigation spotlight is (if you excuse the pun) quite illuminating.

One primary method that the BSA and Fast use to discover which businesses have neglected to keep their licences up to date is encouraging the staff of the business to snitch on the business. Most companies would like to believe that none of their staff would be so disloyal. But there’s a recession on and it’s amazing what people do for money. And the BSA evidence backs this up.

The BSA’s rewards policy usually pays up to £10,000 for a tip-off that leads to a successful judgment or settlement. Staff are shopping the business they work for as a side earner. The BSA even offered a nice little extra Christmas bonus for the snitching employees, by doubling that reward in the weeks leading up to 31 December 2009. A business will probably never find out that it has been reported, because the BSA promises confidentiality to give employees incentives to come forward.

Meanwhile, Fast had a campaign last year to encourage employees to report employers who illegally use software. It wanted to reassure employees that they would be protected for whistleblowing the illegal activity under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 – although the position is not certain as to whether employees would be protected under that Act, as the Act protects against reporting internal wrongdoing to a regulator and it is not clear whether Fast would count as a regulator.

The recession is therefore providing a particularly fertile ground for attracting employees to report employers, especially with the financial rewards on offer. Many businesses have made people redundant, who then find it hard to get new jobs. Where can they turn if they want to supplement their redundancy packages? The BSA cites disgruntled ex-employees as a primary reason for its increase in leads.

Recent research conducted by YouGov for the BSA showed that seven in 10 British workers are willing to “shop” their bosses for improper business practices and one in six would be even more amenable to do this if cash incentives were on offer. An additional 38 per cent would be more willing to snitch if they had been made redundant, and 31 per cent cited big salary rises for the board as being enough to lead them to take action. Some 49 per cent of British staff believe their boss should face legal action for using illegal software.

Returning to our scenario, are you still 100 per cent confident that you are not using software illegally and that your employees are totally loyal to you?

When the watchdogs come sniffing

Most legitimate businesses would not dream of doing anything intentionally unlawful. The experience of most companies being reported for using software “outside scope of licence” is rather like the feeling someone gets for parking his car on a yellow line during a time he genuinely believed was permitted – only to find that it was illegal after all and then being clobbered with a £60 fine. However, for using software outside licence scope, the “fines” are much larger.

Most of our clients who receive a BSA audit letter as a result of a report from inside their business expect to be dealt with sympathetically by the BSA. They rarely are. When our clients have been “unfairly” dealt with, we have had practical experience of the aggressive tactics used by the collecting agencies.

If the report made to the BSA is wrong and alleges use of software that is not in fact being used, then a business can actually refuse an audit if it chooses to. This is sometimes, but not always, the best tactic. However, if software is being used, albeit outside scope of licence, then the licensor may have a contractual right in the licence to demand an audit. To refuse would be a breach of contract.

If a business has breached a software licence inadvertently and a report has been made to the BSA, the first letter from the BSA usually details that a report of unlicensed software has been made (with no details as to the identity of the reporter) coupled with a request for an audit. Most legitimate businesses will not have a problem with carrying out an audit of software used and checks on licences for that software, although they may struggle with resources as it is usually a time-intensive and time-consuming process.

Often, for software acquired more than a year or two in the past, licences or invoices for that software are not always easily available, if at all. Some are shoved to the bottom of a cupboard or into “the round filing bin”. However, assuming a genuine effort is made to produce accurate information and there is no hint of intentional infringement, such as using “cracked” software, if the report is accurate, it is usually possible to negotiate a reasonable compensatory sum for unlicensed use. That negotiation is an art, not a science. Depending on the size of the business and scope of unlicensed use, this can often be a four or five-figure sum.

However, if there is a hint of intentional infringement, then that sum is higher – sometimes much higher. The ferocity of a BSA/Fast investigation much depends on the strength of the original report made to the enforcing organisation. The enforcing organisation would ultimately have to rely on that report in a court if some negotiated figure cannot be reached. The negotiations themselves are usually a careful balancing act based on what the audit reveals, the strength of any evidence from that audit, the cost of the software involved, any factors that might suggest intentional infringement – which understandably is something the vendors need to crack down on and which can severely adversely affect a business’ reputation – and the strength, or believed strength, of the report that led to initial investigation.

A report which is believed by a business to have come from an employee who has been fired for gross incompetence may well (but may not) be believed by that business to carry far less weight as a credible report, than if no one has been “let go”. It may not be possible, though, for the business to know for sure who made the report.

Ironically though, as reports increase because employees have been made redundant, the actual use of software outside scope (in cases where the accusation is that software has been used by more people than have been licensed) is due to fall – because businesses have fewer people working for them. For example, if a business is licensed for 100 people to use software and has been in breach – for example, 105 people have been using it, during this recession it may dismiss 10 people. Some of those 10 people may make a report to the BSA. However, the company will now only have 95 people using the software, thus bringing it back within scope of licence. Although it will of course be liable for the historical period when it was using software outside scope.

So what can you do?

The simple answer would be to pre-empt the problem and ensure you keep up to date with your software licences. This may sound hard when you have been growing quickly and have other priorities. But keeping an inventory of licensed software, the number of permitted users and locations against each software item listed, and checking that list periodically are easy steps. Appointing someone to take responsibility rather than allowing the issue to slip into a black hole can also help.

However, if you are in the position of having the software licensor coming after you, then you cannot ignore the problem. You need to face up to it. Where necessary, you should meet fire with fire. You may need to pay up for their claims in full. More likely, though, through a tough exchange of letters, you may be able to reach a negotiated settlement for less.

Mark Weston and Paul Gershlick are partners advising on IT legal issues at Matthew Arnold & Baldwin LLP

Inside the UK's surveillance society

Jon Thompson — 2010-02-08T11:20:00.000Z

Jon Thompson, Computeractive, Monday 8 February 2010 at 11:20:00

The rise of monitoring technology has prompted public suspicion. We investigate whether people’s fears are justified

Our lives intersect with computers to such an extent that we are often unaware of their influence. From the alarm clock’s call to our evening entertainment, practically everything we do is in some way controlled, aided or recorded by a computer.

Much of this interaction is insignificant, but governments and companies are taking an increasing interest in the electronic footprints we leave in our wake, which are as detailed and indelible as they are unique.

The number of databases in which our identities, movements and associations appear is growing quickly. The cost of technology to usefully collect and analyse personal data is tumbling, and the UK is now seen as a pioneer in the use of mass surveillance.

There is a growing public perception that the government is desperately interested in our electronic footprints, but to what end?

Are we entering a time when innocent patterns of activity can accidentally mark us out as potential enemies of the state or is it all being done for benign reasons of public safety, crime detection and resource provisioning?

Such concerns go back to a time when computers were still in their infancy and most people had practically no interaction with them at all.

An efficient tyranny?

Back in 1970, Professor AS Douglas of the London School of Economics was a worried man. Writing in the October 1970 issue of Science Journal, he asked: “Would we be happy under an efficient tyranny one in which every movement and action of the citizen was recorded, analysed, cross-checked instantaneously and no incident, no matter how trivial, ever forgotten?"

The systems Professor Douglas foresaw are now falling into place, but are they really as sinister as some people believe?

Take a simple shopping trip, for example. Driving into town, your number plate may be recorded using Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras. In London this system is used to operate the congestion charge but across the country the police use mobile ANPR cameras as a dragnet to pull over people without licences or insurance, or those accused of other crimes.

The tabloid press claimed in March that the police also have access to the Highways Agency’s own ANPR network, which was originally set up to anonymously monitor traffic flow. The Highways Agency says that while the police can request information from this database concerning specific incidents or suspected crimes, police forces cannot access the recorded data directly.

Your movements on public transport are also tracked. In London, for example, using an Oyster card means your progress through the Underground can be traced as it is touched on the sensors that open ticket gates.

It is possible to obtain a pay-as-you-go Oyster card that can still be tracked but is not linked to your identity. Buying a train ticket also leaves electronic footprints and CCTV cameras in stations spot even those paying in cash.

On trains across the country, you can see cameras in operation when you pass the train manager’s office on a Virgin Pendolino service, observing each carriage. On buses too, small, shiny, black camera domes record what goes on.

Once in a shopping centre, CCTV cameras operated by individual stores and by the centre itself, in conjunction with the police, keep an eye out for shoplifters. But private companies that are not connected directly with the centre may also be monitoring your movements while you shop, sometimes in novel ways.

One such system is Footpath, run by Path Intelligence of Portsmouth in Hampshire. The system works by detecting the signals of mobile phones and is already installed in several shopping centres in the south of England, including the Gunwharf Quays centre in Portsmouth.

However, even this system, which sounds slightly sinister at first, is strictly controlled and anonymous, as Path Intelligence is at pains to explain. “When we developed Footpath we contacted a number of organisations including Liberty, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Information Commissioner’s Office.

"Acting on their feedback we introduced important changes to our system to make it more secure. We are continually looking to engage with critics and improve our practices,” a company spokesman said.

But isn’t it possible that the collected data could identify individuals? “We have no idea who you are as an individual,” said Path Intelligence. “We only look at the path your phone takes – it’s like looking at a dot moving around. In isolation this information isn’t too interesting until you look at the wider trends and see many dots taking the same route or visiting the same areas.”

By noting when and where these dots collect, security staff can be directed to places where pickpockets are most likely to strike, for instance. By discovering which areas of a shopping centre are more popular, cleaning staff can be better deployed, too.

One criticism of this type of system is that, if hacked, individuals could be identified without their knowledge or consent. As a result all phone IDs are automatically scrambled before use.

Phorm and function

In 1970, Professor Douglas was also concerned about the data a state might collect on its citizens and how it would be used: “Who, even today, has such trust in the willingness and ability of Parliament to check the power of the Executive, let alone defend the individual’s right to fight the system if he believes it wrong?” he wrote. “And what about the data on which all this would be based; how do we ensure that what is in the system is correct? We might not even know it is there.”

Today, when someone stores data that identifies you, in all but the interests of national security you are entitled by law to access it and, where it’s wrong, to have it put right. Find out how at the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

There is also the problem of private companies gathering and holding personal data, which is used in what some people think to be an inappropriate manner.

This is where the power of the Information Commissioner’s Office really begins to show itself on our behalf, as illustrated by its response to the controversy around Phorm’s targeted content system called Webwise.

“Phorm is striving to create a new, more responsive, intuitive kind of internet experience,” said the company’s website. However, when it hooked up with BT to test its targeted advertisement serving technology in 2007, the secret nature of the trials caused a minor scandal. Customers were unhappy that their surfing habits had been monitored without their knowledge.

When the trial was uncovered, BT said: “We conducted a small-scale technical test of a prototype advertising platform on one exchange in June 2007. The test was specifically conducted to evaluate the functional and technical performance of the platform. Absolutely no personally identifiable information was processed, stored or disclosed during this trial.”

Following considerable concern from the public, the then Information Commissioner Richard Thomas stepped in to investigate. The Commissioner’s Office said in a statement: “Regulation 7 of the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive will require the ISP to get the consent of users to the use of their traffic data for any value-added services.

This strongly supports the view that Phorm products will have to operate on an opt-in basis to use traffic data as part of the process of returning relevant targeted marketing to internet users.” Both BT and Virgin Media have since decided not to include Webwise in their services.

The Information Commissioner also has the power to raid a company or other organisation for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act. One such raid took place on The Consulting Association in March. The Association, based in Droitwich, held data on 3,213 construction industry workers and building firms paid a yearly subscription to gain access to this data.

An enforcement notice served by the Information Commissioner ordered Ian Kerr, owner of The Consulting Association, to close his business. Kerr was prosecuted and fined £5,000 in July. The enforcement notice itself highlights the findings of the raid, in which detailed data going back over 30 years was discovered, along with invoices for service subscriptions and data searches.

Some of the data was personal, out of date and arguably nothing more than opinion. It should never have been kept, let alone accessed. Phrases such as ‘Ex-shop steward, definite problems’ and ‘Irish ex-Army, bad egg’ were discovered, along with a complex colour-coding system.

Anyone who believes they may have had their employment opportunities prejudiced can find out how to discover if their details appear on the database at the Information Commissioner’s website. This page also contains a list of the construction companies that subscribed to the illegal records, though many have denied any wrongdoing.

A two-way street

Perhaps our general distaste of electronic snooping stems from being secretly monitored for reasons unknown and by persons unknown. However, this is a two-way street. For example, being able to trace people’s movements via their Oyster card means that if those cards or information are stolen, whoever uses them can also be traced, potentially apprehended and brought to justice.

Trawling through CCTV footage and other data, looking for the suspect or victim of a murder, rape or abduction is far more efficient than appealing to a distrustful public or staging reconstructions that might yield no fresh clues. In cases involving a serial rapist or murderer, time may be of the essence.

But the common thread running through the public’s perception of UK surveillance is still one of mistrust. Such surveillance data is useful only after a crime has been committed and it captures everyone, whether innocent or guilty.

As the press exposes each method of data gathering, such revelations serve only to deepen our mistrust. However, past experience shows that knowing such systems exist enables us to object to what we may see as the misuse of our data footprints.

The House of Lords is also beginning to question the UK’s growing surveillance culture. In a recent report the Lords said: “There is need for much greater attention and a higher profile to be given to the technological capacities, to the nature and extent of information processing, to the risks involved and to the safeguards which are needed.”

So, while the state watches us, we can also watch it back. Public opinion can still hold sway over Whitehall. Individuals can discover what the state and other bodies know about them using the Data Protection Act, and ask direct questions of around 10,000 government bodies under the Freedom of Information Act.

An increasing number of lobby groups, such as NO2ID, Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International scrutinise the activities of the state, publicising their activities and mounting legal challenges. In this climate, even evidence of the UK’s alleged collusion in torture of terror suspects in foreign countries couldn’t be kept secret for long.

Perhaps the final word on the matter is best left to Professor Douglas. “It is not of course the computer itself which creates social problems, but the human beings into whose hands it is placed. The computer is only a tool, like a pen or typewriter, and like all tools it can be used or abused by man at his discretion.”

Have your say: Do we have the correct balance between surveillance that helps to protect us and solve crime and the means to ensure it is not abused? Add your comments below.

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Get Mail for Exchange running on your phone

Alan Stevens — 2010-02-08T10:41:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Monday 8 February 2010 at 10:41:00

A step-by-step guide to using Mail for Exchange working on a Nokia N95

Having recently signed up for a hosted Exchange service, I want to share my experiences of using a Nokia mobile to connect to an Exchange mailbox. It was a lot easier than I expected, but there are a few hurdles to overcome.

Nokia Exchange

I used the very popular Nokia N95, which has both Wifi networking and 3G mobile broadband built in. It also comes with its own Pop3 and Imap client for email, but nothing to support the native Exchange protocols to add that option you need to go to the Nokia website and download an application called Mail for Exchange.

You can get Mail for Exchange free and can use it not just to send and receive email, but to synchronise your calendar, contacts and tasks. The 2.7.0 version supports a range of handsets and can be used with either Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 plus the implementation included in Windows Small Business Server.

Before we jump into the detail, I need to make one thing clear: according to the release notes, Mail for Exchange can be installed and used on any Nokia N-series device, plus Nokia E-series phones and the 6124 and 6220 Classic. That said, I haven’t tried any of these so I can’t guarantee that the procedures I’m going to outline will be exactly the same or even work at all on anything other than an N95.

Getting started

Installation of Mail for Exchange isn’t difficult as the download comes as a Nokia application installer file (.sisx). As I use Nokia PC Suite, this was automatically copied to my handset via USB and installed onto the phone. The file is about 1.7MB and the whole process took just a couple of minutes.

I then started the application and ran through a few setup steps needed to configure a profile for my Exchange server. In my case, this was my hosted service but it could be a local server on a small business or home network. The principles and requirements are the same either way.

Connecting to the server

In terms of connectivity all you have to do is provide Mail for Exchange with the fully qualified name of the server plus the internet access point that will be used to connect to it. On the N95 that can either be Wifi or a mobile broadband service; I use Wifi at home and a 3G mobile broadband service the rest of the time. It works fine, the only bugbear being the need to make sure I’ve set up the correct access point in advance before synchronising.

Of course, you also need to provide your email username and password, and a few other parameters, which is where my problems started.

To begin with I couldn’t get the Mail For Exchange client to connect to the Exchange server at all. I selected the Synchronise Email option on the phone and it appeared to be doing something, but after a few seconds would disconnect without transferring any data. Naturally I fiddled with the settings but nothing seemed to resolve the problem until I left the Domain name blank, after which it worked fine.

I say it worked fine, except that every time I connected I got an error message telling me that the security certificate being used by the Exchange Server was untrusted. I was able to acknowledge this and continue, but it was irksome and meant that I could only synchronise manually rather than being able to set up an automatic schedule to retrieve my mail.

Following a little bit of research, I found that this was specific to Exchange Server 2007 and was a result of the certificate involved not being in the list preloaded onto the Nokia. Fortunately, I found that I could add it myself.

Not to be trusted

The first thing I needed to know was who had issued the certificate, which was fairly easy as Mail For Exchange gave me the option to view the certificate details when the error message popped up. In my case it was issued by the Usertrust Network (UTN-USERFirst-Hardware), but don’t assume this provider in every case.

I then used Outlook Web Access to connect to the Exchange server from a PC. I was able to locate the UTN-USERFirst-Hardware certificate that had been downloaded to the browser and export it to a file ready to copy to the phone. I used Mozilla Firefox to do this but Internet Explorer has a similar facility.

It’s then possible to copy the exported certificate to the phone manually, but there are issues with the format at the Nokia end and I found lots of forum posts describing problems with this approach. So instead I used a certificate import server by Willem Redelijkheid in the Netherlands.

All I had to do was browse to this site and upload my newly exported certificate to Willem’s server where it was converted to the correct format, generating a URL pointing to a certificate ready to install onto my phone.

I simply opened the URL using the browser on the Nokia N95 and the certificate downloaded and installed.

You can also use this server for other Symbian-based handsets and, in my case it provided an instant fix. No more annoying messages when I synchronised Mail for Exchange, just an automatic connection.

As I mentioned earlier, Mail for Exchange also lets you synchronise calendar, contacts and tasks. The only drawback is the lack of support for push email such as that available with Blackberry and Windows Mobile smartphones. However, you can set up synchronisation schedules to collect mail on a regular basis.

Exchange authentication

Next, I wanted to use my notebook to access my mailbox, but encountered another problem when I tried to configure Outlook 2007 to pick up mail using Outlook Anywhere.

Most of the Exchange service providers now support Outlook Anywhere as a matter of course. And that’s good in that it makes it easy to access an Exchange server over the internet. There’s very little you have to do to make it work and I’d had no trouble at all configuring Outlook 2007 on my main desktop running Windows Vista. On the notebook, however, I was repeatedly asked for my username and password and could get no further.

Outlook Web Access worked just fine, so I knew there was nothing wrong with the credentials but, try as I might, Outlook itself just wouldn’t log on. I even tried uninstalling Office and reloading it, but that was just a waste of a couple of hours.

Eventually, I discovered that it had something to do with the way the Exchange server was authenticating the username, as I found other Windows 7 users having similar issues and reporting that tweaking the authentication settings on the server fixed them. However, that’s not possible with a hosted service. I had to look for another answer that could be applied at the client end, which was to log on to the server with a slightly different name.

As with most hosted Exchange services I had typed in my email address in the format name@emaildomain.com whenever Outlook asked. This, however, wasn’t being resolved to the local Active Directory (AD) username required to identify me on the Windows server. Switching to Active Directory credentials in the format ADdomain\exchange_username got around the problem. I still needed to tell Exchange what my email address was, but when asked to log on to the server, I switched to the AD name.

So how did I find out what Active Directory name to use? Easy, I simply logged onto Exchange using Outlook Web Access, clicked on Options and selected ‘Change password’ to display the domain and username on the screen If that doesn’t work you can always phone the hosting company and ask them.

The truth behind consumer rights myths

Computeractive Staff — 2010-02-05T10:30:00.000Z

Computeractive Staff, Computeractive, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:30:00

We reveal the truth behind 10 of the most common myths about your rights as a consumer

Many an upset shopper has cried “I know my rights,” but do they really? There are so many rules and regulations, covering just about every aspect of buying and selling, together with guarantees and promises from shops, that it can be tricky to know exactly what you are entitled to.

There is also plenty of misinformation; look at almost any online forum and someone will tell you what you are entitled to do but they may not necessarily be right.

So, before you take up cudgels against a supplier, it’s important to know what your rights really are, and how best to enforce them. Over the next few pages, we will look at some common beliefs about consumer rights and see whether they are true.

1. You have to return unwanted goods bought online within seven days

Wrong. Goods bought online within the EU are covered by the Distance Selling Regulations. As a general rule of thumb, you have an unconditional right to cancel your order (unless it is for perishable goods or customised goods) before the end of the cancellation period. That period ends seven working days after the day on which you received the goods.

The Regulations say you must also receive details of the warranty, the address for any complaints and information about your right to cancel and how to exercise it. This must be supplied in a ‘durable medium’, which means on paper or via email or fax so it can be in a catalogue, but not simply on a web page.

If you do not receive the information before the goods arrive, your cancellation period ends seven days after you receive it, or three months and seven working days after you received the goods, whichever is sooner.

The date on which you give notice, by sending an email or posting a letter, will be the date on which you cancelled the contract. It does not have to reach the seller before the seven working days is up, but we recommend using recorded delivery or obtaining a certificate of posting.

You are entitled to get your money back within 30 days, even if the seller has not yet collected the goods, and the money refunded should include the cost of the delivery to you, though the seller can ask you to pay for the return of the goods, if that was specified in the information regarding the order.

2. ‘I can take goods back to the shop for a refund if I change my mind’

No, you cannot. You have no right to a refund if you change your mind. However, some shops may allow refunds or exchanges as part of their own ‘no-quibble’ promises. These may have their own conditions attached and it is largely up to the shop what they offer.

If you have bought by mail order or over the internet, though, the purchase will fall under the Distance Selling Regulations and you have a right to cancel the order, except for custom-made products, perishable items, newspapers or magazines, or for products such as DVDs, CDs or software that you have opened.

However, you must still take reasonable care of the items and you must notify the seller that you wish to cancel the contract within the time limits noted earlier.

3. ‘We will not repair/refund that unless you have the receipt’

Wrong. A receipt is the most common way to prove when you bought something and how much you paid, but it is not necessarily the only way.

What you need is proof that you purchased the item from the seller. For example, some shops may stamp or date a warranty card. A credit card bill or receipt may also provide suitable proof. However, if several things were bought at the same time the receipt may not be clear enough.

Some products, such as ‘own-brand’ items, are only available from specific suppliers and may only have been available at a specific time. However, relying on this may mean you have to accept an exchange or repair as it may not be possible for the shop to know exactly what price you paid for an item.

So, it’s a good idea to keep receipts, especially for expensive items, but it’s not necessarily the end of the world if they do get lost, as long as you have something that can show where and when you bought a product.

4. ‘You have to pay the carriage fee to return faulty goods to us’

Wrong. The Distance Selling Regulations are quite clear on this. The guidance for sellers from the Office of Fair Trading says “you should not charge return costs for goods that have been rejected because they are faulty.”

Contact the seller and ask them to arrange to collect the goods or provide a pre-paid envelope to post them back. Many sellers do this already, including a return label with goods that they post.

The Sale of Goods Act also says that the consumer should not be left out of pocket as a result of buying faulty goods. So, if you buy an item from a shop and discover it is faulty when you get it home, the shop should cover the costs of your return trip to swap it for a replacement.

However, it can sometimes be difficult to prove the exact cost of such a trip, so do remember to keep receipts for things like petrol, or consider using a courier or taxi, so that you know exactly how much the return cost. If you are using Royal Mail, send by recorded delivery and add the additional fee for this to the costs.

5. ‘You have to pay a restocking fee to return that item’

A ridiculous and illegal claim. The Distance Selling Regulations say that a seller is not allowed to make further charges when an item is returned, and specifically mentions administration and restocking fees.

They can only charge you the carriage for the return if they specifically stated you would have to pay that, in the information they supplied when the order was placed. This is often found in the company’s terms and conditions, so check before buying.

If, however, you return an item to a shop where you bought it in person, and it is simply unwanted, rather than being faulty, then the shop is not required to give you a refund, and could charge a restocking fee.

6. ‘I can demand a full refund at any time’

No, you cannot. If you were mis-sold an item – for example, you made it clear that you needed a product to do a specific task and the one sold to you could not do it – then you can ask for a refund. But do it right away.

Once you have started using a product, even if you only later discover it will not do everything what you asked for, it becomes second-hand. If it is no longer ‘as new’ then it is unlikely you will receive the full amount, unless the shop has a generous refund policy or you can prove that you were mis-sold the item.

That could be via a description in a catalogue or on the box (‘Mac compatible’ when it is not, perhaps), or by specifically asking for the seller to state in writing that a product will do what you want it to.

If you cannot prove you were mis-sold an item and the shop disputes your claim, a court may decide you have had a certain amount of value from something by using it, and the longer you use it, the higher that value will be. So if you return something after several months, it is unlikely you will receive the amount you paid for it.

7. ‘It’s company policy not to issue refunds’

Nonsense. Company policy cannot override the law. If an item you have bought is broken, does not work or do the job it is supposed to, then the contract of sale is broken and you can reject the goods and ask for a refund. You do not have to accept an exchange.

The law assumes that, if something breaks or goes wrong in the first six months, then it was faulty from the start, and it is up to the seller to show otherwise. After six months, you need to prove a fault was there from the start to get a refund rather than a repair.

As a general rule, after a month you will have to accept a replacement or repair, rather than a refund for faulty goods, but you should not be expected to accept repeated repairs or exchanges.

Again, if you simply return something to a store because you do not want it then the shop does not have to provide any kind of refund by law, although some may offer you a voucher instead of the goods.

8. ‘You have to return a broken item to the manufacturer, not the shop’

Oh no you don’t. When you buy something in the UK, your contract is with the person who sells it to you, not with the person who made it.

It is the seller’s responsibility to replace broken or faulty goods, not the manufacturer’s. It is sometimes quicker to deal direct with the manufacturer because many have dedicated repair departments but you must make the initial complaint to the organisation that took your money.

That is important because if you want a refund (for example, if multiple repairs are required and you decide to opt for a refund) the manufacturer has no duty to provide this. That is down to the retailer.

If you cannot contact the seller, perhaps because it has gone out of business, the item could cost more than £100 and you paid for it by credit card then the credit card company is also responsible, and you can contact them for assistance. You can also ask them to intervene if the seller refuses to deal with you.

9. Your warranty has expired so you have to pay for a repair

Not necessarily, but this one is a legal minefield. A warranty does not, and cannot, affect your legal rights. The law says that customers can demand damages (which a court would usually equate to the cost of repair or replacement) for up to six years after purchase in England and Wales, or five years after discovery of a fault in Scotland.

However, not all goods are expected to last for that long, and you would not be able to claim after three years for a repair to a product that, typically, would only be expected to last a much shorter time.

The way in which the item has been used could also be quoted in a court case, so for example a car that has driven more than 100,000 miles might be expected to last less time than one used for driving to the shops once a week.

This is where it gets difficult for PC owners. It is not possible to get a ‘mileage’ for a PC and any software added to it, along with upgrades such as extra memory or other hardware, makes it incredibly difficult to prove an inherent fault after several years. You would almost certainly have to do so in the Small Claims Court.

If a repair is not possible, or economical, the level of any refund will be based on the use you had from the item.

10. ‘You cannot return a broken mobile phone after 28 days’

Wrong. However, mobile phones are more complicated than many other purchases because when buying a phone, you are often buying two things – the phone itself and a service from the mobile phone network.

If you buy a phone ‘SIM free’ or on ‘Pay As You Go’, so without a contract, then the phone has the same legal status as any other goods. If it becomes faulty you can take it back to the shop for a repair, replacement or refund. If it was bought via the internet or mail order, the Distance Selling Regulations also apply.

Many mobile phones are sold with a contract, where you must pay a certain amount per month for a set time for a phone together with an allowance of calls, texts and so on. The cost of the phone may even appear to be free.

If there is a contract for service involved, things are a little more complicated. The phone itself is still covered by the usual rules, so if it breaks (not because of damage caused by misuse or accident) within the first six months, for example, the seller would have to prove that it was not faulty from the start and should offer a repair or replacement.

However, even though you can return the phone itself, you also have a contract for the service. So, if the terms of that contract are fair, you could end up with no phone, but still have a contract for the mobile phone service. And you cannot cancel this just because the phone is faulty.

Since the cost of the phone is included in the monthly payments, if you reject the phone the provider should provide you with a replacement. If they cannot do this, and you took out the contract to get a specific phone, you may be able to argue that the contract should be terminated, but you will probably have to do so in court.

The difference between warranties and guarantees

Many people think their entitlement to repairs is governed by the warranty, or guarantee in the box of the product they buy. But as you can see from our myth-busting, this is not the case.

Just about every warranty or guarantee you read will explain that they do not affect your statutory rights: no company can take away rights that you already have in law. Of course, most offer fewer rights, and they would rather you did not know, for example, about your six-year time limit for claiming damages.

A warranty or guarantee is a form of insurance, often promoted as an incentive to buy. Once a company has made a promise in such a guarantee, it is legally obliged to stick to it but the terms of the guarantee do not prevent use of rights provided by the Sale of Goods Act and other consumer protection laws.

Extended warranties are a form of insurance against various types of wear and sometimes damage. Be wary of these, especially if a sales assistant is pressuring you.

In 2002 the Office of Fair Trading called the extended warranty market exploitative and referred its investigation to the Competition Commission, which described retailers’ offerings as “unfair and uncompetitive”. For more information read the Before you buy section on the Consumer Direct website.

Where to find out about your rights

Advice Guide

Consumer rights and more, from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.

CISAS

Independent adjudication for disputes with telephone and internet providers.

Consumer Direct

Clear advice about your rights, and how to complain, covering a wide range of topics.

Consumer Line

Advice about consumer rights for people in Northern Ireland.

Distance Selling Regulations

Questions and answers about Distance Selling from the Department for Business.

European Consumer Centre

Advice specifically for people shopping within Europe.

Money Saving Expert

The shopping section of this site includes a guide to consumer rights, plus helpful forums.

Sale of Goods Act

A summary of your rights under the Sale of Goods Act.

Trading Standards

Consumer advice from Trading Standards.

Fair and Square

Download a printable guide to your rights from our special Fair and Square campaign website.

Baffled by jargon? See our free online jargon buster

Online/offline: Deb Hunt

Archana Venkatraman — 2010-02-05T10:27:00.000Z

Archana Venkatraman, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:27:00

LOL in the wired world :-)

As IWR loves to keep up with the digitally changing times, we’ve given our Blogosphere page a light-hearted shake-up. Deb Hunt, who received a special commendation for her work as a member for the US Special Libraries Association (SLA) board of directors in the IWR Information Professional of the Year award ceremony at the Online Information 09 conference, is our first guest.

Hunt is also the principal of Information Edge, a specialist in enterprise search consulting, knowledge services, research and library services and automation.

In our technology-based rapid-fire Q&A, Hunt says she is approaching technology-addiction, but we think her online-offline balance is just right.

IWR: How many hours every week do you spend on technological gadgets, internet and web tools – not including your official work?

DH: About 8 to 10 hours.

Do you use your mobile devices to access the web?

No, I decided not to get Web access with my smartphone, but will this spring when I get a new phone. I can’t ignore this anymore as there are way too many great apps, especially for travel.

How do you read your newspapers – print or online?

I read the print San Francisco Chronicle every Sunday to keep up with local and regional news, but go online to other papers such as the Boston Globe, Wall St Journal and San Jose Mercury News.

How many Twitter accounts do you have and how often do you update them?

Just one Twitter account, which I update about three times a week, unless I’m at a conference and then I update several times per day.

What is the one thing about technology you couldn’t do without?

Instant communication – always being connected.

What is the one thing about the internet you couldn’t live without?

Connecting with friends and colleagues, using social networking tools for learning, networking and sharing. I’ve found lots of old friends and colleagues this way.

When was the last time you blogged/micro-blogged?

I blog about every 2 weeks at blog.information-edge.com and just tweeted.

What does your current Facebook status read and when was the last time you updated it?

Made it home in the rain today – logged 65 miles going to Fry’s [American electronics megastore] and Diablo Valley College. Updated this evening (21 January 2010)

Do you access social media when you’re on holiday?

Yes! I have a netbook I use and always find wifi either in the place I stay, a library or café.

Have you accessed a new website in the last week? What’s the URL?

Yes, http://www.syncro.org/. My husband and I are thinking of getting one for camping roadtrips. (A Syncro is a 4WD VW Vanagon Westfalia only manufactured from 1985-1991.)

If you were to invent an application, what would that be for?

To encode all my user names and passwords so that I would never have to remember them all. I think a small chip implant in my brain would do the trick!

Tell us one thing about yourself which is nothing to do with the wired world.

To totally place myself in the moment, I play doubles tennis competitively. If I don’t pay attention, I’m likely to get hit hard on the head by a very fast moving tennis ball.

Voltage rating:How do you rate yourself in IWR’s Digitometer?

Complete techno-geek, cannot live without my gadgets
On the verge of addiction to social web and latest applications
I like technology, but can certainly do without most of it
I am indifferent
I don’t know my status
I am a digital outcast!

Deb Hunt’s verdict: About a 2.3. Not quite on the verge of addiction, but almost.

Why does printer ink cost so much?

Anthony Dhanendran — 2010-02-05T10:12:00.000Z

Anthony Dhanendran, Computeractive, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:12:00

We look at whether recycled printer cartridges are worth checking out, as well as other ways to save money on printing

Printer ink is expensive; there is no getting around that fact. If you do a lot of printing on an inkjet printer at home you may end up spending more than you would expect.

We are going to look at why ink costs so much, whether recycled, ‘compatible’ or ‘remanufactured’ cartridges do the job, and at other ways to save money on printing.

Total cost of ownership

If you only look at the up-front price of printers, costs have come down significantly in the past 30 years. With the advent of inkjet and then laser printing for the home, prices have dropped and it is now possible to pick up a new inkjet printer for less than £40, or a new laser printer for less than £70.

The up-front cost of the printer is only a small part of the cost of printing. In fact, for some printers it is the least important part. Printer manufacturers use a measure called total cost of ownership (TCO), which measures how much a printer will cost over its lifetime, or over a set number of years.

If you are going to invest in a new printer, it is important to find out, as far as possible, what the TCO is likely to be for that model of printer. That enables users to make an informed decision about which printer is going to give them the best value.

Of course, the cheapest printer is not always the best. There are other factors such as print speed, quality and reliability (which also adds to the TCO. If you have to replace parts or pay to have it fixed, that adds to the cost).

Why ink costs so much

Modern ink cartridges are surprisingly complicated. The ink is fired from the cartridge up to 36,000 times a second to produce what we see on the page. A standard 4x6in photo can contain 35 million ink drops.

Thom Brown of printer and ink manufacturer HP told us that it spends three to five years perfecting each new ink it introduces, testing up to 1,000 prototype formulas and that it spends $1bn (£650m) a year on inkjet research and development.

HP’s most recent study, in 2007, showed that one in five recycled cartridges failed in some way, but no original HP cartridges failed in testing – we will look later on at whether those claims add up.

Printers themselves are quite cheap (some cost as little as £30 in sale deals), but it can be almost as expensive to replace the ink tanks once they dry up.

In part, the cost of ink allows the printer companies to offset some of the money they spend on developing their printers by making a higher profit on ink.

That has led to a healthy market in ‘third-party’ ink supplies, but as you might expect, with such an outlay on their inks, printer manufacturers see the trade in refilled and recycled cartridges as a threat.

Compatible or recycled?

There are two main types of third-party cartridges, known as ‘compatible’ and ‘recycled’. Compatible cartridges are made from scratch by a company unrelated to the printer maker. They are made to look and feel just like original inks, but they are cheaper.

These have been quite popular in the past but are less so now because of the complexity of the cartridges – partly as a response to compatible cartridges, printer makers have made their own designs more complex so they cannot be copied so easily.

The third-party companies’ response to that was to develop so-called ‘remanufactured’ or recycled cartridges. As the name suggests, these are original ink cartridges, made by printer makers such as HP or Epson. The other manufacturers collect used, empty cartridges and refill them with their own ink, making what is in effect a new cartridge.

Printer manufacturers say the cartridges they produce are delicate and the process of refilling could damage them and in turn the printer. They also say that the cartridges are only designed to be used once.

We spoke to the UK Cartridge Remanufacturers Association (UKCRA). Its chairman Keith Moss said: “We are aware of the delicate nature of the cartridges and we go out of the way to refill them delicately.”

Disputing HP’s assertion that recycled cartridges are prone to failure, Mr Moss said: “There are millions of people who are regular users of [recycled] cartridges who would disagree. If that was the case to a large extent, we would not have a business.”

Some ink cartridges have an integrated print head – the part of the printer that does the printing – so this is replaced along with the cartridge. Some manufacturers use this method, while others have simpler cartridges without their own print heads.

Some companies use a mix of both – cheaper printers use integrated-print-head cartridges to reduce the up-front printer price and expensive ranges use ink-only cartridges.

Fill it yourself

Besides ready-made cartridges, there are other ways to refill your printer, using either a refilling kit or a continuous ink supply system. Inkjet refills, often sold by the same companies as recycled cartridges, are supplied as large bottles of printer ink.

They come with syringes or other devices that allow the ink to be injected directly into your used cartridges. However, while the savings from such methods can be high, it is a complicated method that can get very messy.

Also, many ink cartridges come with a built-in expiry date. When it reaches that date the printer will no longer accept ink from that cartridge.

If you are interested in refilling your printer, check that it does not use cartridges that expire. If it does check if the expiry dates can be reset (many can), usually using a piece of software. Check your printer maker’s website for details.

A continuous ink system works in a similar way. The kit comes with large ink tanks that sit outside the printer and connect to a set of special cartridges inside the printer. When ink is required it feeds through into the cartridges in the printer. These kits offer big savings but some printers may not be compatible.

To see if yours is, search the internet for your printer’s model number followed by ‘continuous ink’ or ‘CISS’.

Quality matters

Cost is not the only important factor in printing. Unless you are only printing text documents for your own use, the quality of the finished product is also crucial.

You can see the results from a head-to-head test between original inks and recycled cartridges carried out by an Australian PC World website.

In many cases they show that inks made by the printer manufacturer beat the others, but in the end it comes down to taste.

Using one set of third-party cartridges is very unlikely to do any damage to your printer, so if you are curious, it may be worth testing the cheaper cartridges against the original ones, and seeing whether there is any noticeable difference in print quality.

Beware though, that printer manufacturers will not honour your printer’s warranty if the printer develops a fault that may have been caused by a third-party cartridge.

Other ways to save

There are other ways to avoid paying through the nose for ink. As a rule, the more expensive a printer is, the cheaper its ink is likely to be. If you are buying a new printer, check how much it will cost to refill. If you are in a shop, the printer’s box usually lists the part numbers for its ink cartridges.

Check how much those cartridges cost in the shop. If you are shopping online, type the name of the printer into a search engine, followed by ‘ink’, ‘cartridge’ or ‘refill’. Online cartridge shops allow users to search by printer model number.

Some manufacturers make larger cartridges such as HP’s XL range. These are more expensive than standard cartridges but they contain much more ink and for many people will offer better value per print.

The only problem with them might be if you don’t print a lot, in which case it’s possible that the cartridge will dry out before you use all the ink. If you use the printer more than a couple of times a week, a larger cartridge is probably a good investment.

Kodak, which started making printers about five years ago, claims its ink is better value than that of other manufacturers. Certainly cartridges for Kodak’s devices tend to be cheaper than others, but the economics of its printers are not clear.

After all, factors such as print quality and how often the printer is used have an effect on how much the printer costs to run.

All printers have quality settings that can be changed, and usually the lower-quality settings, which print faster, use less ink. These modes vary from printer to printer – text printed in Draft mode on some printers is unreadable, whereas on others it’s fine. If you can read text printed in draft mode, use that to print less important documents.

If you are printing photographs, look into whether an internet printing service offers cheaper prints than you might get from your own printer. Obviously they will take longer to arrive, but you might save money, especially if you are printing at A4 size or larger.

Our verdict

Printing need not be too expensive. If you are buying a new printer, the most important thing to do is check how much replacement inks are going to cost, and if you can, how long the cartridges are likely to last (in terms of pages printed).

Check the market in recycled and compatible cartridges for your printer, and use web searches to find out whether people have had problems using such cartridges in the printer (forums such as Computeractive’s, are good for finding out how other users have fared).

If you choose to use cartridges not supplied by the printer maker, be sure to go with a reputable supplier who will offer a refund in case you are not satisfied (again, internet searches and web forums are good ways to get an idea of how well companies treat their customers).

Remember that not all cartridges are the same. If you choose to go for cheaper cartridges, be aware that the results may differ from what you saw when using the printer maker’s own cartridges.

Baffled by jargon? See our free online jargon buster

In a scrape over postcodes

Michael Herson — 2010-02-04T17:05:00.000Z

Michael Herson, Information World Review, Thursday 4 February 2010 at 17:05:00

Since the closure of Ernest Marples website, how the Royal Mail should share its postcode data has been hotly debated. Should it be free or licensed with added value?

IWR’s November 2009 feature on “Bashing the bootleggers” sparked a broader debate among public interest groups and bloggers on whether public sector data should be given away free – on the basis that taxpayers are ‘entitled’ to use it. This debate was further stimulated by the government’s announcement in December of a consultation into greater access to Ordnance Survey data.

This itelf is part of a wider government campaign under its ‘Frontline First’ initiative to promote transparency across a whole range of data including NHS Choices, public transport and Met Office public weather service data – all of which can be viewed at www.data.gov.uk.

Issues underlying postcode data, however, are more complex. For a start there are two main files involved; the PAF file (postcode address file) which was conceived by Royal Mail when postcodes were introduced primarily to aid the efficient and effective distribution and delivery of mail. This data is widely used today by a whole raft of businesses to validate addresses for everything from deliveries to insurance quotes. The less well known ‘PostZon’ file, consisting of eastings and northings, is more a tool to calculate the ‘nearest’ (such as restaurant to a tube station etc) and to aid (for example) courier companies in calculating their most effective routing to save fuel and time.

Scraped information

The Ernest Marples’ website, set up by Harry Metcalfe and Richard Pope, has temporarily closed following a challenge from Royal Mail about the source of it s postcode data.

Metcalfe maintains that the site was originally set up with no commercial objective – ie with no fee or advertising based model. It was aimed at citizen-focused websites, charities and ‘back bedroom’ start-ups, rather than the serious business user.

He explains that they never had a copy of the PAF or PostZon files, instead adopting an IT technique known as ‘scraping’, whereby the data is taken from other mapping websites. Their skill was to write a programme to “extract the co-ordinates of a pin on a map”. Metcalfe points out that this was done on a ‘request basis’ rather than via publishing data and regards it as adding a “translation layer”. The issue of who owns the rights to ‘scraped’ data is a murky area, but at the end of the day someone is paying for it in the form of a licence fee.

Metcalfe passionately believes that postcode data should be made available free because of “the increased revenue that government will get in taxation as a result of this information being free will exceed the cost of maintaining it”. His premise is that businesses in ‘UK plc’ will ultimately be more efficient.

Metcalfe argues that “this data is too valuable to be locked up behind fees that are impractical if you’re trying to innovate with government data”. He maintains Ernest Marples never intended to target fulfilment businesses who would in any case gain limited value out of just the physical co-ordinates of the postcode; it is only full PAF file that provides the address and confirms number of the house.

Metcalfe doesn’t believe that PAF re-sellers who add value have anything to fear from the data being made available free – “the ones that really perform a good service for their customers will be fine, they will make more money; the ones that don’t will go the way of the dodo”.

Metcalfe takes no credit for the government consultation on Ordnance Survey data (which is closer to PostZon), but admits his own plans are now “on hold” until after April.

Of course, what you are buying with a licensed copy of either the PAF file or the PostZon file from one of Royal Mail’s re-sellers is the right to receive the updates – PAF has an astonishing 100,000 updates a month, mostly from data collected by ‘posties’ on the street; new builds; businesses that have opened or closed; change of address etc. PostZon isn’t updated quite as often but, nevertheless, it is the updates give the value – and that are the root of the maintenance cost.

Guy Mucklow, managing director of PAF re-seller Postcode Anywhere, points out that Royal Mail employs 80 people to look after the PAF data and estimates it costs £20m a year to maintain; so if the data was made available free of charge, who would bear that cost?

“The UK is one of only three countries in the world that have an address database so refined it allows you to find the final address in under seven key strokes. The strength of the PAF database is that it has spawned a data management software industry in the UK, address management, that is world-leading. We feel that there will always be a need for applications to manage and maintain data,” comments Mucklow.

Charles Arthur, technology editor at The Guardian, ran the ‘Free our data’ campaign run through the newspaper in 2009.

He too is pleased with the outcome on the Ordnance Survey data: “this is a lot of the things we want”. He shares Metcalfe’s view that more tax will accrue to the Revenue as a result of more businesses having access to the data. As an overseas example of ‘free’ data, he cites the GPS signals that the US government provides to underpin the sat nav technology.

With only 37,000 businesses in the UK licensed to use the PAF/Postzon files, Arthur believes the price model needs to be reviewed - “you could argue that actually there’s a lot of benefit in just reducing the cost to the businesses of doing this - if you put these costs in front of businesses it’s an impediment to them starting up”.

Emma Gooderham, managing director of Allies, another PAF re-seller, also sees price as a barrier to some market entrants: “There is a perception about PAF that we need to overcome in the industry – people think it is expensive”. She believes that although the licence has been quite complicated in the past the simpler version Royal Mail is launching in April will be easier to license for single users.

Arthur says the outcome on the Ordnance Survey data appears to meet that objective – “it lowers costs, increases the potential for activity in the economy, and creates all sorts of side benefits which might not be immediately visible, but the real difficulty is measuring it”. Arthur cites Linux as an example of a free operating system that created new business opportunities within the technology space.

IWR columnist Tim Buckley Owen, who wrote the November story, feels “it’s part and parcel of a very much bigger issue about the extent to which public sector agencies should be generating revenue from the information that they hold or making it available as a public good.” Buckley Owen compares it with the Trading Fund model: “It’s better for them to give the stuff away at marginal cost to whoever wants it as this collects more tax.”

PAF re-sellers

Terry Hiles, managing director of Capscan, a leading Royal Mail PAF re-seller, explains how to add value: “We make the data usable, so we build in an interface at the front end that allows people to search through the 28 million or so addresses in the Postcode Address File”. Capscan also supplies data quality management software that updates files with postcode changes. He admits the firm very rarely sells the raw data because “it is constantly changing”, and believes the historical low take-up is because a number of organisations “don’t recognise the importance of using tools such as this”, so for him it is an awareness issue.

Hiles recognises that the huge PAF file costs a lot to produce and maintain, and questions who pays the piper. “Those that are not contributing to that and therefore to the costs, are in fact leaving those that are paying with a higher fee than they might otherwise have to pay”.

He points out that Royal Mail operates in a price controlled environment generating no more than £25m a year from PAF with attendant maintenance costs of £20m a year, with its margin restricted by Postcomm’s mandate to 10%, so this is certainly not a ‘get rich quick’ product. But he concedes that the PostZon file provides limited value to fulfilment businesses unless they are involved in the logistics side of deliveries.

As for scraping, Hiles says: “It rather suggests that simply because you can scrape information off the web, there’s no intellectual property rights attached. That’s clearly wrong in the same way as illegally downloading songs or copyright works is. I’d have no problem about the data being used for free provided all could access it for free. I do have a problem about a site that basically uses data that others are paying for.”

Hiles deals extensively with overseas markets and says they don’t obtain data free from the US and Canada; they pay an up-front licensing charge which works out cheaper – “the licensing obligations are less onerous… it works out much, much cheaper in the sense that you pay an upfront fee and you can sell it to 1,000 licensees”.

Gooderham of Allies agrees that the same rules are needed for everyone in the industry, and backs the action against Earnest Marples. Her firm’s flagship product is ‘PostCoder’: “It is quite a complex address matching engine that looks at missing and misspelt address elements to really cleanse an address database as quickly as possible in an automated manner” explains Gooderham. PostCoder also offers a ‘nearest’ service which appends grid references of branches etc when people are looking up the nearest store to where they live. Gooderham feels the current licence is “quite complicated” but is looking forward to the more simplified version for single users available from April this year.

Postcode Anywhere’s Mucklow sums it up: “The bottom line is that PAF generates significant efficiencies for the UK – efficiencies we need now more than ever. Those that benefit most are often in the financial and services sectors: government should consider carefully the relative value to these sectors when considering the cost of PAF, especially in the current climate”. But he adds, “A fundamental principle of UK fiscal policy is that those who benefit most from national assets pay more. Why would PAF be any different?”

On the issue of the ‘scraping’ Mucklow feels it is more the question of responsibility for collecting and maintaining the data “…although scraped, copied and derived data is a complex issue, we must remember this data costs real money to collect and maintain and has value to users”.

He points out that the UK is not unique and “all overseas databases cost money to varying degrees ... the Royal Mail data is an international leader, providing low cost data bearing in mind its high quality. It’s not free but it saves companies money and is certainly worth paying for.”

Ian Beesley, chairman of the PAF Advisory Board which is part of the regulatory environment, feels a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model might be fairer; suggesting there might be “payments at very low unit cost but which generate enough revenue to maintain the required quality”. He is a supporter of increasing usage – “It’s undeniable there will be innovative use and new users, particularly very small ones, might be enticed”. However any attempt to give it away for free would raise question marks about the quality in Beesley’s mind: “Quality is an important driver of costs but it’s vital in data and I think the prime concern of the Board will be to maintain the quality of the PAF file for those who, putting it crudely, already pay to use it”.

Royal Mail

There is evidence that Royal Mail is listening. Giles Finnemore head of marketing for PAF, feels Royal Mail is now addressing customer concerns. “We’ve reduced the entry price for using PAF on a website to just £1 per 100 uses. For those doing 400k or more uses on a website the price is capped at £4k”. Finnemore adds: “We’ve also reduced the entry price for use in internal systems. Two years ago it was £150 for unlimited use; from April this will be £75 with a new pay as you go entry price of just £8 per 100 uses. This makes using PAF much more affordable for small organisations and start-ups”.

Finnemore believes this will create more opportunities for re-sellers by introducing new solutions targeted at low volume and infrequent users. Effectively, this moves more towards a pay-as-you-go system which meets some customer concerns and enable re-sellers to reach a broader market.

He says: “Royal Mail isn’t in this to make money. The price changes are revenue neutral,” He claims they just cover the cost of maintaining the file, including gathering and validating the data and keeping it up to date. The regime enforced by Postcomm is sufficient, he says: “PAF is regulated to ensure that we treat all organisations the same, be they commercial or non-commercial… they are all charged exactly the same price for the use of the data”.

As for the relationship between Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey: “We licence each other’s data. We licence some of OS’s data and put it onto PostZon, and it licenses ours and puts it into Code Point.”

There is clearly a case for maintaining the data file at the proper level of quality: re-sellers then add value to it and ultimately UK business operates more efficiently – reducing carbon emissions in the process, which no-one has yet quantified. And since the ‘pay-as-you-go’ system to be introduced by Royal Mail in April does embrace smaller users, is it more a case of ‘tweaking the model’ by improving awareness and reducing the entry price than going overboard and making everything available free of charge?

This article has been prepared by Michael Herson of London based The Strategy Works – a strategic marketing consultancy specialising in original business to business insight. Contact: Michael Herson on 020 8868 0212 or mherson@thestrategyworks.com. Website: www.thestrategyworks.com

Use a webcam to chat over a video link

Mark Wilson — 2010-02-04T09:30:00.000Z

Mark Wilson, Computeractive, Thursday 4 February 2010 at 09:30:00

Put your webcam to good use by holding online video chats

It is not all that long ago that webcams were regarded as something of a luxury, and had large price tags associated with them. These days, though, webcams are available at pocket-money prices, you needn’t pay much more than around £20, even for a good one.

Once installed, a webcam can be used to record footage, but also as a means of keeping in touch with people. The simple addition of a webcam makes it possible for people you chat with online to see you and this kind of video chat is a great way of keeping in contact with friends and family you can’t meet up with very often. Obviously you will need a webcam and a microphone, but many webcams have a microphone built in. Here’s how to do it.

Online chat options

The internet has become an indispensable tool for communication. The advent of email changed the way in which friends, family and colleagues stay in touch with each other, making it possible to exchange messages almost instantly. But if ‘almost instant’ was not fast enough, it did not take long for the first batch of instant-messaging (IM) programs to appear, and these provided a means of chatting with contacts in real time.

Over time, instant-messaging tools developed and the option of conducting voice chats with a microphone was added. It was now possible to hear the person you were chatting with rather than just reading messages they had typed. This idea was taken to the next level by the likes of Skype, a company that quickly cottoned on to the fact that internet users were keen on saving money by making web-based phone calls rather than using the more traditional, and expensive, landline option.

Adding video to the mix

More recently still, video chat has become a common addition to instant-messaging tools and services. The popular Google Mail service, for instance, now has both text and video chat modes.

A Google Mail account is needed. If you don’t already have one then pay a visit to the Google Mail website and click the ‘Create an account’ button to set up a new one. Otherwise, just sign in.

In the chat box to the left of the page should be a link labelled ‘Try video chat. Click this to access the download page’, but if the link is not visible, just visit http://mail.google.com/video instead. Click the ‘Install voice and video chat’ button and save the file that is offered for download to the Windows Desktop.

Once the download is complete, double-click the file named GoogleVoiceAndVideoSetup.exe to start the installation. There will be a short pause while additional required components are downloaded and, once this has been done, a web browser restart is required. Click the button to restart and then revisit the Google Mail website before signing back in to your account if you have been signed out.

Setting up

To the left-hand side of the page, look in the Chat box beneath the list of folders, expanding it if necessary by clicking the ‘+’ button. Click the Options link that appears at the bottom of the Chat box and select ‘Chat settings’ from the menu that is displayed. The chat settings screen will be displayed in the right-hand portion of the page, with a number of options. At this point it is important to make sure that a webcam is connected.

Click the ‘+’ button next to the ‘Verify your settings’ label if a video window is not already visible. If the currently connected webcam has been detected, the video window should display what the camera

sees. If this is not the case, it is possible that the wrong input device has been detected as a webcam. This

can happen if a TV tuner card is installed, for example. If the box appears black, click the Camera dropdown menu beneath this section of the settings page and make sure that the correct webcam is selected from the list.

Beneath this are options relating to sound, both input and output. Use the Microphone dropdown menu to select the input that should be used to capture sound. Some webcams have a built-in microphone, while for others a separate microphone will be required. Now scroll up the page slightly so that the microphone meter (to the left of the video window) is visible. Speak into the microphone and check that the meter responds accordingly. If it doesn’t, check the Windows sound settings.

Similar settings need to be configured for the speakers so that sound can be heard. Use the Speakers dropdown menu to select the soundcard that is installed, although in most instances selecting ‘Default device’ will also work.

Next to the video preview window, click the ‘play the test sound’ link and check that audio is working. Assuming everything is work as it should, tick the box labelled ‘Enable echo cancellation (recommended)’ as this will help to reduce improve sound quality by reducing microphone interference. Click Save Changes.

If you experience any problems with either the microphone or sound output, click the ‘Troubleshoot your settings’ link next to the video preview window. This link leads a page featuring an introductory video about video chats along with links to troubleshooting resources to the right of the page. A list of webcams that are known to work with Google video chats is displayed, but this catalogue is far from exhaustive. If your webcam fails to work, it may be necessary to install updated drivers.

Start a video chat

To start a video chat, return to the Google Mail inbox and ensure that the chat box is visible to the left of the screen. Any contacts with a green camera icon next to their name have a webcam installed. Click their name to open a chat window and then click the ‘Video & more’ link at the bottom of the screen. Select ‘Start a video chat’ and wait for the call to be answered. The output of your webcam is shown in a small window, while the larger display shows that of the person you are speaking to.

By default, sound is enabled during a video chat: it can be disabled by clicking the microphone button beneath the video window. To view a larger video window, click the arrow button above the video to ‘pop out’; the icon in the upper left of the video can also be clicked to enter full-screen mode. When the video chat has come to an end, close the video window to end the call. If someone else instigates a video call, all that needs to be done is to click the Answer button.

Tweaking the picture

Lighting is very important when using a webcam. Certain cameras have a built-in light that will automatically activate when conditions are too dark, but if this is not the case, you will have to rely on other sources of light.

The light emitted by a computer monitor is unlikely to be sufficient to light a scene satisfactorily, so it may be necessary to switch on a light or lamp in the room. Be careful to position this lighting so it is beneficial rather than a hindrance.

A light source behind the head of the subject, whether this is electric lighting or a window, will result in a silhouetted image. There are controls available that can be used to adjust the brightness of video footage, but this is only really suitable for making minor tweaks. If the image is very dark, increasing the brightness will simply result in a very grainy picture.

Other ways to have online video chats

All the major instant-messaging programs, such as Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, support webcams. There are even ‘cross-platform’ instant messengers, such as Digsby, that can be used for video chats regardless of which tool your contacts might use. While using Google Mail for video chats keeps things simple, and makes it possible to chat to others whilst checking email, you may prefer to use a dedicated program.

Google Talk is an instant-messaging client which works much likes its rivals and can be used with a webcam. Click here to download Google Talk for free.

Get talking

Video chats online are both simple to set up and free. Obviously, though, you will need someone to hold the other side of the conversation. If you don’t know anyone who uses Google Mail then coerce some webcam-owning friends or family members to sign up. Alternatively, get them to download the standalone Google Talk tool from www.google.com/talk (they will still need to sign up for a Google account, though). With that complete, starting a video chat is as straightforward as clicking a contact’s name. So, what are you waiting for?

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Social tools take KM to a new level

David Tebbutt — 2010-02-02T10:54:00.000Z

David Tebbutt, Computing, Tuesday 2 February 2010 at 10:54:00

Technology expert David Tebbutt explains how – and why – organisations should integrate social networking tools into their knowledge management strategy

Let's get one thing straight up front: knowledge in its pure sense cannot be managed. However, it can still be nurtured and exploited. And the resulting discoveries can be documented if thought to hold potential value for others.

Knowledge can’t be managed explicitly because it exists only between our ears. It comprises our personal insights and experiences. Much of it is highly contextual and may or may not be of use to someone else. This is why the very early knowledge management initiatives came unstuck. Someone had the bright idea of “harvesting” peoples’ knowledge and sticking it in a retrieval system before they left the firm or moved on. This approach would only ever be effective when the knowledge lay in a narrow and slowly changing domain, if the possessor were able to articulate it and willing to give it up. Modern organisations face new challenges daily and require a more dynamic form of knowledge management (KM).

Most KM systems to date have extended their brief into the content world where knowledge has been encapsulated in some way – a recording, some training material, a document and so on – and stuck into a knowledgebase. This essentially ossified content then joins all the other sources of information in a business such as business intelligence, accounting records, market intelligence and so on.

When studied, the information may change the reader’s understanding and lead to new insights, or new knowledge that may or may not find its way back into the outside world. Data, by the way, is essentially raw material that may be transformed, usually by an IT system, into useful information. From a strict knowledge management perspective, we can ignore data.

While information is potentially easy to manage using IT systems, knowledge is a different matter altogether. It has far more to do with people and behaviour than it does with IT. However, for the exploitation of knowledge to be effective, IT will usually be called on to provide some supporting tools. These have evolved over time and recent developments in social or collaborative software have introduced the human factor, which, arguably, should have been there all along.

Organisations benefit when knowledge is shared in context and according to need. They do not benefit anywhere near as much from the “let it all hang out” tendencies of Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Taken as a whole, the noise in these public sites tends to overwhelm the signal, although many users are able to filter reasonably effectively through RSS feeds and being careful about what they write and who they follow. The danger remains that business professionals are so busy sneering at the public manifestation that they fail to see that the same mechanisms, deployed behind the firewall, can be of immense value to the organisation and, possibly, to its partners and stakeholders. Social networking brings the promise of knowledge sharing and creation of new knowledge through dialogue between people with common interests.

With commitment from the top, ground rules agreed and “champions” in place, the mandated addition of social networking to the knowledge management repertoire is likely to achieve a number of useful and complementary outcomes.

A poll of IT professionals by Freeform Dynamics last year found that the top three expected benefits from collaboration were operational efficiency, knowledge retention, innovation and creativity, in that order. In fact, the first two scored 70 and 60 per cent respectively. If you add in the “secondary consideration” scores, the figures shoot up to 96 and 94 per cent. As with all online polls, the respondents were self-selecting according to their interest (pro- or anti-) in the subject. Having said that, the skew is very clearly in favour of social networking.

Many major organisations have successfully introduced business social networking. GE, IBM, Cisco, MindTree, BP and the US Army are just a few examples of organisations that have successfully blended social networking with their knowledge management systems. It is likely that none of them started off by looking at the tools available. They will have considered the business issues associated with having valuable knowledge locked in people’s heads instead of being shared and put to good use. They will have realised that engagement with others is one of the best ways to liberate the knowledge.

Raj Datta, vice president and chief knowledge officer at MindTree, said, “Knowledge Communities in MindTree have allowed people to engage with each other and build a sense of belonging to MindTree. This results in people building their support network and increases satisfaction. This has shown up year after year in our company-wide surveys.

“Several Knowledge Communities in MindTree have gone beyond knowledge sharing and helped the company to build capability in a self-organised manner. For example, communities have come up with methodologies, tools, reusable software, and even strategic direction that the company has harnessed to build its capability.”

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Another way is to publish something, in a wiki perhaps, and to invite corrections and amplifications. Words such as “trust” and “transparency” start to enter the conversation and not everyone or every organisation is comfortable with this.

“Wiki has been very effective in allowing us to build a rich knowledge base of project learnings, one line at a time. You don’t need to think like a professional writer to do this, and hence everyone can contribute in building both depth and breadth into the knowledge base,” says Datta.

People need to learn, quickly, that sharing knowledge with others will actually increase their power rather than decrease it. Those who are unwilling to participate will become invisible and run the risk of being sidelined.

Relevant people and information need to be found quickly, regardless of place in the hierarchy or geographical location, to help the seekers to do their work more effectively. An easily searchable directory of personal profiles that allows users to add their own work-related details and contact points (email, IM and so on) will enable others to find them, learn all about them, find their presentations or publications and follow their recommendations (information, people and groups).

Even better would be if they and visitors could add what they see as relevant tags. The seeker of information may well find what they’re looking for without actually approaching the individual concerned. If not, a clearly articulated plea to a carefully chosen individual will generally evoke a positive and sympathetic response. Simply by committing their details to the profile page, they have made clear the degree to which they are willing to play the social networking game. The aim, as with all knowledge management, is to accelerate understanding and decision-making, leading to the right actions.

Traditional knowledge management systems are focused on content while social networking is focused on people. Content comes from people and from the dialogues that hang between them. Not everything needs to find its way into a knowledgebase information object. How many times have you kicked around an idea with others only to find that, using your collective knowledge, you’ve all arrived at a better place than any of you could acting alone? Computer-supported social networking holds out the promise of capturing these discussions from which, if determined to be of wider value, it is possible to document the outcomes and provide links to the participants.

No one likes revolution. Gentle but firm introduction of social networking procedures, rules and tools will ensure that the organisation evolves to a richer form of knowledge management than existed previously. Don’t try to go high, wide and handsome – pilots are essential for your own learning and proofs of concept will show others the potential.

Expect the culture in those parts of the organisation touched by social networking to change. In essence, individuals will start to give up their personal knowledge for the collective benefit. You’ll know the culture is shifting when people start talking about “we” more than “I”.

The important things to remember are that knowledge management is as much about people and processes as it is about tools and that the system you end up with will be a blend of formal and informal, dialogue and content.

Read how to keep your KM policy within the law here

Keep your KM policy within the law

Struan Robertson, Simon Horsfield and Louise Townsend — 2010-02-02T10:34:00.000Z

Struan Robertson, Simon Horsfield and Louise Townsend, Computing, Tuesday 2 February 2010 at 10:34:00

Struan Robertson, Simon Horsfield and Louise Townsend of international law firm Pinsent Masons examine trends in knowledge management from a legal perspective

What risks do social media tools present?

Ownership of content and the fallout caused by misguided content are among the most common sources of dispute. Most staff, when given social media tools to use for a work purpose, will use them responsibly or not at all – lack of use is sometimes a bigger problem than misuse.

However, any company should take precautions against misuse when introducing social media. That means providing guidelines for staff on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable and making sure that staff know about them and follow them. They should be short and easy to read. Several pages of legalese will only be counterproductive. Also make it easy for anyone to have inappropriate contributions removed quickly.

A risk that is sometimes overlooked is the need to make clear what content is accessible to whom. We have seen problems in the past of staff posting confidential material to an internal forum that they wrongly assumed was accessible to a small internal audience only. It was not a public forum, but it was visible to short-term agency workers who should not have seen that content.

Another trap is thinking that an email and internet use policy that was written several years previously will suffice. If it is an old policy, it may have been written with older web technologies in mind – and it may cover only what is downloaded, not what is uploaded. It also helps to make clear that use of public-facing social media sites outside working hours can affect the employer. We’ve all heard stories of people being disciplined or sacked for making comments on Facebook that bring the employer into disrepute, but most of these cases don’t make the headlines. It’s quite common. So again, it’s worth making the risk clear to staff in the policy.

How can you control wikis and other user-generated content for knowledge management purposes?

In our experience, the biggest challenges are nothing to do with law. They’re about organising the information when wikis are active and encouraging their use when they’re not. On the legal side, a common problem is stopping people posting content that they don’t have the right to use. You would expect developers to share code – but when they bring it with them from their last job, copyright problems arise. Clearly no company wants unwitting infringements to contaminate its own code.

The same risk exists for other types of content. An employee might think he is being helpful by making a rival’s PowerPoint presentation available to his colleagues. That’s probably going to be an infringement and even if it doesn’t result in a lawsuit, it can be embarrassing.

Employers can minimise the risks by setting ground rules on what should and should not be contributed, putting them in writing and making sure everyone knows them. They must also enforce them.

Encourage staff to report anything that is inappropriate. YouTube does this in a very clear way with its “Flag as inappropriate” button. Internal systems can adopt a similar approach.

What employment law issues do I need to be conscious of if implementing virtual learning and training?

The principal concern from an employment law perspective is how employers who offer virtual training will show the fact that their employees have undertaken the relevant training course, and how they will keep a record of the content of the course.

This may become a relevant issue, for example, if an employer is defending a claim of sex discrimination. The employer may want to advance the “statutory defence” that they have taken all reasonably practicable steps to stop the harassment occurring, which will require the employer to provide evidence of their equal opportunities policies and the fact that their employees have been trained on equal opportunities issues.

An employment tribunal will scrutinise any such defence carefully and will require evidence that the employee in question has attended the relevant course, together with details of the course content. Therefore, employers will need to consider practical ways of ensuring that a register is maintained of which employees have attended virtual training courses and that the course content is readily accessible.

This is an issue that should be explored with the training provider before subscribing to their course. Equally, interactive courses, which require employees to answer questions before they can proceed to the next stage of the course, will be preferable to non-interactive courses, because this way the employer will be able to show that the employee has actually engaged in the course and has not just left it running in the background while doing other tasks.

If information is being transferred outside of the EU, what legal obligations are there?

If personal information is transferred outside the European Economic Area, data protection rules apply. This won’t apply to non-personal training material where there is no identifying information about individuals. But it could apply to information such as learner details, learning management information, training matrices of who has done what and the outcome, and other personal details.

An organisation may collect this via an overseas affiliate, or need to transfer it to an overseas parent company which maintains training records. Or an organisation may use a third-party supplier to provide knowledge and learning tools and this supplier could be overseas.

If this is the case, the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) requires appropriate safeguards to be in place to protect the information. This could include secure transmission, access on a need-to-know basis and so on.

If a third-party supplier is involved, or if an affiliate is acting only on behalf of the organisation as a “data processor”, then a written contract with the data processor must also be in place to protect the personal data.

There must be a specific legal ground for the transfer. These grounds are set out in the DPA and can include the consent of the individuals to the transfer (although it can be difficult to rely on the consent of employees as consent is not valid if employees feel compelled to agree and do not really have an alternative) or the use of a “model contract” with the overseas entity. Some US third-party suppliers may be in the US safe harbor, which provides a ground for the transfer to go ahead.

The message for organisations is to think about where employee/learner data is going, how it will be protected and how DPA compliance will be achieved.

Will any content used for knowledge management on our network be eligible for freedom of information requests? If so, how are these handled?

If you are a public authority subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) – or the Scottish equivalent – then yes, content on your knowledge management network is fair game. Anyone can ask for recorded information that you hold, and this can extend to all your training materials including course materials, precedents, wiki and video content. It could also extend to facts and figures about your training such as how many employees have undertaken sex discrimination training, how many employees have failed a particular learning module and so on.

However, it will not necessarily extend to publically available content (online or otherwise) that is not within your control and not held by you, but could extend to materials that you have obtained from public sources where you hold copies of these. Here though you may be able to rely on an exemption where these are reasonably accessible elsewhere.

So if FOIA applies, how do you handle a request for knowledge management content? First, you must observe the FOIA formalities such as responding within 20 working days and providing advice and assistance. If the request is particularly wide ranging then you may look at the fees provisions that impose a limit on the amount of information that has to be provided.

You may then want to consider the FOIA exemptions. The starting point should always be a presumption of disclosure but in some cases disclosure may prejudice the commercial interests of your organisation or a third party, such as a training provider.

However, this exemption is not easy to maintain and also requires a public interest test to be applied. Decisions from the Information Commissioner and Information Tribunal suggest that there is a high threshold for this exemption and have required, for example, university course material to be disclosed. Each case is dependent on its facts and exemptions should be carefully considered. If the material originates from third parties, they should also be consulted.

Finally, a disclosure under FOIA does not mean that the applicant is free to use the material for their own purposes as copyright will still apply to the material and you may wish to make this clear to the applicant when replying.

Read how – and why – organisations should integrate social networking tools into their knowledge management strategy

Use free tools to create your own area online

Orestis Bastounis — 2010-02-02T09:41:00.000Z

Orestis Bastounis, Computeractive, Tuesday 2 February 2010 at 09:41:00

Upload photos for others to browse, create your own blog and more with some easy and free tools

In less than 20 years, the web has exploded in size and now includes more than a trillion web pages. It has revolutionised how we share information and how we communicate with others, whether they’re halfway across the world or just around the corner. Almost every large organisation or business has a website, as do many smaller businesses, clubs, societies and even families.

Many people are put off creating a web page because it appears too complicated, however. In the past, anyone creating a page needed to know how to write a special language called HTML, but that’s no longer the case. Today free online tools allow you to share information, pictures or video, without becoming bogged down in technical nonsense and jargon.

In this article we’ll explain how to get your family, club, society or business online with the minimum of fuss and expense.

Pictures perfect

For many clubs and societies, one brilliant use of the web is to share photographs: images of a recent event, for example. Although it’s possible to send photos by email, there are all sorts of potential problems that can lead to them failing to get through.

A far better idea is to place the photographs on the web, allowing all members or customers to easily view them. There are many free photo-sharing sites that make this easy.

A well-known example is Flickr. This site provides free photo storage to anyone who signs in using a Yahoo account. If you don’t have one, click the ‘Create Your Account’ button on the home page.

Several images can be uploaded from your computer’s hard disk at once. Whenever uploading any photos to Flickr it asks whether the image should be made public or private.

When you upload an image or video to a sharing service such as Flickr you can usually choose whether to make it publicly viewable by anyone, or to restrict it so that only friends and family you authorise can see it.

This is very useful, but remember that there’s no way to keep photos or videos entirely secure; anyone you trust to see them might make a copy and share it elsewhere. As a rule, we recommend only uploading photos that you would be happy to see on public display.

When joining Flickr you will be asked to choose a username. After doing this, the site will automatically set up a ‘photostream’ – a page where all your latest photographs will always be shown. By checking this page, friends and family can easily keep up with the latest pictures.

Flickr can also organise images into groups known as sets . When logged into the site click the Organize link to get started with this. The simple drag-and-drop Organizr interface lets you choose any number of images from your photo collection, edit their titles and descriptions, add descriptive tags to make finding them easier in future, move them to a set, delete them or adjust privacy settings.

It’s also possible for several different members of a family or club to collaborate using the Flickr site. At the Flickr groups we page you can create a group – think of this like a shared pinboard onto which different people can add photos. Groups can be public, so anyone can contribute, or private – ideal for a local club.

An alternative to Flickr is a tool called Picasa, from Google. Unlike Flickr, which runs entirely as a website, Picasa is a program that can be installed on your computer then used to categorise, edit and fix digital photos. It has plenty of useful image-editing tools built in, including one to fix red-eye in your photos.

Once you’re happy with the photos, though, Picasa allows you to easily upload them to Picasa Web Albums – an online sharing service not dissimilar to Flickr.

It can also send photos to online services that will turn them, for a fee, into prints, mugs, calendars, T-shirts and more. This could be a great way to raise funds for a club or society.

Video stars

With camcorders getting cheaper every day and digital cameras that can record video becoming common, there’s a good chance that you might want to share videos as well as photos. Flickr does work with videos but as each is limited to 90 seconds it’s not a terribly good place to store them.

Youtube has become a household name for sharing video online, and contains videos of everything from a dog riding a skateboard to the Queen’s Christmas Message. Sharing a video file on your computer via Youtube is as easy as sharing a photo with Flickr or Picasa.

As with Flickr, you’ll need to create an account, but as Youtube is owned by Google any Google Mail account will do the job. Once logged in (click Sign In in the top right of the screen) uploading a video is simple: you just choose the file you want to share, give it a description and wait.

Youtube handles most of the details of ensuring a video is in the right format for playback, and it can even be used to share high-definition video files. Youtube also gives each user a Channel. Rather like Flickr’s Photostream, this is a page that shows all the files you’ve shared on the site.

Unlike Flickr, though, it’s possible to customise the page layout and appearance. This means you can have a page on Youtube showing all your family or club videos, designed the way you want. You can see one we created at www.youtube.com/user/Computeractive. Friends or family with a Youtube account can subscribe to your channel, so if you add any new videos they’ll be alerted.

Youtube is very popular but it isn’t the only place to share videos online. Vimeo is a popular alternative that offers extremely high-quality video sharing, although you’ll have to pay if you wish to upload more than one high-definition video per week.

Paying for a Vimeo Plus account also removes adverts, gives higher quality video playback and allows you to customise the video player. It costs £36 per year.

Even if you choose a free account, however, Vimeo has advantages. It places a greater restriction on content than Youtube, so adverts and get-rich-quick schemes are prohibited outright, with video game footage and TV shows quickly removed.

This means that there is less nonsense to sift through than on Youtube and has led Vimeo to become preferred as a platform for promoting creative content, such as short films.

Write on

Flickr and Youtube are brilliant for sharing photos and videos, but many people prefer to communicate in a more old-fashioned way: by writing. And for those who want to share words online as well as pictures or videos, the best option is to use one of the many free blogging websites.

Originally designed for online diaries, these are now a convenient way to publish just about anything online. As blogging sites display the latest text at the top of the page, they are ideal for sharing the latest news about a club or society.

Blogs can be used in conjunction with sites like Flickr and Youtube. Both services provide simple ways to ‘embed’ photos or videos into a blog: you simply copy a snippet of HTML code and paste that into the blog where the photo or video should appear.

There are many free blogging services, but Blogger is a good place to start. Like Youtube and Picasa it’s owned by Google, so it’s particularly easy to share videos stored in Picasa into a Blogger blog.

Creating your own blog is easy: simply click the big orange ‘Create a blog’ button on the blogger website. You’ll need a Google account (so one created for Google Mail or Picasa will do), and you will be asked to choose the blog’s address. This will look something like http://yourblogname.blogger.com, and will serve as your place on the web.

Blogger gives you freedom to decide the layout of your page. The easiest way to do this is to choose from the list of ready-made templates, which are found by clicking Choose New Template under the Customise link in the top right.

You can also move some of the page elements around and adjust individual fonts and colours too. Because the design of the page and any entries you’ve written are kept separate there’s no risk to the content when making design changes, so feel free to experiment.

A good alternative to Blogger is Wordpress. This has a wider range of templates to use, as well as a greater range of options when customising your own. Wordpress works in much the same way as Blogger, allowing users to make posts and include images or video in them.

Pull it all together

By combining the services we’ve mentioned here it’s possible to produce a web page with photos, text and videos in less than an hour and at no cost.

However, there’s still one problem. The web address of the page will be something long and difficult to remember such as http://yourblogname.blogger.com. This might serve if the page is for friends and family only, but such a name can be hard to remember and doesn’t look particularly professional.

One way to fix this is to buy a domain name for the site. A domain name is your own personalised address on the internet, and the best way to get one in this case is to look for a company that will rent you the name and forward any visitors to your blog. This is often called ‘web forwarding’.

When people type in www.yournewwebsitename.co.uk, for example, the web forwarding service will show them the page at http://yourblogname.blogger.com.

Similarly, email forwarding services will take any emails sent to the domain (to you@yourwebsite.co.uk, perhaps) and pass those on to your email account. If you choose to buy a domain name, look for a company that includes web forwarding and email forwarding at no charge. UKReg does, with .co.uk domain names costing £2.95 per year. Domain names ending in .com are always more expensive (around £9 per year at UKReg).

Remember that you will have to keep paying for the name each year unless you tell the company that you wish to cancel it.

In this short article we’ve shown how to set up your own personal place on the web, sharing words, photos and videos all at no cost, unless you choose to pay a few pounds for a customised name. So, whatever it is you want to share online, there’s no reason not to get started: there’s a place on the web waiting for you.

Baffled by jargon? See our free online jargon buster.

Legal advice: the loneliest executive?

Nigel Stanford — 2010-02-01T16:06:00.000Z

Nigel Stanford, Accountancy Age, Monday 1 February 2010 at 16:06:00

The incredible demands placed on today’s FDs can make some feel isolated, with no one to confide in. Could the solution to the problem really be your friendly neighbourhood legal representative?

The job of a finance director has seldom been harder. In the current climate it seems that it is not enough to simply be managing your own cash flow and profitability, you are often called upon to help your customers’ cash flow by agreeing extended credit terms.

You may well be involved in assisting in re-tendering for a customer’s business; you may be required to deal with the fall out from the insolvency of customers; you will no doubt be needed to assist in difficult budgeting discussions; you may be required to consider redundancies, short-time working, pay cuts or pay freezes; or a combination of all of these. Last, but by no means least, you will no doubt be spending much more time in discussions with your bankers.

As if these demands were not enough, FDs working in listed companies will also be required to consider the obligations imposed upon them by the market and many will have needed to consider whether or not to issue profit warnings during the last year or so. Finally, FDs of businesses of a sufficient size (turnover in excess of £200m or with a balance sheet total in excess of £2bn), will have had to get to grips with the new provisions of the Finance Act 2009 (Schedule 46), imposing further duties and potential penalties upon “the senior accounting officer” of the company.

The multi-faceted and wide-ranging demands placed upon today’s FD sometimes make the job feel extremely challenging and lonely. Where many CEOs are heavily reliant on their FD as a sounding board, an FD can often feel that they have no equivalent confidant or counsellor.

However, the more savvy FD will seek to put in place an appropriate support network of peers and professional advisers. An obvious port of call would be representatives from the company’s auditors. However, some companies may be slightly wary of being too open with their auditors given the statutory obligations placed upon auditors and the concerns many are having at the moment in interpreting “going concern” issues.

In light of this, the FD’s legal adviser can often be invaluable.

Experienced corporate lawyers can advise FDs across a wide range of businesses and will often have come across a number of the issues being faced by an FD while advising other clients. A solicitor’s professional obligation of confidentiality should also give an FD comfort that they can be completely open with their legal adviser.

A company’s legal adviser can also advise on a number of specific areas that have been common during the recession. Here is a snapshot.

Banking arrangements

A common theme of the current recession has been the need for a number of corporates to renegotiate and refinance their bank facilities. Experience suggests that the most successful renegotiation happens when the corporate is open with its bank, approaches it early with regard to any issues and is flexible as to potential changes. For example, if it is a property company and has unencumbered assets, it may well be that offering to put some or all of those unencumbered assets into the bank’s security web will be able to address any loan-to-value covenant shortfalls. Non-property companies could consider whether or not new subsidiaries or related companies that did not exist at the time the facility was entered into could cross guarantee the main borrower’s obligations. Equally the owners of the borrower could consider whether they could stand behind the borrowings as guarantors if they are not already doing so.

Credit terms

Another theme of the current recession has been of customers having cash flow problems and seeking to have their suppliers be part of the solution.

Often the solution proposed by the customer involves a supplier agreeing some form of deferred payment plan. Many suppliers have taken the view that they have little choice other than to accept the customer’s requirements, particularly if they wish to continue their relationship with the customer. However, before simply agreeing such a course of action, a number of issues need to be considered. For example, any agreement as to extended payment terms should be appropriately documented.

The parties should be clear whether or not what is proposed is a one-off variation or a permanent change to existing contractual terms. Clearly, from the supplier’s perspective, the former is preferable. The supplier should also bear in mind that if it credit insures its exposure to customers, any extended credit terms for that customer would usually require the prior approval of the credit insurer. Clearly any credit insurer should be informed about what is being considered at an early stage.

Retendering for Business

Another common feature of the current recession in certain industries (in particular marketing services industries) has been for clients to require suppliers to retender for the business. (It will not surprise readers to note that any retendering exercise seems to usually involve a reduction in the commercial terms payable to the supplier). If you are involved in a retendering exercise it is important to be aware of your existing contractual rights and obligations and to consider these in the light of any retendering.

Clearly these rights should apply until such time as any retendering exercise has been completed and any new contractual terms agreed. If a retendering exercise is unsuccessful, you must be aware of your accrued rights and obligations under the contract in question. In addition, you may be able to take advantage of legislation such as Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) (TUPE) Regulations 2006. These regulations provide that on the change of service provider any employee who was employed for the majority of its working time for that customer will transfer to the employment of the new service provider. TUPE is potentially a very helpful piece of legislation for those who have just lost a major customer.

Nowadays the FD has to contend with the wider volatility of business performance in an unpredictable and turbulent market as well as the usual business concerns and pressures. This is why it is essential for the FD to be able to rely on one constant – an appropriate support network of peers and professional advisers, especially the confidential relationship with their solicitor – that can guide a finance director through the key issues that need to be grappled with.

Dealing with employment issues

In these troubled times, FDs have had as much to do with employee issues as anything else. Many businesses have looked at their payroll costs recently and are considering measures to reduce them. If this is the case you must involve your employees at the earliest possible stage. If you do not have a unionised work force or elected workers representatives in place, you may well need to ensure that workers’ representatives are elected. A dialogue with workers representatives can be helpful when things such as possible redundancies or alternatives, such as short-time working, temporary or permanent pay cuts or the reduction and or removal of certain employment related benefits, are being considered. A key feature of the current recession as against previous ones has been flexibility on the part of workers and their willingness to consider things such as short-time working, pay cuts, reductions in benefits, etc, as an alternative to outright redundancy.

Nigel Stanford is a partner at Cripps Harries Hall LLP

Recruitment: the chief challenge

Chris Hart — 2010-02-01T15:58:00.000Z

Chris Hart, Accountancy Age, Monday 1 February 2010 at 15:58:00

Whether there is a second dip to come or the recovery is really here, it is a challenging time for FDs to ascend to the top job.

For those who make it, the position of CEO presents an unparalleled opportunity to make one’s mark upon a company – even a whole industry. During the recession FDs have been instrumental in preserving company performance. From cost cutting to refinancing and shareholder relations, they have been at the heart of the action throughout.

As the finance director, it is taken as read that you know a lot about finance and accountancy, but you need to show that you have the breadth of skills and experience to run and inspire the whole business, if you want to get to the very top.

With the appearance of better economic times, company boards are looking for CEOs who can ensure the company succeeds in good and bad times. In fact, our research has shown that the same boards that craved financial skills to survive the recession now prioritise broader management skills for the recovery. It is these skills that FDs wanting to make the jump to CEO must demonstrate.

Leadership

It is often possible for FDs to be a success in their role without strong leadership skills, ensuring the decisions made by the board are financially enabled. FDs leadership skills need to be made razor-sharp to be a successful CEO.

Successful leadership can have a profound effect on a company. This is far more than simply managing people: leadership means people are motivated to do what is required of them because they understand its importance to the company and others. This can be a challenge when a job is seemingly removed from the company’s goal or is particularly unrewarding. Ultimately, FDs need to be able to demonstrate they can lead a whole company – so get out there and get presenting, don’t sit in an office issuing dictats by email.

Strategic skills

A critical area for FDs to focus on is their strategic skills. Companies shaken by recent events will need CEOs who simultaneously understand the damage the recession has done to the company and how to limit this, but also to prepare for the recovery and think of ways to make the most of it.

The only way to drive a company through such a period of upheaval successfully is to have long-term goals and a strategy to reach them. Amendments need to be made as situations change, but keeping your company’s (and employees’) focus on achieving both the short and long-term goals are essential for both company and CEO.

It is easy, as an FD, to deliver short-term profit increases by cutting investments and delaying projects, at the expense of the long term. A potential CEO should know that an important programme cut is not a saving, it is a potentially huge opportunity cost incurred.

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Larger companies are typically less entrepreneurial in culture than smaller ones. Procedures and policies supplant individual creativity. Committees and ‘group-think’ dampen innovation and create barriers to action.

Yet, in modern markets, fresh ideas, together with their effective and rapid deployment, are vital for survival and growth. The CEO knows a company that simply squeezes more income out of an aging product range has no future. For the FD looking to prove his worth, how can innovation in the finance function foster, rather than stamp on, innovation and growth?

Sales skills

Boards want CEOs who can deliver a strategy that drives sales as the economy improves and the sales department is vital to the company’s success. Yet this core function can be hard for FDs, often distant from customers and day-to-day operations.

It would be inadvisable for FDs to hit the road to overcome this. But prospective CEOs need to ensure they are close to sales teams and understand their work in order to be successful in the top job.

Many FDs have become CEOs. Martin Sorrell was a great FD and became a hugely successful CEO at WPP. Conversely, in the world of politics, a lack of the right leadership skills has undone Gordon Brown. Once popular as chancellor, he has floundered as prime minister. The transition to the top job is not easy, but ambitious FDs have a great starting point with their accounting skills. To get to the CEO’s chair they can’t rely on these alone: they should make sure their skill set is as rounded as the job they aspire to.

Who’s making the move successfully?

Alison Cooper, Imperial Tobacco. Having held a number of positions on Imperial’s Board, including FD, Alison will take over in May this year.

David Nish, Standard Life. Took up Standard Life’s top job in January 2010.

Graham Chipchase, Rexam. Previously Rexam’s FD and then divisional head, he became CEO in January 2010.

Chris Hart is a partner at business performance consultancy McKinney Rogers

Profile: Andrew Willetts, Lloydspharmacy

Kevin Reed — 2010-02-01T15:49:00.000Z

Kevin Reed, Accountancy Age, Monday 1 February 2010 at 15:49:00

Juggling retail outlets, NHS contracts and shrinking prescription revenues is par for the course for LloydsPharmacy FD Andrew Willetts

“Hybrid” is an adjective hijacked by the motor industry to promote its new greener cars. But Andrew Willetts, finance director of retail giant Lloydspharmacy, seems intent on clawing the word back – albeit just to describe his business rather than for more general use.

It’s not just the 1,700 retail pharmacy outlets, you know. A “large proportion” of its business revolves around the NHS. So managing the vagaries of retail while dealing with the UK’s health behemoth keeps Willetts very busy. “You have retail pressures such as our competitors; rent, then you have our NHS relationship, which has changed dramatically over the past five years.”

The £1.7bn turnover business has faced a squeeze on its profits from selling prescriptions – along with the whole dispensing industry. Four years ago a new pharmacy contract was set up that introduced a drugs tariff.

The tariff has been reduced annually, as regular as clockwork on 1 October. “We calculate that £800m has been taken out of reimbursement to [all] pharmacies in the last few years,” says Willetts.

The calculation is made on a sample basis, and there has been much debate between the industry and government about this method, let alone the yearly wrangling.

“It’s fair to say that sometimes it’s reasonable and other times less reasonable – it’s seen that a significant amount is taken out of supply chain profits.”

Where your common or garden retailer would be affected by the vagaries of customer choice and attrition from competitors, pharmacies see their profits eaten into, suddenly, over the course of one day. “It makes it difficult to forecast and budget with a December year end, this change in our funding.”

This creates unpredictability, says Willetts, but “ironically the reason for having a contract was to create predictability”.

The advantage for the bigger chains is the potential for economies of scale, “if you're running a tight ship”.

So does a big and clever business like Lloydspharmacy press a red button and the new tariff is implemented into its systems?

It’s not quite as easy as that, says Willetts.

The business uses modelling tools, plus its links to the negotiating committee, to gauge where the tariff is likely to move to.

“Everything in this business tends to be quite complex,” he muses. “Even retail, which is relatively straight forward, deals with the impact of this size of estate, rent reviews, labour costs, over the counter retail offer, discounting, new lines, competition – something we deal with and budget and forecast for – which has its own set of pressures and challenges.”

Negotiating skills add another string to Willetts’ bow but, despite a traditional chartered accountancy background at PwC, his retail experience gave him a leg up in terms of healthcare.

“In terms of the modelling, negotiations and assessing the impact of government action, it’s not something I was prepared for early on in my career, but FDs should be able to deal with that,” Willetts says.

Public sector efficiency drives are here for the long term, and the NHS’s budgetary squeeze is a continual focus for Lloydspharmacy. “We’re used to the government and NHS taking action that impacts on us – we try to estimate that in terms of pressure on supply chain and other areas of working in the NHS.”

The “other areas” Willetts refers to are pretty widespread.

Working with primary care trusts has seen Lloyds expand its service range. It has introduced consultation rooms in many of its sites and offers blood pressure checks. Diabetes checks and smoking cessation schemes have also been employed.

It even branched into medical electrical products – including TENS pain relief machines and blood pressure monitors.

Health services to business, hospitals, prisons and private hospitals are also part of the plan. “With pressure on funding for traditional dispensing, we’re looking at other income streams, which includes making sure the retail offer is as good as it can be, and medical electrical [has been] big for us the last couple of years. We’ve been actively repositioning ourselves to make sure we’re not victims of that [dispensing tariff], so we’re moving into new business streams, we are diversifying.”

The move of GPs into new super centres, or polyclinics, can yield opportunities, but there are also risks. Incumbent local pharmacies may have the right to move into a pharmacy ahead of other suitors, for example.

There might also be a detrimental impact on nearby pharmacies that don’t make it into the new clinic. There are also “quite large premiums” to be paid to move in.

“We’ve seen some good things come out of them, and we’ve lost out as well. Polyclinics are essentially bigger versions of health centres, which brings us closer to the GPs, gives us the ability to offer other services and fits with our moving to a healthcare company rather than a pharmacy retailer.”

With such a wide-ranging set of issues for Lloyds to deal with, it’s unsurprising that Willetts’ role mirrors that expansiveness.

Lloyds is run by an operating board, as a subsidiary of German pharma giant Celesio. Willetts heads the operating performance monthly board meeting.

The other monthly meeting, on statutory issues and governance, effectively fills the hole that non-executives would normally take.

“Commercial aspects and business partnering is what I particularly enjoy. While I do the reporting and statutory controls side of things… my interest is very much in supporting the business commercially and strategically.”

It has traditionally acquired around 100 pharmacies a year, but that process has slowed down while it focuses on areas of new growth, another part of Willetts’ responsibility. “If we can open a pharmacy, with lower profitability early on, we’d rather do that than buy a mature business,” explains Willetts.

With profits squeezed, the business is constantly restructuring and analysing its cost base. “It’s an iterative process, whether NHS or retail. The pressure on NHS funding means that, while the number of drugs we dispense goes up and up, we’re not being reimbursed on a corresponding basis, so we’re working harder to get to the same level of funding… We can’t do that and show growing profit without restructuring the cost base, so we look at new ways of doing things, whether its dispensing prescriptions from centralised locations, the head office, or our field structure – that’s my role.”

Willetts adds: “For me it’s about balance. We have the unpredictability [of the tariff] and I need to make sure we have a consistent process to reduce costs but also not to disrupt the business… and invest in the future.”

Report card

Reporting into the parent company always presents its own issues. For Lloydspharmacy, reporting to Celesio sees it use IFRS for management reporting and UK GAAP for statutory filings.

Filing under IFRS will happen within the next two years, says Willetts, but a complicating factor is the acquisitive nature of the business – which sees it own a staggering 400 dormant or non-trading companies.

“It takes a lot more time and cost and effort, plus there are often tax and property reasons for treading cautiously [in removing them from the Companies House database].

“It’s time consuming and I’ve signed hundreds of sets of accounts – and returns rationalisation is on the agenda, it’s not very glamorous.”

A key part of this move will be shifting onto an SAP finance system, “not necessarily completely integrated but for key modules where it’s right”.

There’s no I in team

FD Andrew Willetts oversees a team of more than 100 people, the majority of whom are based in its Coventry head office. Around 20 are based out in the field, acting as a “loss prevention” team. “They are in the pharmacy network doing proactive and reactive work – internal audit; controls compliance.”

Five regional financial controllers oversee the day-to-day running of the finance teams.

A small team of finance staff supports the rest of the company’s departments, including buyers, marketing and its property team.

“We’re not an ivory tower function,” says Willetts.

“Finance is a partnership function. If you’re remote from other parts of the business that won’t work very well. If you’ve got that closeness with the people you’re supporting, you get finance working as part of the teams rather than being remote and having a silo mentality. Again it’s a balance – loyalty to finance first and their teams second. Work closely with the teams, but also challenge them and make sure you get efficiencies, driving sales, etc…”

There is tension with this model, Willetts admits, but that’s a small price to pay for the benefits. Other issues that can arise from such arrangements are also well understood and dealt with.

“It generally works pretty well, but occasionally needs some iteration.

Finance, for instance, when it comes to our regional controllers, they are seen as part of those teams. Those FCs are part of regional meetings, but it’s about making sure the contact between them and key relevant people in the core finance function remains strong, so they don’t go native – that they understand the overall targets of the finance department.”

Which method of sharing is best for your small business?

Alan Stevens — 2010-02-01T09:30:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Monday 1 February 2010 at 09:30:00

Discover which method of sharing your files over a network is the best option by exploring the pros and cons of appliances and servers

If you want to share files on your network and, perhaps, host your own web, email and database servers, you’ve a couple of choices.

One is to use general-purpose servers running either Windows or Linux; the other is server appliances designed specifically to handle such tasks.

If you’re a small business there are pros and cons to each that need to be considered before deciding what to go for.

The server pros

The advantages of a conventional, industry-standard server stem from the ready availability of the hardware and application software to run on it.

If you’re a small start-up, for example, you can buy an entry-level server for anything from £200 upwards, plug it into your network and start sharing files almost straight away.

Industry-standard servers are also very flexible, as it’s up to you what processor to get and how much memory and storage to buy (you can always add more should you need it, or upgrade to Raid protection very easily).

Go for Windows Server as the operating system and the interface will be very familiar, making it relatively easy to manage.

File and print sharing also comes as standard with Windows, together with a web server (IIS), plus there’s a huge choice when it comes to optional applications, both from Microsoft and third-party developers.

A popular choice here is Windows Small Business Server 2008 (SBS2008) which, despite being for companies with no more than 75 users, is far from a cut-down solution, delivering full implementations of both Windows Server 2008 and Exchange Server 2007.

Similarly, Sharepoint Services comes as standard with SQL Server 2008 thrown in for good measure if you opt for the Premium Edition.

It sounds an ideal small-business solution, and one that thousands of small businesses choose for their networks.

You don’t even have to worry about installation as it can be bought pre-installed on servers from Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, HP and others.

Plus there’s a custom management console designed to make it easy for non-experts to manage, simplifying day-to-day tasks such as managing network shares, adding new users and taking backups.

As popular as this kind of solution is, however, there are one or two issues to bear in mind.

The server cons

Server hardware may appear relatively cheap but costs can quickly rise if you need faster processors or extra Ram to cope with more users and new applications.

More than that the cost of an entry-level server can easily double by the time you add on the price of the operating system.

Windows Server 2008, for example, costs around £500 ex Vat when factory installed, and that’s for five users.

Above that you need to buy additional Client Access Licences (Cals), costing around £20 ex Vat per user depending on how many you buy.

The Small Business bundle is better value, but still costly at around £640 ex Vat for the Standard edition of Small Business Server 2008 or £1,060 if you want the Premium Edition with SQL Server.

That’s also for five users with additional Cals needed to handle more.

One way around this is to opt for Linux, where no additional client licences are required and the OS is usually supplied free of charge.

However, if you want a supported solution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Suse Linux Enterprise you’ll have to pay an annual subscription.

On the plus side that subscription will be less than you’d have to pay to get Windows installed, but it’s still an ongoing cost to bear in mind.

Server management is another issue.

Opt for the Windows Small Business Server and the basics are pretty straightforward but it can’t all be made easy.

As well as setting up and monitoring users, it’s important to keep on top of the various updates and patches needed to keep the software secure, plus make sure backups are taken and troubleshoot any conflicts that arise.

Any applications you add will also need to be maintained and may have different interfaces to learn.

Go for Linux, either to save money or because it’s potentially more secure and the same management considerations apply.

You’ll also need Linux technical skills which may not be available in your organisation.

The appliance pros

Industry-standard servers are very flexible one-size-fits-all, solutions.

Server appliances, on the other hand, are more specialised, typically designed to perform a small sub-set of server tasks.

Far from being a limitation, however, this can be an advantage as it allows appliances to be made both cheaper and simpler to deploy, with most configured and monitored remotely via a browser.

On a small network, for example, you may only want to add basic file and print sharing. If that is the case it makes sense to buy a Nas (network-attached storage) appliance rather than a conventional server, not least because of the price differential.

A Readynas Duo from Netgear, for example, is available for around £170 ex Vat.

You’ll get 500GB of storage which can be plugged into the Lan and shared between Windows users with no additional client licences required.

Add a second disk and you get instant backup of all your data, with the contents of the first disk constantly mirrored to the second.

The only management concerns with this kind of Nas appliance are making sure network shares are available and deciding who is allowed access to what.

Plus there’s less to worry about on the security front with the (mostly) Linux-based firmware involved, as it is less vulnerable to attack than Windows.

Another advantage is that because Nas appliances are designed primarily to share storage and little else, they don’t need high-end processors or lots of memory.

Hence they tend to be less expensive and, as a result are a popular small-business option.

There are lots of products available, from single/dual disk products from Buffalo, Netgear, D-Link and others to larger multi-disk devices from companies such as Dell, Iomega, Lacie and Synology, with Raid protection and optional expansion facilities, if needed.

At the high end the Snap Server 650 from Overland Storage, for example, can be expanded to support up to 84TB using ordinary Sata disks.

The appliance cons

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to expand or upgrade an appliance.

Run out of space on many of the smaller Nas boxes and you can’t just pop in an extra or bigger hard disk.

Instead you have either to replace the entire device, or add another alongside it, neither of which is totally satisfactory.

That said, some do let you plug in external disks to boost capacity, and on the larger, more expensive, models install extra disks.

As with the Snap Server, Buffalo’s Terastation and some of the Synology products.

Adding extra applications can be an issue, too.

The low-cost Nas servers will do little other than share files, take backups and, in some cases, let you plug in a printer and share that on the Lan.

If you want to host your own email, web or database server that means either looking for an appliance dedicated to those tasks (which aren’t nearly as plentiful or affordable as Nas appliances), deploying an industry-standard server, or subscribing to a hosted service.

One recent development, however, has been a move towards building extra applications into the firmware of Nas servers.

Most are geared towards home users as with the streaming media servers bu ilt into Netgear’s Readynas, but some have more widespread appeal.

Synology, in particular, stands out in that it includes an optional web server and MySQL database in its Diskstation software and, in the latest release, a simple SMTP mail server.

Decision time

When it comes to the crunch what you should buy will depend on how many users you have, the type of applications you want to run and the level of technical expertise available in your company.

If file sharing is the principal requirement Nas appliances make good sense, both financially and because they tend to be ‘fit and forget’ solutions, requiring little more than regular checks to ensure your data is being backed up.

Good news if you’re a small business with limited resources, but worth having in larger companies too.

When it comes to application sharing, appliances aren’t such a good idea.

There aren’t that many available and those that are tend to be limited in what they have to offer, delivering few cost or management advantages compared to a general-purpose server.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that appliances and traditional, industry standard servers can co-exist on the same network.

A good compromise is, therefore, to deploy appliances to handle the bulk of your file sharing, leaving general-purpose servers to look after the apps.