Chris A Watkins - Business

Differences in File Storage Office 365 with SharePoint on-line should never be compared to Dropbox, Google Apps, Google Docs, Amazon cloud offerings or Microsoft OneDrive Live. These are good products and competitive in the market place they serve, but they are just cloud storage. They all store files off-site in an NTFS type file store. SharePoint on-line stores files in a SQL database delivering huge advantages in security, file grouping, file analysis and file location. What does this mean in practice ? – If you consider a standard NTFS file storage system such as you would find on any computer .     When you create and save a file you are prompted to give the file a name so that you can find it again when it is needed. Most modern software will also be configured to save the file to a default location such as ‘documents’ or ‘my documents’. You can elect to modify the location by creating new sub-folders within the ‘documents’ fol...

Differences in Software as a Service ( SaaS ) This is the 21st century, the New Computer Age. Cloud services and SaaS are available for all to use. Word on-line, Excel on-line and Power Point on-line are just such services. They are available to all who want them, they are free, if taken via One Drive Live, and they enable the creation, editing and viewing of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PP presentations on ANY device that has a browser installed. This without any need to install software on the device used. The on-line software that is used to create the files is the same on-line software used to view them. There can be no incompatibilities and no missing fonts. Open Document Standards, to which these most office applications conform, requires that any document file should contain the properties of style, layout, font etc. These elements are the property of the document file and will travel with it wherever it is stored or sent. However, issues can still aris...

Most business managers don’t know it but this is very close to the truth. IT teams across the world live in day to day hope that their servers and networks hold together and pray that the disaster recovery schemes will be adequate in the event of catastrophe. IT people are highly professional and, of course, their server networks do deliver. Massive and expensive failure is surprisingly rare, provided that the IT department gets what the IT department needs in terms of budget. But, where budget is restricted, where the IT manager fails to make the business case for upgrade, then performance and security start to become threatened. In addition, a complex IT infrastructure brings with it the penalties of restrictive practise where a department head can’t get the software, services or technology required for a lean department because what is needed will not fit with the current IT infrastructure. So, what’s the answer? Sole Trader - Read more SME - Read more En...

The New Computer Age and the Enterprise So, here’s the critical question – ‘Can I really save large amounts of cash swapping PCs and local networking for budget tablet computers and the cloud?’ Let’s face it reliable tablet devices can cost as little as £70 and printer/scanners can be had for as little as £40. That’s a low overhead and if you can get away with minimising expenditure to that level why doesn’t everyone jump on the bandwagon? In fact that does appear to be the trend,   - ‘ Windows-based PCs have fallen from a 95% market share a decade ago to 90% today, according to Morningstar. That's thanks to the rise of mobile devices and software from competitors like Apple ( AAPL , Tech30 ) and Google ( GOOGL , Tech30 ).’ - http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/21/technology/microsoft-earnings/index.html Computer experts and advisors will caution that any start-up business should factor in capacity for expansion, redundancy to cover equipment failure and a whole hos...