The customer comes first, right?

From “The Open Sourcerer” blog (a good read by the way), is news of Microsoft’s warm and cuddly attitude to world...

Free web filtering

In a prior existence as an IT Manager, I implemented a Websense server on our network, primarily to monitor website usage and enforce our internet use policy. It was, and probably still is, a very good product offering a huge level of detail on who is accessing what on the network. For a small business, however, Websense and it’s competing products just don’t make sense. Financially...

Open for all

Open source software is a bit of a buzzword (buzzphrase?) at the moment, and rightly so. Considering that the majority of the world’s websites run on open source software (servers running the suite of applications known collectively as LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and that the Firefox web browser continues to erode Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the browser of choice for...

A new way to sell laptops

Most people nowadays have a mobile phone (cellular if you’re the wrong side of the pond), and whilst many stump up the full whack for their handset and then stick a pay-as-you-go SIM in, a sizeable percentage (in the UK at least) have the cost of their handset heavily subsidised by opting for a 12 or 18 month contract. If you’re a reasonably heavy user, then contracts make sense,...

When Asterisk goes wrong

Yesterday I received in the post some information from a company (who shall remain unnamed) in the public sector who had put out an Invitation To Tender (ITT) for a new, VoIP-enabled telephone system. The ITT itself contained very little information indeed about their requirements, as is often the case. However, it did mention the fact that it was a public sector company, and since value for...