Last month my external hard drive stopped working.  Some advice online says it’s the power supply, others say it’s the housing of the hard drive that needs replacing.  Companies offer the service to retrieve your lost data  – lost hours of ripping your CDs, holiday photos, personal documents etc. etc.  If it’s lose it all forever, or pay from about £100 – £1,000 a lot of people may go with the latter.

Happily, I back all my stuff up so I just bought a new hard drive, bigger and cheaper than the kaput one – 2TB USB3 for £85.  But it’s worth reminding people – always back up your stuff, maybe on multiple hard-drives.  It’s so cheap now, and you can’t put a price on your memories, not to mention the hours spent acquiring all your stuff.

It goes without saying that companies need to do this with more vigour and frequency, but home users are less likely to bother.

Well I’ve got the first month under my belt and it’s been a good one. Lots and lots of information to take in and process (I really had no idea that GMS had so much additional functionality and I’ve used it for 10 years!).  I won’t even pretend I’m half way there yet but I’m starting to feel a bit more with it.

The guys in the office have been busy beavering away on a variety of projects, ASPConnect and GMS V4 so in the main they leave me to crack on with things at my own pace.  One of my first main tasks will be to make all of our clients aware of just how many additional features GMS can offer. I was amazed – I thought I was pretty GMS savvy but little did I know what extras are available – everything from Flex Billing to Forecasting and it’s my role to ensure all clients are aware of just what GMS can do.

It’ll be an on-going task as the new features are constantly evolving as these are driven by supplier requirements and changes within the gas industry itself. So never a dull moment to be had in the world of programming, code and gas supply….

Hello, I’m Julie the newest member of the Datamere team. It was my first day last week and as always the first day nerves were quite bad even though I’ve known all the boys for the last 10 years or so.  Changing from being a client to an employee certainly gives me a great advantage work wise but walking through the door for the first time in a different role still gave me the heebie jeebies!

Well I don’t know what I was worried about….. I was made to feel really welcome with a lovely new laptop that was even ordered in a suitably girly colour. Well done boys I am impressed and was even more so when I got myself set up at home and everything worked first time. I’ve never had that before – suppose that’s what comes of working for a software company!

So my official new title is UK Key Accounts and Sales Manager which sounds really grand. In reality I’ll act as the link between the guys in the office and our key clients leaving the team free to develop new modules and GMS V4 because as they say there’s never enough hours in the day.  Secretly I’m hoping it will involve lots of nice chats and drinking tea as Paul tells me all the Datamere clients are a lovely bunch…

So the next few months should prove to be interesting with plenty of new challenges and meeting lots of new people and baking/buying lots of cakes (delete as appropriate!) for those times when I go up spend the day in Wilmslow. I’ll be based at home as the 220 mile round trip up the M6 every day to the office really would be a deal breaker!

I’ll let you know how the first couple of weeks go in my next instalment…

It’s the latest buzz word that’s been bandied around for the last few years or so… ‘The Cloud’. We now find software publishers, developers, IT hardware, Internet providers, mobile phone companies and Uncle Tom Cobley purporting to be Cloud savvy, but what is it… I’m not going to wax lyrical on this or I’ll be here all day other than to say in its simplest form the Cloud is a nebulous term which essentially means something is hosted on a virtual platform (or Internet)… That’s it!

Obviously various companies offer differing degrees of Cloud services and have a different spin on what the cloud actually is and what it does.

With all this hype it can be easy to for potential clients to get brought into this ether without fully understanding what is going on.

Our concern with the Cloud and hence this blog is that, are we all 100% happy with the amount of data we want to host on some other hardware via the Internet? Apple’s version of the Cloud, DropBox etc. etc. whilst being great services and secure must be a honey pot to potential hackers and cyber crimesters…

Therefore without wanting to be doom mongers this is just a heads up that you should always be careful what data you allow to be hosted on the Cloud.

Oh for sunnier skies.

By the way Happy New Year.

Greggs Festive Bakes & mince pies, and Boots Christmas butties keep us going through December, along with our measly decorations including a tree with a stale chocolate still hanging on from last year.

We are currently working on a new project – ASP Connect website which will share MPR data between ASPs/MAMs in time for early 2012. GMS V4 development is still going strong.

Christmas film recommendations from Datamere:

Die Hard

Elf

Bad Santa

Muppets Christmas Carol

Scrooged

Nightmare Before Christmas

Gremlins

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Coding Carollers.