The most recent Features from Incisive Media

Steven Warburton's Blogosphere

Archana Venkatraman — 2009-07-13T09:15:00.000Z

Archana Venkatraman, Information World Review, Monday 13 July 2009 at 09:15:00

An ICT and e-learning manager at King’s College London with a strong background in the implementation and evaluation of learning technology, his research interests are online learning, the dimensions of space and time in multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life, social networking, the changing notion of community and the sociology of emotion

Q Who are you?

A My name is Steven Warburton. I’ve been working at King’s College London for just over nine years– though my role has changed somewhat over time. I came to King’s from a technology enhanced learning background but took on an IT management role and expanded it to include e-learning management and project-based research.

My interests revolve around questioning the use of technologies within learning and teaching. This research has focussed on social software and social networking; supporting community development; design pattern languages; multi-user virtual worlds such as Second Life; and more recently an Eduserv funded project called Rhizome (http://www.rhizomeproject.org) that looks at the impact of digital identities on life-long learning.

Q Describe your blog and the categories in it

A My personal blog Liquid

Learning can be found at http://www.liquidlearning.org. At the moment it is dominated by two categories – MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments) and Second Life – which reflects the work I’ve been doing on three projects in this area: Openhabitat, LLL3D and MUVEnation.

Q How long have you been blogging?

A It feels like a long time. Looking back I can see that I started blogging seriously – the moment I signed up for a paid Typepad account – back in November 2005.

Q What started you blogging?

A Reading early bloggers and being fascinated by this new democratic style of content production. I loved the way that blogs subverted the normal editorial processes of what some now call Web 1.0. This also coincided with a grant call from which I received funding to look at the potential use of blogs as socialising devices in distance education.

Q Which bloggers do you watch and link to, and why?

A It tends to shift according to the research projects I am working on. Using RSS eases the pain of visiting a large number of sites but I do watch the blogs of colleagues and friends who provide thought-provoking content, such as Steve Wheeler, Josie Fraser and Graham Attwell.

Q Do you comment on other blogs?

A Yes I do, mainly to clarify issues and points in related research blogs and to stimulate discussion. This may be as simple as sharing resources or may involve a more detailed asynchronous back and forth conversation.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your presence in the blogosphere?

A My blog is not related to my organisation, rather it is a personal research space. But this question does raise the issue of the tension that exists between personal and professional identities, and how these are managed. I use other blogging spaces to separate out particular positions and activities.

Q What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?

A The trust I place in other blogs really depends on the purpose of reading that particular blog. If I am going to act on information then I build a sense of trust based on an assessment of the authenticity of the writing, and I cross reference material through other trusted networks.

Q What do you personally get out of it for your career?

A For me it is about visibility and having a publicly accessible intermediate space for writing that sits between academic publications and notes. In terms of career then I like to the think of my blog as extended CV – a longitudinal insight into my interests and research.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of blogging?

A In the main it has been the feeling of being part of a wider community and the spin off contacts that this can generate. It has served as a great basis for conversation and collaboration with a number of people in areas of mutual interest.

Q Setting work aside, which blogs do you read just for fun?

A None in particular but if I am browsing my newsfeeds in a spare moment I will often leap off into blogs that open up new areas and ideas to me. For example, this has recently been to explore blogs in the field of design.

Q What do you use social networking sites for?

A I maintain two profiles – one on Facebook and the other on LinkedIn which I use to keep in contact with friends and with my professional network respectively. Inevitably

there is overlap. This is one of the stubborn tensions within the use of social media – the constant play between aggregation and compartmentalisation of our online identities.

Q Do you Twitter? How has this helped you or your blog?

A I wondered when the Twitter question would come up. Yes I do – you can find me @stevenwarburton. My personal feeling, and from watching friends who are medium to heavy ‘tweeters’, is that Twitter competes for attention and time. Blogging and Twitter are not necessarily complementary technologies, especially when the two are serving the same purpose, for example as broadcast news.

Outsource to get lean – and survive the recession

Archana Venkatraman — 2009-07-13T09:00:00.000Z

Archana Venkatraman, Information World Review, Monday 13 July 2009 at 09:00:00

Outsourcing non-core activities is all the rage nowadays, helping hone companies to stalk the tough business environment, but be prepared for pitfalls – especially if venturing into the world of multi-sourcing

When outsourcing was first proposed as a viable business option a few years ago, it was confined to the world of information technology alone. Businesses turned to IT outsourcing to reduce operating costs, focus on their core competence and to accelerate business processes. As it produced the desired results in IT, other departments such as human resources, finance and even information began flirting with the idea.

In the light of changing technological, information and commercial environments, all sectors focused on maintaining their market share. Outsourcing, offshoring and shared services looked promising for areas such as learning, research, information management and data mining to help companies have a competitive edge.

Today specific offshore models such as Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), content transformation and even an ‘offshore centre for excellence’ help avoid process repetition and streamline business prospects. KPO gives information professionals an ability to outsource a wide range of non-core but knowledge-based tasks and free up internal resources/personnel to focus on strategic areas. It has helped eliminate waste and standardise and automate business, insist experts.

With the current economic downturn and its impact on outsourcing and shared services, experts predict such arrangements are likely to trickle further down the information spine.

Organisations use specialist information services for searching, extracting metadata and data mining to help with policy making. They provide access to critical skills and experience, help implement industry best practices and improve performance.

Having made steady inroads in the information sector, how can institutions and professionals adapt and equip themselves for newer trends? Professionals should consider key company objectives and then analyse and review the data to achieve them, experts say. Fons Kuijpers, head of IT management and operations practice, PA Consulting Group said: “While outsourcing reduces operating costs, the biggest challenge is that all professionals in different companies receive the same data from outsourced service providers. How professionals use this information is important.”

Nick Kingsbury, director at Objective Corporation, said the role of the professional within an organisation that adopted the offshore business model remains challenged. “His/her role has to morph more into the person who understands the options and can advise the business manager on credible alternatives.”

Besides, off-shoring requires offshore providers to have deep technical capability in this new technology, subject matter expertise as well as process experience to automate “transformation” wherever possible.

“As multi-media content and a wide variety of information delivery platforms become widely available, publishing companies will need to transform existing and new content to take advantage of this new technology”, said Tom Lesica, chief executive, global shared services, at Wolters Kluwer.

Not just money, honey

The initial driver of outsourcing-adoption may have been cost reduction, but it is about being able to do things differently and better with outsourcing, said experts.

The benefits are far more strategic- for one, outsourcing non-core functions allows professionals to attend to key business needs and allows greater focus by internal staff on adding value to business.

Lesica said: “Maturity in the off-shoring industry has led to new opportunities and trends.” Outsourcers now offer higher level skills including subject matter expertise. “It is now possible to have a mix of geographically dispersed teams, onshore, nearshore and offshore, providing high quality, multi-lingual transactional and knowledge based services.”

The rules for information outsourcing are similar to any other such arrangement, experts added. Professionals must define the services and service level, and identify the business targets.

While outsourcing has a history of success and business prosperity, it is crucial that professionals understand company goals and assess whether they can be achieved in house. “Only when they have ruled out in-house possibilities must they opt for outsourcing, rather than simply following the herd,” said another consultant from PA.

JISC has produced a paper, in association with the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) and Universities UK, which assesses outsourcing of information services such as email and data storage. Institutions should “think carefully about the hidden costs such as service down time that is out of their hands and ensuring that legal issues are covered in setup”, it concludes. It also found that the risk of confidential data being lost or stolen is 43% higher when it is outsourced rather than held in-house.

For many institutions a critical question is whether to outsource all their email services or just students’, noted the report. Outsourcing staff

e-mail may bring additional privacy and confidentiality issues (for example under the Data Protection or Freedom of Information Acts).

Email and data storage services from Google, Microsoft and others rely on using servers across the world to ensure resilience and robustness. However, these third party providers may not be able to guarantee that the data would be held on UK or EU servers and will not become subject to a foreign country’s jurisdiction. It may also prove necessary to inform every user affected by what is being proposed.

seeking the perfect mate

Another study, by consultant Duke and Jordan for JISC, examined the challenges of engaging in shared services. It identified problems in establishing and maintaining satisfactory partnerships; reluctance to rely on a third party for service; concern over loss of local control over critical services; and problems incurred in running re-procurements or severing the partnership and reluctance to have data stored elsewhere.

According to the briefing, investing in shared services can help further and higher education (FE and HE) save costs in a number of ways, although many senior institutional managers have not yet properly evaluated the potential strategic benefits.

Experts note that FE and HE institutions can identify services to be shared between institutions to improve delivery and release resources to further support teaching and research. Shared services can free up staff-time for more customer-service oriented activity, leveraging transformation, gaining competitive advantage, collaborating with other institutions and making it possible to offer otherwise unsustainable services, among others.

PA Consulting survey on outsourcing appears at << The future is multisourcing >>

How to customise your Word Press blog

Ken McMahon — 2009-07-13T09:00:00.000Z

Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World, Monday 13 July 2009 at 09:00:00

You don’t need extensive design knowledge to make your blog stand out.

Given that a blog is essentially a list of chronologically ordered posts, you might think the potential for creative flair was limited and it’s fair to say that many blogs look the same as one another.

However, there are some blogs that do look amazingly different while some don’t even look like blogs at all. Although these über-blogs may be created by design professionals and CSS geeks, an increasing number are published by bloggers with scant knowledge of design or coding.

The most recent release of Word Press, version 2.7, makes blog customisation easier than ever. There’s a growing library of both free and paid-for themes which you can install and apply in minutes.

With a little knowledge of CSS you can individualise your blog, add a company logo, change the typography and colour scheme and even redesign the navigation.

If trendy themes and custom style sheets aren’t for you, then you can still stand out from the crowd and make your blog a better fit for your content by using the customisation features in the Administration panel and by adding widgets and plug-ins.

In this guide we look at some of the customisation options open to those who are hosting their own Word Press blog using software from www.wordpress.org. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com, there is much less scope for customisation, so maybe now is the time to think about taking control and making the leap to self-hosting (see 'Hosting your own Word Press blog' later).

Before making any changes to your blog it’s always advisable to back up both your blog content and database. The excellent Word Press codex provides advice on how to do this.

Customising from the Dashboard

The first time you see your blog it will display using the default ‘Kubrick’ theme. This is a two-column layout with your posts on the left and widgets in a sidebar on the right (see 'Improve your design with a widget' later).

The Appearance sub-panel on the admin panel provides some customisation options that will take you a short distance away from the default theme and help you get your pages looking the way you want them. The Manage Themes sub-panel, which displays when you click Appearance in the main navigation menu, allows you to select from the available themes.

Editing the default theme

A white title on a round-cornered rectangle with a blue graduated fill announces to the world that your site is a Word Press blog. It’s easy to change this all you need to do is click Header Image and Colour in the Appearance panel and click the buttons to change the font and background colours.

If you want to radically alter the look of the header, you’ll need to resort to some more advanced tinkering - see the section on customising CSS for more information.

‘Static’ home page

With blogging you want your most recent posts displayed on the home page, as Word Press does. But what if you want a more conventional looking home page that doesn’t carry posts? One way to do this is to produce your home page using something other than Word Press, install Word Press in a sub-directory, for example /blog, and link to it from the home page.

Alternatively, you can easily set up Word Press to display one of your pages as the home page and define another page as your ‘blog’ page, displaying all your latest posts. This has the advantage of saving you the effort of designing your own home page, plus it will be consistent with your other pages in Word Press and be able to hold widgets and other content.

To do this, select ‘Reading’ from the Settings panel and opposite ‘Front page displays’ select the radio button labelled ‘A static page’. Then use the pulldown menus to select which of your pages you want to be the new home and blog pages.

Plug-ins

You can find plug-ins either in the Word Press plug-in as already mentioned, or by selecting the plug-in browser from the Manage plug-ins page.

Most Word Press plug-ins are designed to add functionality to your blog - they make it easier to carry out administration tasks, or to display information in a format that isn’t otherwise available. Plug-ins that manage visitor statistics, filter spam, or enable visitors to rate your posts will set your blog apart from the crowd, but they won’t do much to alter its visual appearance.

One solution is to install a plug-in that provides an alternative way to display images in your posts. Word Press includes Gallery shortcode that displays a thumbnail gallery of images attached to a post, but there are a variety of plug-ins that go much further with images.

One plug-in such as Lightbox provides about the coolest and most user-friendly way to display pictures and will instantly set your blog head-and-shoulders above the rest.

There are several Lightbox plug-ins, but they all do much the same thing with minor variations, which is to overlay your images in a modal window on the page. The rest of the page is dimmed to highlight the image window which displays a full-sized image and can usually be closed by clicking anywhere on the page.

The more sophisticated Lightbox plug-ins will show an entire gallery as well as individual images and display captions.

If you want to see Lightbox plug-ins in action, take a look at any of the following examples:

www.4mj.it/lightbox-js-v20-wordpress

www.stimuli.ca/lightbox

www.tinyurl.com/cmxz7h

Graphics and CSS

Although you can customise the default theme header using the options in the Header Image and Colour sub-panel from the Appearance menu, by simply substituting the image used for the header you can achieve a much more radical customisation. The default theme header graphic is wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickheader.jpg.

If you want a different header, simply replace this JPEG file with a different one of the same dimensions (760x200 pixels). First rename the old version kubrickheader_old.jpg. Bear in mind that the original header image has a border that joins the rest of the page, so you might want to use this as a template to paste your new image into.

If you want to use a photo for your header, but haven’t got anything suitable, take a look at Kubrickr. This is a tool that helps you search Flickr for a suitable Creative Commons licensed photo for your blogs, crops it to the correct dimensions, adds the border and saves it to your hard drive.

Take a look inside wp-content/themes/default/images and you’ll find other page elements that you can replace to create your own custom theme.

If you know a little CSS, you can go even further with customisation, altering the look and positioning of text and other elements on your blog pages.

The stylesheet for the default theme is wp-content/themes/default/styles.css. You can edit this in a web development application such as Dreamweaver, any text editor, or using the built-in Word Press editor (select Editor from the Appearance panel then select stylesheet (styles.css) in the right-hand column under ‘Styles’).

The first section controls the typography and colours.

/* BEGIN TYPOGRAPHY AND COLOURS */

How much you’re able to do with this will clearly depend on the depth of your CSS knowledge, but here’s a simple example. Scroll down to the following line:

H1 {

FONT-SIZE: 4EM;

TEXT-ALIGN: CENTER;

}

This sets the font size of any h1 element to 4ems. The only h1 text in the default theme is the blog title in the header panel at the top of your blog pages. If you change this part of the stylesheet as follows:

H1 {

FONT-SIZE: 8EM;

TEXT-ALIGN: CENTER;

}

You can increase the size of your header text at a stroke.

Changing the appearance and position of other elements can be equally straightforward, but the more CSS you learn, the more scope you’ll have for really changing things.

Custom themes and frameworks

The quick route to radical Word Press makeovers is to apply a ready-made custom theme. There are hundreds of themes out there; the Word Press Theme Directory is the place to look. At the time of writing all the themes here were free.

There’s also a market for so-called premium or paid-for Word Press themes. These range in price and quality, and start from a few pounds.

Developers that produce paid-for themes often also offer a free version that omits some of the features of the premium theme and are almost as good.

Remember that one of the drawbacks with customising themes is when you upgrade your Word Press installation, if the theme requires upgrading as well you lose all your customisation when the theme files are overwritten. To get around this issue theme developers are starting to produce theme frameworks.

The framework contains all the necessary PHP and CSS files and any amendments to it are made to a ‘child’ theme. The framework structure maintains all the customisation securely in the child theme which is not touched during any upgrade, effectively future-proofing your blog customisations.

Word Press theme developers that use frameworks include Thad Allender, Justin Tadlock and Ian Stewart.

Improve your design with a widget

Word Press widgets are add-ons that allow the addition of design elements and other content to your blog. The widgets displayed in the default theme include Your Pages, Archives, Categories, Blog roll (links) and Meta (admin and login).

Clicking Widgets provides a display of all the available widgets in the left-hand column and current widgets on the right. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the current widgets column doesn’t include the default widgets and explains that you are currently using 0 widgets. If you add a single widget it replaces the entire default selection, so if you want to keep any of the default widgets, you’ll have to add them in again.

To insert a new widget you simply click ‘Add’ and it appears in the current widgets column. Some widgets have editing options, The Categories widget, for example, can be displayed as a dropdown list, arranged hierarchically and display post counts. The Text widget obviously has a field for entering text, and all have a remove button.

Though perhaps not the most exciting widget in the box, the Text widget comes in handy for adding important messages to all your blog pages; things like a short ‘about me’ message, contact details, or both.

You can add multiple copies of any widget to the sidebar. However, this widget isn’t just for text; you can also add images and Youtube videos. Here's a list of text widget-compatible content.

Among the more useful widgets included in the default Word Press setup are Search, Calendar, Tag Cloud, Recent Posts and Recent Comments, but you can extend the scope of your blog way beyond what’s available in the default setup by adding third-party widgets. The first place to look for these is the Word Press plug-in directory.

Hosting your own Word Press blog

To run your own Word Press blog you’ll need a server that supports My SQL and PHP. For most people that means it will be a Linux server running the Apache web server. Before you arrange hosting, check with your ISP that it can support this.

Setting up Word Press is pretty straightforward, Word Press prides itself on its ‘Famous Five Minute Installation’.

In a nutshell, the procedure involves downloading the Word Press files uploading them via FTP to your server, editing a config file, and creating the database. Unless you’re a dab hand at working with MySQL from the command line, you’ll probably find it helpful to install PHP My Admin. This makes it much easier for those with minimal database experience to set up and manage a MySQL database.

If none of this makes much sense to you, don’t be put off. The Word Press documentation or ‘Codex’ is extremely well written and informative and the forums at are another good source of help and advice.

If it all looks too technically challenging, you could try the Word Press free installation service. At the time of writing the service had been temporarily suspended due to high demand, but may be back online by the time you read this.

Why are so many people using Twitter?

Dinah Greek — 2009-07-10T09:30:00.000Z

Dinah Greek, Computeractive, Friday 10 July 2009 at 09:30:00

We explain Twitter, the latest social network website to take the country by storm

There are already believed to be around 12 million Twitter accounts and many more people sign up every day or just visit to read a posting. All sorts of celebrities, from actor Stephen Fry to tennis player Andy Murray, have also opened Twitter accounts.

But what does this website actually do, and what’s the point?

What is Twitter and how does it work?

At its simplest, Twitter allows users to do two things: to post short messages about what they are doing, and to read other users’ updates.

It is easy to set up a Twitter account and it is free. It is best to use your real name so people you know can find you easily. Accounts can be made private so only friends the user has authorised can see them, or public so you can be found and generate a list of followers you don’t know as well as those that you do.

If you find friends on the service then you can choose to follow them and you will be shown their updates as they happen. When someone decides to follow you, an email is sent to the address you registered to let you know. Users can block people if they don’t want them as a follower. Like most social networking sites, the settings page lets users customise the look of the profile page by changing the background picture or adding a photo.

A Tweet community

Twitter has also spawned its own language. Users are variously called Twitters, Tweeters or ahem - Twits. The updates posted are known as Tweets. These posts are restricted to 140 characters so brevity is essential and considering the banality of some of the updates that’s not a bad thing but there is nothing to stop someone posting updates one after another if they want to get a longer message across.

These updates are then placed on the user’s profile page and are delivered to and appear on the profile pages of users who have chosen to follow that person’s updates.

For users of Twitter one of the most attractive features of this service is the range of ways these updates can be posted and received. Updates can be posted from a mobile phone and Twitter users can sign up to receive updates from people they are following via RSS feeds, social networking sites such as Facebook and various widget applications such as Twidget.

Despite the musings often being completely insignificant, Twitter has been credited by some as providing an essential tool in breaking news. Not so much by hardened hacks maybe but there are those who point out that it heralds the fact that ‘citizen journalists’ have broken news before the professional news agencies.

They argue that Twitter has allowed journalists to pick up on stories they may have had to wait for on the news wires. The site was credited with being the first to break the news about the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York after a passenger on a nearby ferry posted a picture.

Follow us on Twitter

Each member of the Computeractive team now has a Twitter account, so you can follow the thoughts of Paul, Tom, Dinah, Anthony, Tim and Andrea as we put the magazine together, meet companies, make online videos, make random observations on technology and the world in general or as happened recently get stuck at home because of heavy snow.

To access our ‘tweets’, go to our website's Twitter page and click the name of a team member to see what they are doing. If you join Twitter yourself and sign in you’ll also be able to follow us and receive updates automatically: simply click the grey Follow button displayed beneath each person’s photo. To stop following us, click the button again.

How to refine your Windows Registry

Mark Wilson — 2009-07-10T09:00:00.000Z

Mark Wilson, Personal Computer World, Friday 10 July 2009 at 09:00:00

The Windows Registry is viewed with fear by many, but it’s easy to work with once you understand the basics

The Windows Registry is something that a surprising number of people are completely unaware of or actively avoid and with good reason.

Continuing our series of ‘back to basics’ articles aimed at those just starting out in computing (or experienced users who fancy a quick refresher), this feature will explain the need-to-know elements of one of the core components of Windows.

When Windows is working well, the Registry shouldn’t need touching and it’s not a place where novices should need to tread.

But there are occasions when Windows misbehaves in such a way that a manual edit of the Registry may be unavoidable. So to better understand your foe, read on.

What’s the Registry?

The Registry as we currently know it was first introduced way back in Windows 95. Prior to this, those with long memories may remember the INI files used by Windows 3.1x (such as win.ini and system.ini) to store program and driver configuration information.

Third-party developers could also use their own INI files for configuring applications, which could result in the files being scattered all over your hard drive.

The Registry was Microsoft’s attempt to rationalise system configuration and clean up this anarchic system of INI files.

It’s essentially a large database (stored in the /Windows/System32/config folder) used to store settings relating to Windows itself, along with any hardware and software that is installed. It’s integral to the operation of Windows.

When a change is made to settings using the Control Panel or a program’s options or preferences screen, these changes are recorded in the Registry.

As a result, there is often no reason to delve into the Registry using Windows is a much easier way of adjusting settings. But by learning about how the Registry works, it is possible to take greater control of your computer and access otherwise hidden settings.

But before continuing, it may help to explain exactly how Windows uses the Registry.

First off, it’s important to realise that the Registry is not a static file all the time Windows is running, Windows processes, services and applications are constantly querying and modifying entries in the Registry.

If you download and run a Registry monitoring program such as Microsoft’s free Regmon utility, you can see what’s happening to the Registry in real time, and it’s quite amazing how busy it is in there.

Before you start

Before venturing any further, it’s important to point out that editing the Registry can, in extreme cases, damage your Windows installation. Accidentally change the wrong setting and your PC may become inoperable.

So be sure to have a full system backup in place, so things can be brought back to normal should the worst happen. Create a System Restore point and back up valuable data before editing anything.

If you’re just starting out and don’t know how to back up your PC then this really isn’t the kind of feature for you. It’s also worth noting that when editing the Registry, there is no ‘undo’ feature and any changes are made immediately. See below for information on how to create a Registry backup.

It is possible to work safely with the Registry. We will explain later how to back up the Registry itself something that even novices might want to try, just in case the Registry ever gets corrupted.

Hello, Regedit

To start working with the Registry, you can launch the Windows Registry Editor, Regedit, in several ways. In all cases you will need to be logged on with administrator privileges.

In Vista, click Start, type regedit and select the entry from the list that is displayed. In XP, click Start, choose Run and type regedit in the dialogue b ox and click OK. Alternatively, in either operating system hold down the Windows key and tap R simultaneously before typing regedit and pressing Enter.

In Vista it may be necessary to click Continue at the User Account Control box, if this is displayed. Once the Registry Editor has loaded, the similarity to Windows Explorer should be immediately apparent.

The various components of the Registry are displayed in a tree-like structure in the left-hand panel, much like Explorer’s folder display, while additional content is displayed in the right-hand window.

Key to the Registry

The terminology surrounding the Registry can be confusing, so it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with a number of key terms before proceeding.

There are five main entries in the left-hand panel. These are referred to as hives and each is concerned with the storage of different types of settings. The HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive is mainly used to store information about file associations, and HKEY_CURRENT_USER holds the settings of the user currently logged in to Windows.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is used to store information about installed hardware and software, and these settings are applied to all users, while HKEY_USERS comprises links to sections of HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

Very little information is stored in the latter and that which it does contain relates to the current system configuration, with information drawn from sub-sections of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

Expand one of the hives by clicking the plus sign alongside its name, and a series of folders is displayed these are known as keys, which can contain further sub-keys. Icons appearing in the right-hand pane are known as values and these come in various types including String, Binary, DWORD and Expandable String.

The right-hand pane is split into three columns, the first of which, labelled Name, simply indicates what the value is called. The Type column shows the type that has been assigned to a value, while the Data column shows the setting that has been applied to a value.

Depending on the type of value the Data column may contain a path, a number, or a word. It is also possible for a value to have no setting indicated by the presence of the words ‘value not set’. This should not be interpreted to mean that the value is not needed, as the lack of data should be regarded as a setting in its own right.

Software may check this Registry key and perform a particular way if the value has no data but perform differently if data has been assigned to it. It may also be the case that problems arise if the value is not found to be present.

How to back up

When editing the Registry it is vital that you are certain of any changes, additions or deletions you make. If you are unsure of anything, double-check and if in doubt, leave well alone.

Registry editing is potentially dangerous, and it is easy to turn a working computer into an unusable mess with one false step. Before you implement planned changes, backing up all or part of the Registry is highly recommended. This can be achieved in a couple of ways.

The first option is to create a backup of a sub-key, safeguarding the data it contains. In the left-hand pane, right-click a sub-key (or an entire branch) and select the Export option from the context menu. In the dialogue box that appears, enter a meaningful name for the backup, ensure that Registration Files (*.reg) is selected from the ‘Save as type’ menu and then click OK.

The backup file will be saved. If you click the ‘All’ checkbox in the Export Range section, the entire Registry will not be exported, but only selected hives, so such a backup can’t be used to totally restore a system. For a full backup that you can use for an emergency restore, we’d recommend the Erunt tool (see later).

If need be, such backups can be reinstated by right-clicking the .reg file created above and selecting the Merge option. Before using this as the sole method of backing up the Registry, it is important to note that when .reg files are merged back into the Registry, they will not necessarily undo all the changes that have been made to a key.

Any data that has been deleted will be restored to its previous state, but anything that has been added since you saved the key will not be deleted.

This is why it can be useful to back up hives in their entirety. To do so, right-click a key and select the Export option as mentioned before. This time, ensure that Registry Hive Files (*.*) is selected from the ‘Save as type’ menu.

The file that is generated does not have a file extension, but it can be reimported into the Registry to undo any changes. Unlike .reg files which can be merged with the Registry, hives must be imported from within the Registry Editor. Click the File menu and select the Import option.

Select Registry Hive Files (*.*) from the dropdown menu and then navigate to and select the file that has been created before clicking Open. Click Yes to confirm the action and then OK once the operation is complete.

Backing up hives is by far the most secure means of backing up sections of the Registry because, when a backup is imported, all changes that have been made will be reversed. Additional information about how to create and restore a backup of the Registry can be found on the Microsoft website.

However, .reg files are not entirely redundant. If you have more than one computer running Windows Vista, for example, it is possible to make changes to the Registry on one machine, export the relevant keys and then copy the .reg file to another computer.

The information stored in the file can then be imported into the second computer’s Registry to save duplicate editing.

You should only use this method when working with keys that relate directly to Windows itself though, as the hardware and software installed on different computers is unlikely to be the same, and irrelevant Registry keys could lead to problems.

A much easier way to back up and restore the Registry is to use the free Erunt tool. This handy tool backs up your entire Registry to a directory of your choice, and can also be set to automatically create a backup every time Windows starts. Erunt comes with a very useful text guide to backing up and restoring your Registry.

Finding your way

While navigating the Registry, it’s easy to lose track of exactly where you are, not least because the highlight effect used to indicate which key is currently active can be difficult to see. But help is at hand in the form of the status bar.

Just like Windows Explorer, the Registry Editor includes a small information panel at the bottom of the window which displays the address of the currently selected key. If this isn’t visible, click the View menu and ensure that the Status Bar option is ticked.

Deleting unwanted keys and values is a simple matter of right-clicking the appropriate item and selecting the Delete option before confirming the action renaming can be done in a similar fashion. To edit the data connected to a particular existing value, double-click it, make any required changes and click OK.

Should a Registry tweak require the creation of a new key, start by navigating to the key which will act as the parent and then click Edit, then New followed by Key before entering a name and pressing Enter.

If a new value needs to be created, click Edit then New and select the type of value you want to create, before typing a name and pressing Enter. The value can then be assigned another value by double-clicking it and entering the required data.

Advanced tweaks

This masterclass is intended as an introduction to working with the Registry, and there is not enough room to mention individual tweaks that can be applied.

However, to get you started, use the Registry Editor to look at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\

Software\Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\Run and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Run.

Here you’ll find a list of programs configured to run automatically when Windows starts simply delete any that are not required for accelerated startup times.

This is a fairly safe tweak but, as we’ve stressed throughout, do back up the Registry first there may be a startup program that, for example, your printer needs to work properly.

The tweaks and customisations that can be put in place by editing the Registry are virtually limitless and plenty have been mentioned in the Hands On and Question Time sections of PCW over the years.

Find more tips on the web at Computer Performance, Blackviper and Winguides.

But a final word of warning don’t try playing around with Registry tweaks just for the sake of it you could end up spending more time fixing your mistakes than you bargained for.

Finally, for some more advanced topics specifically for XP users (although much of it is still relevant to those running Vista), you can read a PDF of our 2006 guide to the Registry.

Edit the Registry with tweaking software

If you use Windows 98 or XP, a handy tweaking tool called TweakUI is available. This utility makes it possible to change system settings that are otherwise only accessible by editing the Registry something that not everyone is comfortable with.

Currently, there is no Microsoft-made Vista version, but there are alternatives.

One is Winbubble, a free utility needs no installation: just extract the program from its ZIP file, open the resulting folder and double-click the file named Winbubbles.exe.

Working through the various tabs, it is possible to perform a number of tweaks such as adding options to the context menu that appears when right-clicking on files and folders, customising icons for drives and folders and disabling Vista features such as Aero.

Another similar program is the free version of TweakVI. The free Basic version offers a limited range of Registry tweaks compared to the Pro and Premium versions.

Access and navigate the Registry easily

Step 1

Although the Registry can be launched from a Run box, frequent editing may justify creating a shortcut. Simply create a new shortcut pointing to regedit.exe on the Windows Desktop and then drag it to the Quick Launch bar or Start menu for easy access.

Step 2

Using the Registry Editor’s search facility can make it easier to home in on references to a particular file or program. Click Edit, then Find, type a keyword and press Enter to go to the first instance of the word, using the F3 key to jump to the next.

Step 3

Frequently used locations in the Registry (such as the Run key) can be bookmarked for easier access. Navigate to the key in question before clicking Favorites, followed by Add to Favorites and then enter a suitable name. Use the Favorites menu like the one in a web browser to jump to these bookmarked locations.

Using compound primary keys

Mark Whitehorn — 2009-07-10T09:00:00.000Z

Mark Whitehorn, Personal Computer World, Friday 10 July 2009 at 09:00:00

Discover what compound primary keys can do for your and your data

A primary key provides a value that is guaranteed to be unique for every record in a table. This is often a number in a single field. For example, if we sell books, we could give each book a unique ProductID.

It is a good idea to use a simple primary key like this because it’s easy to understand and queries will be fast.

Access’ AutoNumber data type is often a good choice. However, it is possible to use two (or even more) fields for the primary key; this is called a ‘compound’ or ‘joint’ primary key.

If you do this, it is fine for two records to have the same value in one of the fields as long as the other contains a different value. For example, the screenshot of the table’s primary key is made up of ProductID and ProductID2.

We can now have duplicate values ProductID as long as the value in ProductID2 is different (and vice versa). As the screen shows, if we tell Access these two form the primary key, it will ensure we never duplicate the values in both fields between two rows.

So, a good question, and one that PCW reader Tom Boyd asked, is: under what circumstances is it worth accepting the added complexity of a compound primary key?

One answer is that the table above is a good example of bad practice. All I have done is to make the table more complex for no gain.

However, when used correctly, compound primary keys are wonderful. More than that, they are common because we use them to solve a common problem.

Databases are constructed to model the behaviour of the real world. In that world, we find real-world objects that have a many-to-many relationship between them.

Imagine a situation where we have many products for sale and many orders being placed by our customers. Each product can appear on many different orders and each order can have many different products on it.

Our database needs to be able to store this relationship, so we need a many-to-many relationship between the Order table and the Product table. We do this by creating a table that sits between Order and Product I’ve called it OrderDetail.

Following the joins, we can see that Order number 1 was for two different products: three copies of ‘Gordon the Wonder Land Rover’ and two copies of ‘EF goes to France’. Order number 2 was for three products.

Suppose the customer who placed order number 1 rings back and adds four more copies of ‘Gordon the Wonder Land Rover’, we simply amend the Number field from 3 to 7.

We actively don’t want more than one row in OrderDetails that points to the same order and the same product; it would just be confusing. If we declare these two fields to be the primary key of OrderDetail, Access ensures that we can never do this.

There is an important point here. When people (myself included) first use a relational database, they often find that it seems obstructive. No matter what you try to do, the database engine interferes. You can’t change this, you mustn’t do that.

But, if the database is designed properly, it never gets in the way unless you try to do something foolish (such as adding the same product to an order twice).

Unnatural primary keys

Tom also mentioned my brief coverage of natural primary keys, which use a value that already exists in the real world and is guaranteed to be unique, such as the registration number of a car.

Even if you find a natural key, it’s always worth considering whether it is the best solution; just because there is a natural key doesn’t mean it’s definitely the best in every situation.

For instance, where you have a table of employees, each one with a National Insurance number, it’s tempting to use the NI number as the primary key.

However, NI numbers contain a mix of characters and numbers and will make queries slower. This is unlikely to be a problem in a small business, but it could become so with a very large table.

You may also have to cope with rare instances where employees don’t have a number. Store NI numbers by all means, but consider using a more compact numerical value/AutoNumber as the primary key.

Not just a database problem

Oliver Metherell leads Super7, an attempt to make a first ascent on every one of the seven continents (we are talking mountain climbing here).

The current status is five done, two to go. Oliver presently maintains a mailing list in Word and feels now is the time to move up.

Excel and Access could both be excellent candidates, depending on your data, expertise and circumstances. I’ll demonstrate the Access path.

Oliver’s email list is stored in Word like this:

Foo ; foo ;

The first issue is that multiple addresses can be held in a single line in the Word document and we’ll need to standardise on one per line. This problem is most easily solved in Word using the Replace utility.

Set up the Replace utility with a semi-colon followed by a space in the ‘Find what’ box and type ^p into the ‘Replace with’ box.

This will find the semi-colon in the middle of a line and the ^p will replace it (and the space that follows it) with a paragraph break. This ensures all email addresses are on different lines.

Then run Replace again, but this time searching for just a semi-colon and leaving the ‘Replace with’ box blank. This removes the semi-colons at the ends of lines. The result is:

Foo

foo

Now we need two passes through the data with the Replace utility to find and remove (by leaving the ‘Replace with’ section blank) the < and > characters. The result is:

Foo foo@baa.co.uk

foo footoo@baatoo.com

Now for the data transfer. In Access prepare a table to hold the data. In our database, the table Mail has two columns: one is an AutoNumber primary key field and the other is called EmailAd.

Highlight the list in Word (Ctrl &A), copy (Ctrl & C), then swap to Access. In the datasheet view of the Mail table, click in the EmailAd column header and then paste (Ctrl & V).

Now we can use Access’ data manipulation capabilities to finish the task by removing the names. The key to solving this problem is that there is always a space character between the bit we don’t want (the name) and the bit we do want (the email address). All we have to do is to find that space character and then take all the characters from that point to the end.

Make a copy of the table and we’ll start work on it. Base a query on the Mail table and add the EmailAd field. We find the position (counting from the left) of the space character using a function called InStr (short for InString). In a fresh column, build an expression called PosSpace:

PosSpace: InStr(1,[EmailAd]," ")

InStr needs to know from where you want it to start counting, the column to be searched and the character you seek. We’ll start at the beginning of the string with character 1, though you can omit this argument as the function’s default behaviour is to start at 1. This is the SQL:

SELECT Mail.EmailAd, InStr(1,[EmailAd]," ") AS PosSpace

FROM Mail;

Now we know where the spaces are. There is another function called Mid that will chop up a string. You tell it the start position and how many characters you want to chop out. Now, as a first guess we might try:

CleanEmail: Mid([EmailAd],[PosSpace],100)

This says: take the string which is in EmailAd (Foo foo@baa.co.uk), go along to the position shown in PosSpace (which happens to be 4) and then chop out the string from there to the end; technically, it chops out from there to position 100, but Oliver had no strings longer than 100 characters.

This works but it includes the space from which we are counting, so:

CleanEmail: Mid([EmailAd],[PosSpace]+1,100)

works better.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to work out how we could isolate the name and put it in another field hint: a function called Left is very handy here.

Web seminar: To cut or not to cut

Accountancy Age — 2009-07-09T14:30:00.000Z

Accountancy Age, Accountancy Age, Thursday 9 July 2009 at 14:30:00

Our experts look at whether technology spend should be maintained in the recession

Are FDs prepared to invest in technology right now or are they simply looking for different ways to say ‘no’?

David Dewhurst, finance director, Next Fifteen Group

As an FD my natural inclination is to hang onto cash and not spend it and to justify that by asking: where is the return? It is in our blood to be that cautious and I’ve had battles with my IT guys about spending money all the time. But I think the speed with which you can now make decisions is the key to unlock the spending.

We’re a relatively small company in market cap terms, but we’re a global business with clients that are increasingly wanting a global solution from us. We have to be able to get information quickly back to the centre to make decisions. So any spending we are looking at is to keep the communication as quick as possible, and shorten the decision-making process. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll make better decisions but we’ll make more informed decisions and more quickly.

The IT guys want a joined-up system because that is what we asked them to build at the beginning of the process. So given that the software can do it why aren’t we continuing the investment? That’s the kind of question that we are currently faced with and we are going into a budget round just now. In the next two or three weeks, I’ll be seeing the requirements coming through from the different departments and IT.

Does this cause tension between finance and IT?

Paul Sparks, product director, Iris

We are working with the IT team and we are helping them build clear business cases. Whereas you could have the position: ‘This sounds like a really good idea, let’s invest that money now.’ Now the question is: ‘What is the business case? How are we going to track those benefits? How are we going to make sure each phase of the implementation of the project has clear parameters that we can track?’

So tension is definitely there but there’s tension in most cases for a lot of businesses. The ability to actually make a really clear case is paramount. If that’s not there they shouldn’t be doing it.

The big thing over the last 12 to 24 months is that everything has to be cloud, everything has to be internet-based or whatever. What we have found when we have spoken to customers is, actually, it’s about what it is that they do.

For medium-sized and larger businesses that is an area where they feel comfortable. For smaller businesses it’s very different.

Can you afford not to invest?

Peter Simons, technical specialist, CIMA

I can understand that everybody wants to sit on the cash - but there is also a danger there of false economies. We see it on a personal level with people being let go, yet a few months later companies are looking for someone with those qualities to bring in.

It is very easy to have an embargo on capital expenditure, it is a simple way of controlling the cash and it is a priority. But once you have figured out that you can survive, the next thing to ask is how do we ensure that we prepare ourselves for the future?

There is a quote from Barack Obama’s chief of staff where he says a crisis is a dreadful thing to waste. Crisis provides you with a burning platform for change. If you have always been keen to invest more in technology, cut costs, this is the chance to win buy-in to that change programme and this is what we have to do. We have to sit on the cash, but we also have to ensure that we develop the business for the future and that tension is really exciting.

The finance function may have two futures. We have a future back office which is around technology automation and shared service centres and a future for the front office which is around taking information from those accounting operations as a starting point and parting with the business.

How can you best manage the competing pressures of retaining cash and making necessary investments?

Ryan Shuttleworth, chief technical officer, Validis

It is really important that you have different disciplines involved in the project.

I don’t think it’s the case now where an IT director can simply build his business case: the IT department builds it and the FD signs off on it. The FD needs to be involved in that process.

It is difficult for companies that maybe don’t have internal management accountants and are using accountants in practice to get that sort of integrated, really close advice and knowledge about their business because decisions do need to be made fast.

But unless your FD is involved all the way and understands the reason for this change, there is a sort of silo and traditionally-led projects can often fail and you won’t realise that return on investment.

If you are shopping around at the moment, you can actually get some pretty good deals, and if you are prepared to make the move onto some new technology platform or upgrade your infrastructure in some way, then now is a pretty good time to do it.

Is less money being invested in IT?

James Griffin, head of hosting strategy, Star

We are not seeing budgets shrinking. But we are not seeing them rise as much as the cost of servicing in-house. I’ve seen some reports that suggest that budgets are rising by around 6% whereas IT costs on premise are rising around 20%. What we are seeing is that you have to make a much more robust case.

So IT directors two years ago had fairly free rein to go and spend their budget. Now even though it is their budget, they are then having to take that back to the board. Are there any capex blocks? Are there an opex blocks? It’s a longer decision.

So rather than the IT guy having a discussion with his FD about getting more budget, he is just making better use of what he has got. That trend is growing massively.

Chaired by Damian Wild

Access no longer denied

Mark Hoyle and Andrew Butler — 2009-07-09T12:53:00.000Z

Mark Hoyle and Andrew Butler, Accountancy Age, Thursday 9 July 2009 at 12:53:00

You no longer need a solicitor to talk to a top barrister. But why would you want to?

The Bar is changing and innovative sets of chambers now recognise that their professional client base extends far beyond solicitors. Many accountants are still not aware that their own profession can obtain the services of barristers without the need to instruct a solicitor first.

The Licensed Access Rules and Recognition Regulations which confer this right apply automatically to firms of accountants who are members of one of a number of professional bodies.

Even firms and practitioners who are not members of any of these bodies can apply to the Bar Council’s ‘Access to the Bar’ committee for a licence, and such an application will be considered on its merits.

Used correctly, the ability to go direct to counsel can be a useful and cost-saving device. But what is the right situation in which to bypass the services of a solicitor? The key to this is an understanding of the kind of work barristers undertake. While barristers are primarily perceived as advocates, it is worth remembering that most are also pre-eminent in their chosen fields of legal expertise. Specialist barristers - experienced in, for example, business and commerce, property, fraud or international dispute resolution - can be hired ad hoc or become part of a team led by or working alongside accountants on any project which might benefit from their involvement.

However barristers will usually be retained for the purposes of litigation. One particular field which can benefit from the link between accountant and barrister is asset tracing, both within the UK and globally. Specialist barristers experienced in the methods and procedures for seeking and tracing assets, and recovering them, are an ideal fit with accountants instructed to identify and recover commercial or judgment debts for their clients. Equally, barristers can assist in protective debt management. Many are also skilled at mediating disputes.

It needs to be understood, however, that barristers are not permitted by their professional rules to take general conduct of litigation in the way that a solicitor does. They are not allowed to engage in correspondence with the other side, or to involve themselves in the investigation and gathering of evidence for a hearing. They can however perform more discrete and self-contained tasks, such as drafting legal documents and giving representation at a hearing. They can also give general advice on merits, evidence and matters of strategy generally.

Some fine distinctions are involved here, for example, a barrister can draft a letter for a client to send but cannot send it in his own name. A barrister can review a witness statement, or even draft a witness statement from a written proof provided by a witness, but he cannot be involved in the process of obtaining the evidence from the witness in the first place. These apparently arbitrary limitations reflect the fact that it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between what does and what does not constitute the general management of litigation. While the barrister’s non-managerial role undoubtedly constitutes a limitation on the scope of direct instruction, it does at least mean that fees will be transparent and easily understood.

As to the type of case that might be appropriate for licensed access, the first consideration must be the nature and complexity of the dispute. Where there is voluminous documentation, a lengthy history and a catalogue of disputed facts, it may well be that the case will benefit from the management and day-to-day supervision of a solicitor. On the other hand, in a situation where the subject-matter is self-contained and the issues clearly defined, or where it is thought that a properly drafted legal document will be enough to secure the desired result, an accountant may well wish to involve counsel directly.

Another relevant factor is the level of management and organisation the practitioner is personally able to bring to the dispute. The more orderly and streamlined the papers submitted to counsel, the more cost-effective direct instruction will inevitably be.

Many accountants might feel uneasy about the process of finding appropriate counsel, or conducting negotiations with counsel’s clerks. These need not be daunting tasks. Word of mouth recommendation is a good way to go but, failing that, there are numerous professional directories which can assist - Chambers & Partners, the Bar Directory or the Legal 500 to name but three.

Once a particular set of chambers has been identified, the clerks can be contacted by telephone or email - clerks’ rooms should be well prepared for fielding questions from those new to the process and experienced at matching the requirements of a particular client to a suitable barrister. So far as the negotiation of fees is concerned, this can be done on the basis of an hourly retainer, a fixed fee or, in the case of court hearings, a lump sum ‘brief fee’ with daily refreshers for each subsequent day of the hearing.

Whichever approach is adopted, the client should demand transparency and should be entitled to know how much time a particular piece of work will take and why. In deciding upon a particular set of chambers, the client may also want to be satisfied that there is sufficient back-up should their first-choice barrister be indisposed at any time.

Ultimately, the process should be made easier by the fact that it is in no one’s interests for the client to be represented by the wrong barrister. Most clerks will be at pains to ensure that the right person is found and, if the brief is better directed to a different set or to a solicitor, will say so. Barristers themselves are under a duty to say if they do not think they are the right individual for a particular case, or if they think that the involvement of a solicitor is necessary. As for fees, there is stiff competition among sets - there can be few easier markets in which to ‘shop around’ than the Bar. And the fact that the overheads of most chambers are lower than those of solicitors’ firms mean that clients can generally obtain a comparable level of experience at a significantly lower hourly rate.

Many sets now see the traditional solicitor-barrister route as being only one of many different ways to attract work. With a large number of practitioners covering a wide range of disciplines, and an ethos of approachability which is shared by barristers and clerks alike - many are trying hard to take the sting and mystique out of licensed access. Accountants should also be aware that there are benefits for clients too - licensed access is available to a growing range of professionals. Some barristers are also qualified to accept public access, ie. instructions from members of the public at large, irrespective of professional qualification. Brick by brick, the walls of the ivory tower are coming down.

Mark Hoyle and Andrew Butler are head and deputy head respectively of the business and commercial group at Tanfield Chambers

Profile: Michael Julien, former FD of Midland Bank

Peter Krijgsman — 2009-07-09T11:04:00.000Z

Peter Krijgsman, Accountancy Age, Thursday 9 July 2009 at 11:04:00

Michael Julien's stint as FD of Midland Bank put him off ever working in the financial services sector again, yet the systems he put in place at the former banking giant still have resonance today

The form might have changed, but the substance of the mistakes behind the current banking crisis holds nothing new: poor lending decisions, slack management, excessive optimism and too many unfettered egos. We have been here many times before.

Michael Julien knows this better than most. Now retired and splitting his time between Surrey and western France, Julien made several waves in the City throughout his senior management career. A big one was his appointment to the board of Midland Bank in 1983: the first finance director at a UK clearing bank.

Midland Bank doesn’t exist today, having been acquired in an orderly fashion by HSBC in 1992, but in 1985, when we interviewed him as part of an article on why banks needed finance directors, it was secretly confronting a more violent end. ‘We came very close to failing,’ says Julien.

Midland had been the nation’s biggest clearing bank, used by hundreds of foreign banks in London. You can see its bronze nameplate, still exuding echoes of past power and influence over the doors of its former headquarters close to the Bank of England.

Julien had been appointed at the behest of Midland’s chairman, the Scottish chartered accountant Sir Donald Barron. Julien was well known to three of the Midland directors - who also sat on the board of his former employer, cable-maker BICC: a ‘bit of a stitch-up’ Julien recalls with a wry smile.

At the time of his joining, Midland had no reason to think it was in serious trouble. That was the whole point. The board had little idea of what was happening on the ground.

‘I remember the first set of board papers I saw in June 1983,’ says Julien. ‘There was no financial information at all, just a collection of loan applications.’ There were no monthly accounts and the group balance sheet was only prepared twice a year at results time. In retrospect, he thinks the chairman had a premonition of impending doom and wanted a savvy FD to put his finger on the reason why.

Soon after, Julien popped in to see the CEO, the late Geoffrey Taylor, about the annual budget review. Taylor looked blank. They had never done one of those before, although, to his credit, he embraced the new-fangled concept with enthusiasm. Julien got to work, installing budget systems, internal audit functions, a group legal division and various other departments that most of the outside world might have reasonably thought existed already.

He found himself involved in other housekeeping issues, such as technology and communications. On one occasion, frustrated by reports from overseas colleagues that it took an awfully long time to get through on the phone, Julien went to the switchboard room to find out what was going wrong.

‘The chief operator nearly fell off her chair,’ he recalls. ‘She’d never seen a main board director before.’ Having recovered her composure, she explained the reason for the slow connections was that the operators didn’t have an alphabetical phone directory. The 4,000 telephone extensions within the building were listed by order of seniority in the bank.

Aside from such everyday evidence of past sclerotic management, there was an elephant in the room. In 1981, Midland had taken a 57% stake in Crocker, the 10th largest bank in the US. The terms of the acquisition had given Crocker’s own board and management ‘maximum operational autonomy’ together with the retention of its US share listing.

Although it accounted for a third of the enlarged Midland group balance sheet, no one at HQ knew what it contained. In Julien’s view, the international business, of which Crocker was the largest part, had grown like a huge boil on the bank’s arms, completely unintegrated with the UK business.

Towards the end of 1983, he flew across for a visit. The first thing he noticed was the superiority of Crocker’s information systems, thanks mainly to better technology and a very demanding regulator. With the full co-operation of the US bank’s financial controller, he drilled through the numbers much more easily than he could at home, but he soon realised they bore little resemblance to those that were presented to London. ‘The figure sent to us was a plug,’ he said. ‘London would tell Crocker its performance expectations and Crocker sent them a number that met them.’ Something was seriously amiss.

In fact, Crocker’s management had been spending Midland’s billion pounds of acquisition money shoring up and expanding a toxic loan book that included more than a fair share of dud Californian businesses and bankrupt Latin sovereigns. Midland itself had extended some ill-judged loans in South America, but Crocker threatened to be the last straw.

Beginning of the end

In a chilling parallel to the US authorities’ attitude towards the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the Bank of England was in no mood to rescue a troubled clearer. Parliament had objected to the rescue of another bank, Johnson Matthey, in 1984. ‘We were on our own,’ Julien says.

The pressure meant his three-year stay at Midland effectively turned into six as he worked two shifts. ‘From 8am until 4pm, it was UK business. Then, when California woke up, I worked from 4pm until midnight on the US. I hardly saw my family over Christmas for three years because December was always the time the US regulators would throw up some new crisis.’

The successful resolution of the Crocker problem fell into three phases: first the acquisition of the outstanding shares in the bank, second the restructuring of the balance sheet including removal of the toxic debt and finally the sale of Crocker to Wells Fargo in 1986.

‘We had to deal with both boards of directors. The Midland board had to agree the acquisition of the outstanding shares and to a capital injection of $250m. Then we had to deal with the Crocker board which was acting as if there was no problem and that the bank was a wonderful asset which Midland was trying to acquire on the cheap,’ Julien notes.

Ironically, by the time they reached the third phase, he voted against the sale to Wells Fargo. He believes the Midland board could have done better for its shareholders if it had held on, but, as Julien puts it, Crocker was ‘one of the worst symptoms of a greater malaise’. The dissent among senior executives over how it could retrieve value from the rescued US bank was too much to handle. ‘It is a sad commentary on corporate governance that the internal bickering of the executive directors could drive the board as a whole to a course of action calculated to destroy value for the shareholders.’

While Midland survived, it was severely weakened and not long after the Crocker sale the board started the process of putting Midland itself up for sale. Julien left for the board of Guinness the following year.

He doesn’t have fond memories of his brief banking career. ‘After Midland, I promised I would never go back into a financial services company. They’re difficult to manage and there are a lot of low-quality people lurking everywhere.’

He thinks the fact that so many of the people working within banks are major financial decision-makers in their own right means that most bank boards will underestimate the financial management requirement. ‘Compared to an industrial company, you need to multiply the overall headcount by ten to get a sense of the beast you’re trying to control,’ he says. ‘For companies like Royal Bank of Scotland, with 174,000 employees at the end of last year, you start to realise they may be simply too big to manage.’

His work wasn’t wasted. Julien and his team showed sufficiently sharp navigation skills to avoid a run on the bank and the likely ensuing corporate (and macro-economic) disaster. Perhaps more relevant to today, away from the Crocker crisis, the disciplines he instilled at Midland later went on to provid e a sound platform for the management at HSBC in the UK, which has notably not been a serious casualty in the current banking crisis. Had more of the UK’s institutions followed Midland’s lead, the banking sector in 2009 might have been in better shape.

He hesitates to judge whether good financial control systems alone would have been effective in withstanding the financial tsunami of 2008. Maintaining liquidity and conservative banking ratios are important, but so is culture. One of HSBC’s traditional characteristics, which he admires, has been the way it discourages prima donnas. Even when he was in the midst of restructuring Crocker, there were some senior managers within Midland who came close to scuppering the deal through pursuit of an alternative strategy. Had they succeeded, Julien has no doubt that the bank would have gone down.

Hugh O’Brien, who was in Julien’s team and was group planning director at the time of the takeover by HSBC, stayed on after the acquisition. He thinks the bigger bank’s conservative, deliberate culture was its strongest line of defence against the recent banking catastrophe. O’Brien notes that financial management tends to move centre stage when an organisation is in crisis and that HSBC was very strong and very successful. The urgency attaching to the finance function at Midland became less pronounced.

Interestingly, O’Brien and other Midland alumni later moved to NatWest. ‘It was like moving into a time warp, with endless committees of people talking to themselves,’ O’Brien says. Some of the innovations Julien brought to Midland sound humdrum for example, the introduction of new accounting software and integrated bookkeeping technology. At NatWest, only a decade ago, even these fixes hadn’t been done. Financial management medicine came too late for NatWest which was swallowed up by RBS in 2000.

Government interference

Julien is less hesitant in his judgement of governments’ regulatory response to current problems in the banking world. ‘I fear that the march of the bureaucrats is becoming unstoppable,’ he says.

In particular, he thinks that the 2009 finance bill’s proposed imposition of penalties for finance directors who fail to tick the right box on a tax return, is wholly wrong. ‘By making one person at the top totally accountable, you’re letting everyone else off the hook. There is no way a finance director of a large group can be expected to verify every single item in the books,’ he says.

One risk management lesson has never left him. Julien now refuses to sit on boards as a non-executive director, although his professional knowledge and experience would be invaluable for any company. ‘The money would be nice, but the risks are just too high, especially if you’re a chartered accountant,’ he says yet more backfiring bureaucracy.

Julien’s general observation on his time at Midland is that most of his achievements were down to getting out of his chair and calling on people. ‘I developed a reputation for barging in on meetings and racing down corridors with shirt-tails flying,’ he says. ‘Ninety-five percent of what I achieved was a result of getting out and seeing people.’

And by that he means colleagues, not clients. It is easy for very senior managers to be distracted by the hubris of global summits, the flattery of finance ministers and the social trappings of high rank. ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day to enjoy all that and get the job done,’ he says.

Overall Julien’s story of his time at Midland shows that banks are hard to manage. Anyone who suggests otherwise might be regarded with a degree of suspicion.

Peter Krijgsman was launch editor of Financial Decisions which was later re-named Financial Director in 1984. His original interview with Michael Julien and other bank finance chiefs appeared in the September 1985 edition. This article first appeared in the latest edition of Financial Director magazine.

The blame game

Paul Goodman and Colin Bond — 2009-07-09T10:37:00.000Z

Paul Goodman and Colin Bond, Accountancy Age, Thursday 9 July 2009 at 10:37:00

The finance function needs to be proactive and show its worth if it is to avoid the cost-cutting axe from the board

Finance functions have been at the epicentre of the economic earthquake. The downturn brings with it an array of new demands. There is greater pressure to protect cash and liquidity. Operational leadership grappling with critical decisions require additional information and analysis. New budgets and reforecasts need to be prepared and new funding may need to be raised. The list goes on.

This additional pressure is often aggravated by the need to demonstrate your own cost-cutting credentials. Senior management colleagues will be looking to the finance function to accept its share of any cost and headcount reductions.

The question facing finance leadership is how to deal with a simultaneous increase in demand and a reduction in resources.

In a steady state finance, headcount reductions can be achieved by changing structures, organisations, processes, systems or by removing underperformers. But this is not the circumstances we find ourselves in.

So, the overall starting point for a finance leader is to have a clear understanding of the factors that drive the efforts of the finance team. These factors may be numerous. They might include the number of legal entities, business units, products, systems, manufacturing sites, improvement initiatives, business development opportunities, suppliers, customers, terms, conditions and reports. In addition, activity is also impacted by defined materiality and risk levels.

Whatever those drivers might be we can broadly split the activities of the finance function into cash management, transaction processing, financial reporting and governance and business information.

In any downturn cash management is the number one priority, driving a big increase in finance activity. Existing stakeholders will need to be managed to avoid any adverse breach of existing contractual commitments and prevent any negative reassessment of the company. In addition, alternatives and contingencies need to be developed to mitigate any undesirable response and protect liquidity.

This will put a significant demand on resources including additional meetings, increased analysis and further documentation that will be almost impossible to avoid. It is therefore critical to educate business and management colleagues in the importance of this activity.

Transaction processing should broadly decrease in line with the reduction in business activity. If well managed, the reduction can even exceed the decreases in business. This can be achieved by techniques such as ensuring that suppliers are paid only on defined dates as opposed to when invoices are submitted.

A key consideration in executing any reduction in this area is to consider what the implications would be in any subsequent upturn. How easy would it be to scale up the function again? What alternatives would exist? Good analysis of transactions volumes and processes is critical.

Activity in financial reporting and governance has increased during the downturn. As economic activity has declined, the need for improved financial control has increased together with additional activity in respect of reported results. For example, as a result of the downturn, many companies have been forced to revalue balance sheet goodwill on an exceptional basis outside of the normal annual cycle. Headcount reduction can be achieved but this often increases risk, which needs to be fully understood and approved by the board. Inevitably financial pressure exposes the quality of governance.

And finally, the demand for business information from all stakeholders usually increases in a downturn.

This is caused by the need to understand variances to budget, develop upsides, identify solutions and improve forecast accuracy. Senior management colleagues need to understand that headcount in this area is driven by the service level provided to the business.

The impact on service levels as a result of any planned headcount reductions need to be understood and agreed. Clearly there is the opportunity for finance leadership to be proactive. It is critical to be clear on what the priorities of the finance function are and how they relate to those of the business. Only then can we ask questions like: What are we currently doing that adds no value? Does anyone in the organisation make any decisions using that report?

Adjusting these drivers and activities and therefore finance headcount with business in steadier conditions is a significant challenge. The scenario in a downturn requires a different type of strategic and operational finance leadership. It represents a huge challenge to a generation of finance leaders who have been used to quarter-on-quarter economic growth over 16 years.

When all of the above is resolved, the finance function must still interact in the right way with the business. If business performance is falling there are inevitably difficult questions to answer.

Operational leaders should be prepared for this to happen within a co-operative process. The aim is not to catch people out or ambush them with clever questions, it is to make sure the business makes the right decisions (see box). Teamwork is clearly the most effective means. This may lead to additional benefits and opportunities for the finance team, for example operational support with cash collection may be particularly helpful when customers are trying to manage their cash flows more effectively.

This is clearly a moment of opportunity for finance functions and professionals to demonstrate their value as teams and as individuals. The rewards will be great. If you prove your worth you may open up your career vista. People attach huge credibility to those that can handle themselves in a crisis because they substantiate that they have the right personal characteristics to deal with challenging commercial circumstances. Watch out for an emerging new breed of business leader, hardened in the kiln of adversity.

Paul Goodman is the Founder of Goodman Masson, a specialist financial recruitment business, and a member of the executive of the Association of Professional Staffing Companies. Colin Bond is the CFO of Novelis Europe and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University Business School.

Changing a wireless router

Alan Stevens — 2009-07-08T09:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 8 July 2009 at 09:00:00

Ditching the free router supplied by your ISP can cause problems. Plus we look at Ubuntu 8.10

I’ve a number of tales of woe to regale you with this month, starting with the troubles I had when I tried to change my wireless broadband router.

Like the majority of home and small-business users, I rely on a free router supplied by my ISP. In my case it’s a Thomson TG785 from O2, which I use to connect both wired and Wifi networks to the internet.

Most of the time it works fine but, of late, it’s started to play up, at times dropping the internet connection or refusing to talk to anything connected to its wired ports.

It’s the latter that I find most frustrating as I mostly use wired connections and can’t access the router it to find out what’s wrong when this happens.

On the plus side, turning it off and back on again usually puts things right, but it takes time and, having restarted it for the umpteenth time the other day, I decided to take action to replace the freebie router with something a bit more upmarket and, hopefully, reliable, in the form of a Draytek Vigor 2820.

However, changing from the router supplied by my ISP to a Draytek Vigor was far from straightforward.

Only the start of it

It should have been easy as I’d reviewed the Vigor before and had been meaning to switch to it permanently for some time as it has a lot more to offer than the Thomson hardware.

To begin with it has two Wan interfaces, one of which can be 3G, that can be used for both failover and load-balancing purposes. It also has a built-in virtual private network (VPN) server, a much better firewall and a lot more in the way of management options than the O2 router (see How to tailor your O2 wireless router, below).

In practice, however, swapping routers was far from simple, taking the best part of the day and, even then, failing to provide the results I’d hoped for.

Not through any fault of the router involved, but because of other issues. The first problem was getting the Vigor to connect to my ISP.

In theory I should have been able to just plug it in and switch it on, the modem automatically detecting the ADSL-2+ settings required. That, though, didn’t happen and, in my experience, rarely does.

Also, the settings I’d jotted down last time I used it must have been for a different service, as they didn’t work either.

I did find some information about setting up third-party routers on the O2 broadband website, but it was all pretty general and I spent a long time trying different permutations before I eventually worked out the appropriate protocols to use.

Then I discovered new firmware had been released for the router, one of the advantages of which was better stability with the latest ADSL2+ services.

I decided it would be wise to upgrade so downloaded said firmware, installed the update utility and attempted to squirt it over to the router.

Another hour or so later, I was no further forward. The firmware would start to copy across, get about three-quarters of the way and then stop. Disabling the desktop firewall helped, but in the end I had to get hold of an earlier update program and use that.

From then on it was plain sailing. The internet connection held, I quickly changed the router settings to match what I normally use and configured my Wifi devices to use WPA2. Fantastic, I thought.

Then my wife came home and tried to connect to my wireless network using the laptop supplied by her employer. It wouldn’t work and, to cut a very long story short, the Wifi adapter in her notebook refused to connect unless I downgraded from WPA2 to plain WPA-only security and told the Draytek router to only use channel 6.

At which point, I started having problems connecting with my Linux-powered notebook and had to spend yet more time trying different combinations to see if I could find settings to work with both.

Nothing worked satisfactorily and I was further hampered by the fact that I couldn’t change much on my wife’s laptop as the software needed to manage the Wifi interface wasn’t there.

So, come the end of the day I had to admit defeat and revert to the freebie Thomson router, which at least worked with everything even if it wasn’t quite as good as I wanted.

And the moral of the tale? Well a couple of things. First, if you’re going to swap routers you need to know in detail how it should be configured for the ISP you’ve signed up with, and that’s not always easy.

Second, you shouldn’t take compatibility for granted no matter what vendors might say, especially when it comes to wireless networks. Just because a router says it supports a particular type of security, there’s no guarantee it will work with other implementations. It should, but sometimes it won’t.

I’ve since told my wife to get her company to buy a new laptop with all the software needed to manage its Wifi interface and draft-N wireless another potential can of worms and an option I didn’t even dare to enable on the Vigor router. Hopefully, that’ll happen soon, and I’ll be able to upgrade my router the way I planned.

More Ubuntu SMB woes

So much for my router problems. I decided a while ago to abandon the Vista pre-install on my Dell Vostro 1310 in favour of Ubuntu, the latest release of which (8.10) is a very competent and well-rounded distro, offering just about everything I need on a day-to-day basis.

The latest Ubuntu 8.10 release was therefore downloaded and installed onto the Vostro with no trouble at all, right down to configuring the touchpad, selecting the best possible screen resolution and, crucially, correctly identifying the built-in Wifi adapter and connecting it straight away to my wireless router.

I could even put the notebook into hibernation, wake it up and reconnect to the Wifi network with no trouble at all.

It was going fine until, a week or so later, I downloaded and installed the latest patches, as prompted by the update utility included as part of the distro.

From then on I could no longer connect to any Windows SMB shares on my network. Everything else worked fine, and I could still connect to the shares from another Ubuntu system that hadn’t been updated.

The notebook, however, refused to even display a list of Windows servers in its Nautilus browser. Instead it would hang about doing little before, eventually, telling me it had failed to mount the shares involved.

Naturally I started looking around on the web to see if I could find other users with the same problem and, hopefully, how to fix it. I found lots; some with the same symptoms, and variations on the theme. I also found a number of fixes, all of which I tried but with no success.

Unfortunately this is the second time I’ve been affected by SMB troubles in Ubuntu. I wrote about a similar problem in the 8.04 LTS distro in September 2008 and thought it would not only have been resolved by now, but that any new release would be free of such problems. Instead it seems to have found its way into the updated version too.

For many of us SMB file sharing is a fundamental prerequisite, this bug making my Vostro notebook more or less unusable. I spent about half a day trying to fix it but just as with my router I eventually gave up trying.

I could, of course, have changed to another Linux distro, but instead have junked Linux on my notebook for the time being in favour of the Windows 7 beta. This has no problems with SMB shares, at least not so far.

Email on storage

Finally, as a postscript to my articles on home email servers, I’ve long wondered why vendors of network attached storage (Nas) appliances don’t build one into their firmware.

Many now routinely offer built-in web, media streaming and other tools on top of the basic file and printer sharing, and a mail server would seem a logical next step.

Well, Synology has now taken that step with the beta release of its Disk Station Manager software which features an SMTP/Pop3/Imap4 server, called Mail Station.

Available to run on a range of Synology appliances, I’ve yet to download and try it, but it’s on my to-do list and, of course, I’ll let you know what it’s like when I do.

How to tailor your O2 wireless router

I’m used to being able to explore and tailor the configuration of a router via its web interface, but most of the options on the O2 wireless router are locked and can’t be changed, even when you log on as Administrator.

There is, however, a way of getting more access and, as one of the worst kept secrets on the web, I’m not giving anything away by telling you how.

What you have to do is log on using the name SuperUser and a password of O2Br0ad64nd, paying attention to capitalisation as shown.

You can only log on this way from the Lan, not over the internet, and you don’t get a huge amount of extra functionality. You will, however, be able to configure address-based filters, change the level of firewall security (not by much), create new user accounts and view the security logs.

Choose the best IT help for your PC problems

Emil Larsen — 2009-07-08T09:00:00.000Z

Emil Larsen, Computeractive, Wednesday 8 July 2009 at 09:00:00

Are PC support services good value? We find out

The boom in computing and internet access has been accompanied by several companies offering to fix these IT products. Big businesses such as BT and PC World have entered the fray, offering dozens of fixed-price packages that aim to fix broadband connections, software problems and computer incompatibilities. Some involve a technician making a home visit, while others are remote services where a representative will call and then take full control of the problem computer via the internet. In this article we’ll explain what options are available, what they cost and how to pick the best service for any given problem and reveal the results of our exclusive test of three of the biggest companies.

If it’s broken, fix it

PC support specialists can repair software, recover PCs from viruses and optimise home networks, but they won’t fix genuinely broken products. Physical damage, like if a paper tray has snapped off a printer or a computer screen has been cracked, won’t be repaired by the PC support companies investigated here.

If something like this happens, the manufacturer of the broken product should always be your first port of call. Even if the warranty has run out, their repair service may be cheaper than third-party support companies. Sony, for example, charges £141 to diagnose out-of-warranty laptops, which is much cheaper than The Tech Guys’ £229 laptop diagnosis charge.

Replacing the broken product could also be cheaper than paying for support. New wireless routers and printers often cost less than £100 much the same price as getting broken ones fixed.

Warranties and statutory rights

Inspect the warranty before rushing out to employ an engineer. Most products include a warranty period of at least one year during which it should be simple to obtain a repair or replacement item. Some sellers offer extended warranties but these have, historically, been poor value.

If your warranty expires, don’t assume that there’s no possibility of help. The Sale of Goods Act, which applies to all UK purchases, provides protection against any faults that are ‘inherent’ present in the product when it was made rather than the result of later damage or mistreatment. The time limit for this protection is six years, or five in Scotland.

If you’ve had the product for a while you may have to prove that it is inherently faulty; normally by getting an expert report. In any case, to make a claim under the Sale of Goods Act you should contact the shop where you bought the product, not the manufacturer. Alternatively, some companies have been known to extend their warranties should a product suffer from widespread problems: Microsoft, for example, extended the warranty on its Xbox 360 console after many suffered from the so called ‘red ring of death’ failure.

Packages on offer

So, technical support services shouldn’t be your first port of call for every problem but there are some problems they can help with. Many provide software support, so if Windows has gone wrong and you can’t get it working properly they may be able to help. Also, if you’ve damaged your computer, it won’t be covered by a warranty or the Sale of Goods Act, but a PC support service might fix it for a fee. Some services also offer setup packages, so they can come out and install a wireless network, for example.

There are, broadly, three types of service package: in-home support, telephone and remote access support on a subscription basis and telephone and remote access support on for a pay as you go basis. Both the remote services have a two-pronged way of dealing with computer problems. An IT technician will call and direct you to a website that loads secure remote access software. The technician will speak to you over the phone while they take full control of your computer to try to help from there.

BT Home IT Support

BT’s Home IT Support charges £9.78 per month for a remote access subscription with a three-month minimum contract, or £8.80 a month for a 12-month contract. Lines are open 8am-11pm every day. Its pay as you go option, where each incident is charged for separately, costs £25 and is limited to existing BT customers. Each £25 charge is limited to 45 minutes of support, so if you think you might need more than one 45 minute session then a three-month contract would be cheaper.

An in-home visit starts from £88, but if the technician stays for more than an hour additional charges apply. One such service is the Broadband Accelerator package, which promises to speed up your broadband by at least 0.5Mbits/sec or your money back. This involves a home visit by a technician who will rewire internal phone cables and optimise your PC for better broadband speeds.

Geek Squad

Geek Squad charges £6.99 a month for its full subscription package with a three-month minimum contract. The subscription includes free McAfee anti-virus software and 20GB of space for online backup. Non subscribers can pay £30 for one-off remote support. One £30 session can be used to set up a wireless network or a single hardware or software installation.

Home visits start from £99 but, unlike BT, there’s no fixed time limit on them. Geek Squad says it ‘won’t leave until the job is done to your complete satisfaction’. Home visits are also cheaper by a fifth for subscribers to the £6.99 remote support service. The Geek Squad’s home visits are limited to London, the South East, and the North West, but its subscription package is available to everyone.

Tech Guys

The Tech Guys charges a flat fee of £90 for various in-home services such as PC health checks and wireless network installation. It also offers a range of more expensive non-PC services such as flat screen TV and digital aerial installation. Employing the Tech Guys’ in-home service is a bit tricky as you must pay before you choose a date at least two days in advance for the visit.

The Tech Guys also offer a ‘Techfriend’ phone and remote access service. Unlike BT and Geek Squad, you pay £90 upfront for a year’s cover. Its trump card, however, is the services it offers in PC World shops. PC repair is £70, upgrade installation costs £30 and memory installation is £15. There are more options to choose from and all are cheaper than a home visit.

Go independent

Crossloop is a popular remote help service that allows experts to sell their own expertise online. To use it visit the website, pick an expert and load up Crossloop’s remote access software so the expert can get fixing. Crossloop’s best feature is the reputation system it uses. Like sellers on Ebay, every expert has a rating based on previous customers’ experiences. By choosing somebody with a high rating, you improve your chances of a good quality service. Different experts charge different prices, but a typical hourly rate is just $40 (around £29), which is a good price when you can choose exactly who to use.

How to pick one

Picking a service to use is made far easier if you know what you want done or roughly what might be wrong with your computer. Each service fixes slightly different problems. BT, for example, specialises in broadband problems while The Tech Guys are better suited to PC hardware problems.

If you’re suffering from a software problem and you can access the internet, remember that you might be able to benefit from the experience of others: if you’ve experienced an error, the chances are someone else has. Most problems are accompanied by errors, and a fix can often be found by searching for that exact error. Even if there’s no error message, try to search for the problem you are experiencing. You may find a solution you can use yourself if not, the information you find may help a technician fix the problem faster.

If you do decide to use a call-out service to fix a problem or set up some equipment, remember to apply some basic safety rules. Only employ a company that you know and trust, and always ask for identification when the technician arrives. It’s also best to have two people at home when a technician comes to visit. Try to follow what the engineer does when they fix your problem. Make notes and don’t be afraid to ask exactly what they are doing you might learn something that will allow you to fix future problems, for free, yourself.

Trials and errors

It’s impossible to accurately review PC support services as two separate callouts and technicians, will never be alike. We wanted to see what kind of service was on offer, though, so we arranged to perform blind tests using three of the biggest services in the UK. As a test we created a ‘broken’ laptop, whose memory we had deliberately dislodged as if it had taken a knock. We also asked Geek Squad and BT Home IT Support to fix our ‘slow’ wireless internet, which we had deliberately left unencrypted, and connect our wireless printer.

You’ll find an account of our experiences with BT Home IT support, Geek Squad and the Tech Guys later on. Our experiences varied significantly, with one service failing to fix any of the problems we presented but another fixing our laptop quickly and cheaply. We were disappointed by the home call out services we tried, with one unavailable for over a week and anot her performing poorly in our test, but our experiences of remote and in-store support were better.

All in all it’s impossible to recommend any one service as the choice, if any, will depend on the type of problem that you are experiencing. Purely judging by price, though, Geek Squad’s £6.99 monthly subscription service is good value as it includes security software and 20GB of online space for backups. You’re only tied in to a three-month contract, costing just over £20 in total, and this includes 24-hour remote support.

Our support tips

So, would we recommend using PC help services if you encounter a problem that you can’t fix yourself? The answer is yes, but only after taking the steps we’ve outlined above first. If a product is broken check whether it’s covered by a warranty or if you can get help under the Sale of Goods Act. If that doesn’t help, look online for advice search the web for people with similar problems or post a query in the Computeractive online forum as other readers may be able to assist you.

If you still need professional assistance, weigh up the options carefully to ensure that you get the best value. Help over the phone, where a technician takes control of your computer remotely, is generally cheaper than paying somebody to come out and visit, and signing up to a short contract can end up cheaper than paying for one-off assistance. And finally, if you do request a callout, always check the technician’s ID and be nosey: ask what they’re doing, and take notes as these could help you solve problems yourself in future.

We try: BT Home IT Support

BT’s engineer called at our flat within 48 hours, spent an hour looking at our wireless router and charged £110. He recognised the router should have encryption enabled and attempted to fix this, but could not get our wireless printer working. After he left we noticed he hadn’t provided us with the wireless password; we checked the router and found he had failed to apply the encryption after all.

We then tried BT’s online help service. A technician spoke to us on the phone while he took control of our computer remotely. After 50 minutes he’d managed to connect our printer to the wireless network, then tried to enable WEP encryption to the wireless network. Sadly, and as a message on screen at the time warned, it’s not possible to add WEP encryption to an 802.11n wireless network. Rather than reading this advice he kept trying and failing, eventually leaving the network insecure. A BT spokesperson said that our test “did not reflect the experience that a majority of customers get from the service” and that in a recent survey 86 per cent of Home IT Support customers were satisfied with the service provided.

We try: Geek Squad

When we tried to book a Geek Squad visit we were told that we’d have to wait nine days. With time running short we opted for help over the phone instead.

A representative informed us there would be a 10-minute wait and, helpfully, offered to call us back. When he called the technician asked us to visit a website that would let him take control of our PC.

The technician identified that our wireless network was unencrypted, and promptly fixed this problem. He couldn’t connect the wireless printer, however, and suggested that we buy a new router. In fact, the help files he read explained that the printer is suitable only for 802.11g networks, while our wireless was using 802.11n this could have been fixed easily. The call took 30 minutes.

A representative from the Geek Squad said that most customers wait no longer than 48 hours for a home visit and that an “escalation process” that should happen when longer waits occur was not followed properly in our case. The company pledged to “do our utmost to ensure that this does not happen again”.

It said leaving our printer unconnected was “unacceptable”, it is investigating what went wrong, and it will improve its training “to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction is maintained”.

We try: The Tech Guys

To add a bit of variety to our mystery shopping we went to a PC World store to try out the Tech Guys. We were initially warned that the laptop would probably have to be sent away for a thorough diagnosis costing £229, but the advisor handed it to a technician who quickly looked at the memory compartment and fixed the problem within five minutes.

Our second problem that the laptop couldn’t connect to our wireless broadband wasn’t investigated. The sales advisor claimed a technician would have to visit our home to inspect the internet router. We told him that it was a recently purchased second-hand laptop, hoping that he would take a quick look at the network settings, but he didn’t this is not unreasonable. On the plus side, PC Repair is supposed to cost £69.99 but the sales advisor and the technician decided to charge us a very reasonable £15 for reseating the memory.

E-commerce case study: Agent Provocateur

Lisa Kelly — 2009-07-07T11:57:00.000Z

Lisa Kelly, Computing, Tuesday 7 July 2009 at 11:57:00

Lingerie firm gets intimate with its customers

Agent Provocateur, the luxury lingerie retailer, is preparing for a site relaunch in September that will address usability issues, strengthen online brand identity and intensify its customer focus.

“The site redesign is customer-led to improve the online experience and create better customer journeys,” says Catherine Hall, an e-commerce specialist from Tela Consulting who has been brought in as e-commerce project leader for the company.

The redesigned site will be optimised for search engines, which should increase its visibility for potential customers. But Hall believes usability and search engine optimisation go hand in hand.

“If you do usability well, you automatically enhance search engine optimisation,” she says.

The update should make the web site easier to navigate and more intuitive for users through improved content and structure with more key words on the page.

“The business is focusing on e-commerce as a major part of its strategy going forward, with sponsorship from the highest level as the company’s chairman is involved in the e-commerce steering group,” says Hall.

In the past, the site has been overtaken by seasonal campaigns at the expense of brand identity, which is something Hall plans to tackle.

“It felt like a redesign and a new web site with each campaign, which we want to avoid in the future. Customers have a great experience in the shop and are immersed in the world of Agent Provocateur. We need to be sure the online environment reflects that,” she says.

The site already uses technologies such as Twitter and has a Facebook presence, but there are plans to develop social technologies further.

“We’re looking to further enhance our social media strategy, building on the uses of social networking sites, with a view to starting our own blog. We aim to engage in every way with visitors,” says Hall.

Gaining a better insight into customer preferences through more extensive use of social tools should help to boost Agent Provocateur’s online sales. “We want to learn as much as we can about customers and how and why they buy online by putting them right at the centre of what we are doing, delighting them and giving them what they want,” says Hall.

As the company gets to know its online customers better, it wants to merge this knowledge with offline buying patterns.

“We want to get a single view of the customer. At the moment we have a retail customer database and an online customer database and we need to tie them up by having one master database. There is an ongoing project to define what the master database should be,” she says.

Read how UK-based online retailer Glasses Direct is enjoying double-digit growth and how an enhanced search engine helps Evans Cycles to peddle more bikes

Case study: Evans Cycles races to web success

Lisa Kelly — 2009-07-07T11:56:00.000Z

Lisa Kelly, Computing, Tuesday 7 July 2009 at 11:56:00

Enhanced search engine helps Evans to peddle more bikes

Bicycle retailer Evans Cycles has long had a web presence to complement its chain of high-street stores, but today it is looking to drive up online sales and attract more customers to its web store.

“The cycle-buying process is complex as a lot of decisions have to be made and we have different types of users with different needs,” says Ben Hart, head of e-commerce and marketing for Evans Cycles. “Some will use the site for research and come into stores armed with information. Others will look at products online, but want to talk to an expert, while those who know a lot about cycling will make their purchases online.”

The integration of online and offline sales is what differentiates Evans from competitors, says Hart. As part of that integration, Evans Cycles has a consistent pricing policy for the web and the high street.

“It creates a lot of confusion if offers are online only and causes a headache for staff,” says Hart.

“Around 20 per cent of our sales are through e-commerce and we are experiencing strong revenue growth online.”

Any spike in site visitors needs to translate into sales and the company has recently completed the integration of behavioural merchandising software from Avail Intelligence to help improve the onsite search function.

The software uses previous searches and buying patterns to generate lists of recommendations to new visitors doing searches.

Hart believes that users have become conditioned to search being an integral feature of a web site, increasing the pressure to get it right.

“Users don’t tend to browse anymore. Google has set the standard and the expectations for search are high. People expect to be able to type in a random phrase and see decent results,” says Hart.

The software has not been in use long enough to measure its effectiveness, but Hart says the core metrics will be conversion rates from browsing and cross-selling suggestions into purchases.

“We will use Google Analytics to track how many more people find products and buy them,” he says.

Further plans for the site include marrying the shop and online view of the customer.

“They are currently separate as the site is technically separate from systems in stores. In 2010 we want a new electronic point of sale system, warehousing system and call centre based on Microsoft’s Navision enterprise resource planning software to address that,” says Hart.

Read how UK-based online retailer Glasses Direct is enjoying double-digit growth and how Agent Provocateur gets intimate with its customers

A vision fulfilled: Retail growth through e-commerce

Lisa Kelly — 2009-07-07T11:55:00.000Z

Lisa Kelly, Computing, Tuesday 7 July 2009 at 11:55:00

UK-based online retailer Glasses Direct is enjoying double-digit growth thanks to an e-commerce strategy that is innovative, forward looking – and highly cost effective

Boarded-up windows and closing down sales have become common features on high streets up and down the UK, as consumers continue to tighten their purse strings. But not all retailers are mired in the gloom. Online spectacle retailer Glasses Direct continues to grow, and it credits its success to a commitment to offering value for money and high levels of customer service – both of which are dependent on the creativity of its in-house IT team.

“Despite the recession, business is good. Glasses are not a luxury and with some high street stores giving quotes of about £200 for a pair of glasses, many customers come to us for value,” says Matthew Pontefract, chief technical officer at Glasses Direct. “Each product is bespoke and we use technology to ensure that it is what the customer wants. Uptake rates only increase if we provide the exact glasses and lenses in the first place.”

Pontefract says that sales targets are being maintained and year-on-year growth is “in the high tens of per cent,” but this success is founded on a clear-sighted e-commerce strategy, which focuses on what needs to be done in-house and what can be outsourced.

“I have an in-house team of eight people and we look at where we should be doing work and where we should be outsourcing to give a client the best experience,” says Pontefract.

A dedicated team of opticians check prescriptions and is available to discuss customers’ needs, while technology works to enhance the buying process. An order system automatically flags up any potential problem early on so it can be dealt with promptly and double-checked by a Glasses Direct optician.

Glasses Direct is also acutely aware of the need to streamline operations, and has embraced IT outsourcing through a hosting partnership with NTT Europe Online. The deal allows the firm to keep costs of maintaining its web presence down, while ensuring site availability and scalability as it grows.

“Five years ago, we had a smaller hosting partner on one box, typical of a startup business. We needed to move to a solid hosting platform, which could grow with the company and allow us to expand into other countries. NTT Europe Online provides us with reliable hosting that can scale up,” says Pontefract.

Hosting deal to support global expansion

That scalability will be tested further as the company expands operations into Europe and the US. “When we expand outside the UK, we don’t want different hosts in many datacentres, so we need a content delivery network we can switch on easily. NTT Europe Online has dedicated fibre around the world so we do not have to deploy physical hardware all over the place, which would be expensive and inefficient,” says Pontefract.

The UK operation will act as a blueprint, but e-commerce in new territories must comply with local regulations.

“We sell a medical product and will have to go through each country’s legal and local issues regarding dispensing. It will not be a simple cookie-cutter process,” says Pontefract.

In the longer term, expansion could also include a shift to cloud computing services, says Pontefract, as it may be suitable for a business with geographically dispersed users.

“Running our site primarily in the cloud could be a viable option provided cost, management and security constraints could all be satisfied, but we would certainly also have some fixed infrastructure,” he says.

While Glasses Direct is committed to providing high levels of customer service, competing online inevitably creates pressure to keep costs low. That, in turn, has persuaded Pontefract of the benefits of open-source technology: the firm’s e-commerce platform runs on Solaris, web pages are written in the PHP scripting language which works with a MySQL database, and its web server is Apache.

But for Pontefract, the most important benefit of open source is the support.

“You can have service-level agreements (SLAs) with a software vendor with spe cified response times, but you have to pay for it. If there is an open-source problem, I can Google it and in half an hour the problem is solved,” he says.

Keeping costs down where possible by outsourcing and using open-source technology leaves the internal IT team to concentrate on where it can add value, he says.

“E-commerce technology is very commoditised. My team focuses on where it can make a difference to the user, which increases the conversion rate from browsing to sales. We also create tools for the business internally as they are our clients as well,” says Pontefract.

The site has a “virtual mirror” where potential customers can upload a photo of themselves and “try on” different glasses to help buying decisions and the tool has gone through several versions to improve usability.

“Each product is bespoke so it takes time, but we try to make the buying process as painless as possible. We tweak the site to improve the user experience and increase sales by putting together a package that makes sense,” says Pontefract.

Email campaigns are of vital importance to a purely online business and Glasses Direct uses Mailtrack’s ProDigital marketing platform to target customers with offers.

“The technology exploits our email database very effectively and our marketing manager spends a lot of time using it to realise promotional ideas. We are finding new ways to understand different demographics based on order history,” says Pontefract.

Attracting the customer’s eye is one thing, but even if it translates to a sale, the intensely personal experience of wearing glasses means that some customers will change their mind.

To overcome this problem, the company has recently launched a home-trial scheme where customers can order up to four frames for trial. This brings its own challenges from a technical perspective.

Managing the supply chain

“Warehouse management is a very big concern for us. Our order management system is bespoke and we have bent it to our particular needs and processes. The home-trial scheme meant we had to upgrade it so that orders did not go straight into fulfilment. It is an efficient system and we have the skills to support it, but we will keep an eye on what is going on in the market. I guard against having all bespoke systems so that we concentrate on what needs to be done in-house,” says Pontefract.

Although reducing the amount of bespoke systems in the business is on his list of priorities, Pontefract says that an enterprise resource planning system such as SAP is too costly. He is doing other things to improve supply chain optimisation and order management.

“We have a supply chain manager who looks at how we can optimise the supply chain. We have recently bought an industrial edger, which cuts pre-made lenses to fit glasses,” he says.

“The aim is to speed up delivery, cut costs and improve quality control. Our aim is to fulfil orders within 28 days and we often do so in under 10 days.”

Looking into the future, Pontefract is keen for the web site to harness the power of social networking.

“Buying glasses is a social experience and we want the site to reflect that. For example, we use Twitter and the home-trial scheme is an example of bringing the social experience into the physical world. We will continue to look for other opportunities to enhance this aspect,” says Pontefract.

Read how Agent Provocateur and Evans Cycles have both used e-commerce to improve their online strategies

In part three we will explore how technology can be used to maintain a competitive edge online