http://www.redcross.org.uk/japantsunami/ UK
http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.1a019a978f421296e81ec89e43181aa0/?vgnextoid=f9efd2a1ac6ae210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD USA

These are tax deductable in the UK and the USA (please check with your accountant).  So please help with the tsunami relief you will help save lives.

If you know of any other worthwhile charities please leave a comment below and I will add them to the list.  I’m only interested in ones currently helping Japan

The whole point of an SLA really isn’t to compensate the client (you) for a loss, it’s to make it unprofitable for the service provider to keep making the same mistakes.

In other words, let’s say our margins are 15%. If we have a serious problem during a month, we have to pay out for technician time and cough up to all of the affected customers which could cost us say 25%. In other words, we lose 10% instead of making 15%.

Hopefully that helps make sense why SLAs are so highly valued.  That’s why it’s in ours as the “IT service provider’s” best interests to make sure those mistakes don’t happen, or if they do come up with a prevention plan.

So always check the comments and if you’re worried remove any links to external websites before you accept them.  (Yes you should review EVERY comment by hand!)  Once your happy go and get that nice ego boost, you deserve it a blog takes a lot of commitment and time!

First off to keep this simple if you hover over this image with your mouse:

Doesn’t do much right?

Now try this one:

You see the text “Computer First Logo” correct?

This is what an alt tag does, for the techy people the code looks like <img src=”http://www.computerfirst.org/itsupportblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/logo.jpg” alt=”Computer First Logo” width=”234″ height=”73″ />

The other key thing to notice here is the name of the image file “logo.jpg” mean much?  Not really does it?

The simple concept here is that images now come up in Google results to get the traffic from those results you should meet the following criteria:

1. The content (text) around the image should describe the image.
2. The “Alt Tag” should reflect the contents of the image and the content around the image.
3. The name of the file of the image should also match the content, i.e. describe the image.
4. The whole page itself and the content of it should be related to the title of the page and the images within it.

What does this all give you?  Well a damn good spot in Google image search for starters.

We’re still developing our own SEO on the images but to give you an idea have a look at http://www.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&biw=1659&bih=844&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=site%3Acomputerfirst.org&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

We’re there, were indexed now we just have to tune them to what our clients are searching for and then we get traffic.

I hope this gives you a good insight into how an Alt tag works and a basic understanding of how it relates to Google.  This one subject alone can be very in-depth so be careful if you do use alt tags.  Please don’t stuff them with keywords it’ll end up having the wrong effect on your Google position.

For the uninitiated vendor management is where a firm has a pool of suppliers that it has built up relationships for many years.  This is usually Telecoms, Network, Customers, Internet provision, Internet Hosting, Web design, Programming and a few more.  A lot of these now tie into the IT ecospace in the corporate world and the “all in one” firms tend to be trying to be doing too much, the old “Jack of all trades”.  An experienced firm will know you need to talk to firms that specialise in each of the areas.  While it might be nice to have “one bill” it’s most likely you’ll be losing out decades of experience from firms that know their industry inside out.

Heres ten tips to help you pick a new supplier:

1. Check for reviews on the internet and look for “fake” reviews as it’ll give you an example of how “moral” the company is.
2. Do a credit check, you need to make sure the company is not about to “go under”.
3. Make sure they are local and don’t just treat you like a number i.e. a lot of nationals.
4. Get a third party in to verify their sales claims.
5. Ask to speak to actual clients.
6. If possible test their service and reaction times.  This will always be better during trials but it can show you what they can be capable off.
7. Get two competitive quotes and make sure there in the right ballpark, cheapest isn’t always best.
8. Get reviews of the equipment they recommend to you to make sure there not just doing high margin/poor quality items.
9. Have a look at their offices on Google maps or better yet go pay them a visit there office will tell you a lot about the company.
10. Make sure you like them as people when you first talk, this will go a long way in developing the relationship.

I’m sure there’s many more and would welcome any comments in regards to your experiences with new suppliers.

Please vist the Original

It may seem good sense to keep PCs for as long as they are usable. But this strategy may be penny wise and pound foolish when taking into account the bigger picture of lost productivity, support costs, power consumption and security risks. How do we decide when enough is enough, and send old PCs to the Knackers’ Yard?

One may assume that it is cheap to keep on running an old working PC. But time never stands still – the business evolves, demands change and newer technologies emerge. Meanwhile, the PC ages and slows down as it is loaded down with new or updated software.

Ageing security

Let’s explore some of the issues in setting a PC refresh policy. We’ll kick off with security – one of the most important, and often most overlooked, factors.

Many older PCs are running much the same software that they were initially configured with. Windows XP has been around since the turn of the century, but the age of some machines means they may run Windows 2000 or even variants of Windows 98 or NT. These lack many of the security improvements incorporated into modern operating systems and applications.

Old timers

Ageing PCs may also affect user satisfaction and productivity. This is often a tricky issue, as salaries are not paid by the IT department.

Employees often try to “work” around performance difficulties by doing other things while waiting, such as grabbing a cigarette during a lengthy boot-up or a coffee when an application goes into hour-glass mode.

Sometimes they may even do something useful: not all workers use their PC as the central element of their job, but for those who do, the performance of their PC can have a non-trivial impact on performance and efficiency. Always factor this into discussions with the business on budget and refresh plans.

Cost of support

New PCs are not particularly expensive to buy. Much of the cost of replacement is in the provisioning and roll-out, application licences and end-user training for new applications.

As PCs move out of maintenance, any issue that needs support or attention from IT will cost money, particularly if the support means downtime for the user or desk visits from support.

Issues can often mean more in cost terms than issuing a user with a new PC when a problem arises: it may be more effective to issue a user who encounters problems with a ‘new’ PC rather than attempting to fix what has gone wrong.

This is even more likely to be the case as desktop virtualisation solutions become more widely used across the business.

Estate management

Understanding the issues of PC lifecycle management is one thing. But few companies have a good handle on their PC, their specs, who is using them, what is running on them, and how much they cost in operations and support.

This information is complex to obtain and difficult to maintain, and we are told time and again that many businesses lack the tools needed to manage PC assets, software distribution and licensing.

Patchy insight can make it very difficult to justify a planned obsolescence and refresh strategy. The end result is that rules of thumb and gut instinct, rather than the real picture, determine the course of action.

Managing old PCs so that they fade away rather than soldier on is best accomplished by investing in modern and automated management tools, so that the real trouble spots are identified and dealt with before they have too great an effect on the users.

How?  Well it will tell you what google thinks your page is about, once your idea of what the site is about and googles is the same then take the ad off. (Unless you want to make some money on a non-commercial site).