Mark Thompson's blog

Newsflash July 2010
We are now Microsoft BPOS partners.

After having successfully passed more Microsoft exams Thompson Consultants Ltd are now Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) partners.

This means that we can now advise on and resell the range of Microsoft Online services. See here for details on the Microsoft website.

What is in this for our clients?

Well, increasingly our smaller clients are looking to use the internet cloud to host all their data and applications and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite will provide most of the tools and applications they need. BPOS provides hosted Exchange 2007, hosted SharePoint and Microsoft Communicator and Live Meeting.

The hosted Exchange in BPOS provides a generous 25Gb mailbox and you can also share Calendars, Tasks and Contacts with the other users in your group. Microsoft pickup all the tedious but necessary effor involved in managing and backing up Exchange so the users only need to worry about their email.

Similarly with Sharepoint you let Microsoft take the strain of maintaining the system while you get on with uploading content.

The obvious target of these services are small workgroups/businesses/organisations that do not currently have a central server for file and mail services. Rather than investing in on-premise solutions – as would have been the case up until now – clients can save their capital and instead move to a monthly fixed payment model.

Also perhaps larger businesses that have small, distributed groups working on projects might look at this as the ideal short term solution.

As well as the Microsoft suite we will also be provinding hosted online storage for when SharePoint is not the required solution.

With our hosted Asterisk VoIP services, Microsoft BPOS and online storage and backup Thompson Consultants are poised to offer the SME a complete hosted office solution.

We are looking at using QR codes on our business cards and other media. I generated this one last night and, hopefully, anyone with a suitable reader will find my contact details in this image

I’d be interested in anyone’s feedback on the use of QR codes in the UK and in particular a reader for Windows Mobile devices.

We have just installed a video conferencing system for a client who has offices in Boston, Mass. and Bath, England.

They didn’t want to spend a fortune of a Cisco Telepresence system or other proprietary a/v system so turned to us to come up with a solution.

Having seen another client essentially run their business using Mac’s and iChat we looked at putting together a system based on that technology. Using Mac Mini’s with a big screen (I mean an NEC 60″ plasma screen!) seemed the obvious thing to do. The Mac combined with the very sexy Mac bluetooth keyboard and Mighty Mouse and a Logitech USB microphone provides the bones of the system.

Many Mac users have the immediate advantage of having the built-in iSight camera. These give an excellent video output and if you can live with a screen of up to 24″ you have everything you need. However if you want to put a system in a boardroom and have a screen big enough for several people to sit round you need another camera.

Up until this month (July 2008) there has been next to no choice. The Mac works best with a firewire webcam and there are very few of those on the market. You might find it easier, as we have done to date, to use a digital camcorder with a firewire output. Our Sony camcorder works brilliantly with Mac’s (leave the DV tape out if you want to prevent it going to sleep after a period of inactivity) and we specifed our clients system with cheap firewire camcorders as the webcams.

PC users have had the choice of the excellent Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 to use for a/v systems and these can output up to 720p HD video which is more than good enough for an internet based video conference.

However up until now Logitech seemed to have no interest in providing proper OS X support for the QuickCam 9000 Pro and our experience of them with Mac’s was that the video output in iChat was disapointing. But just as we are putting this system in place Logitech take us by surprise and suddenly announce the QuickCam Vision Pro that is ONLY supported under Mac / OS X. This webcam will apparently give us the auto-focusing and full 720p HD (960×720 pixels) output in iChat! Just what we want!

We’ve put an order in for one with Ingram Micro so we now just have to wait for it to come into stock.

As soon as we have it we will test it and let you know what the iChat output is like.

UPDATE 21st July
Cancelled order with Ingram Micro as they were still showing no stock date. Instead we have bought one direct from Logitech off their UK website.

This arrived today and at first glance it is an exact match for the PC version albeit a slightly more silvery black colour. It is recognised in iChat and the auto-focus works and there is no software to load. Without another QuickCam user to iChat with it is hard to tell at the moment what the resolution over the internet will be.

We have just signed up as a reseller with a major VoIP gateway provider so we are now able to offer you VoIP service billed through ourselves.

We’ll post further about VoIP over the coming weeks but this is really the way ahead for small and medium businesses. We have been using it in-house some for some months now and would not go back to renting phone lines again.

We put in our first customer site next week and VoIP will immediately save them the cost of renting 5-6 analogue phone lines .

Update – 27th March 2007

The new site went live a couple of weeks ago now so they have been using an entirely IP driven phone system for their business for that time. A few minor tweaks to the voice on hold are required but other than that the syste has performed very well. The client is particularly impressed with the call quality as it is better than their last analogue phone system.