Hi, I'm Martin Peirce the CEO of Click2Scan Ltd. One of the things I'm regularly asked is "how we do this" or "how we do that". My friends know me as a bit of a "techie "and my two boys think I'm gadget man. All of this stems from an (un?!) healthy interest in computers in the early 80's. I've always been an early new innovations adopter, even at 14 using my paper-round money to buy a ZX Spectrum.
So here I am, now in my (early) 40's running Click2Scan and still using my knowledge to hunt down solutions to problems we face in our business. The solutions we have put together are quite groovy so my techie friends have suggested I share this knowledge to benefit other individuals and businesses So here goes, here is my attempt at a blog ...
30/8/2010 - Ive grown a beard and learned Linux !
With our new server sat in a proper datacentre, it was sensible to move our web sites over to it. We were using a hosting company before and they have been less than good to say the least. One day this month they turned off our server without notice, turning off all of our web sites. That'sa bit like white washing your office window in the middle of the day. Our main web sites have now migrated over to a new Linux server I downloaded. It's taken some getting used to from Windows but I have to say it seems much quicker and I think will be easier to use and maintain as well. It will also hopefully be more secure.
27/8/2010 - Ive been to the Internet.
I can now say I've physically been to the internet ! I took one of our servers to a data centre in central London this afternoon. They call this colocation. This was one of only a few massive data warehouses in the country which is the end point for many ISP's. Our applications, including our FileDirector server are now running soooo much faster than before. With masses of bandwidth on tap at this place I expect our web sites will be running much faster as well making the user experience even more effective and pleasing.
05/08/2010 - loving the Ipad
After much deliberation I purchased an Ipad this week. It is absolutely superb and one of those things where I'm sure in no time at all I'll be wondering how I got by without it. What I like so far is the fact that it can do pretty much everything my laptop can do with the portability that I need when I'm out and about seeing clients. The fact it powers up with "instant on" is the big advantage. I can also use FileDirectior document management very easily, using the Safari web browser so anybody wanting to give access to scanned documents to remote staff should look at this.
09/07/2010 - I love FREE it's so much better ...
If you are one of our customer reading this, we don't actually offer FREE services or solutions (although all document scanning and document management related advice is totally FREE) but there is plenty of FREE stuff out there in the world that may benefit you as much as it has us. These are just some.......
Google Apps - we run all of our email, calendars and contacts through Google Apps and have a great intranet now as well. Google Apps is basically a hosted Microsoft Exchange and as it's free you can't beat it. We are a medium sized company and the cost saving and application benefits are immense. I will expand on this again in the future.
Thunderbird & Firefox - All of the PC's in the company now run Thunderbird for email and Firefox for web. With me being a Mac user, Outlook is just a plain no no. As soon as a new PC comes into the company we have to clear off all the Microsoft stuff that they insist on pre-loading and which drives you mad - bloated office 2007 and so on. Thunderbird is a great mail application that works well with IMAP - an essential part of using Google Apps and iPhones and multiple PC's etc. Thunderbird is a good clean web browser that has plenty of widgetry. We are now using a new phone system and we can make calls by highlighting a number in the browser, right clicking and selecting dial - saves us so much time. We have found great solutions for Thunderbird that we will again explore including a Calendar module that links and syncs to our Google Calendars and a neat tool that allows shared contacts by syncing with any one of our Google mail accounts.
Open Office - Being a Mac user I was in a situation where I was using Pages & Numbers ( the Mac equivalent of Word and Excel) and my staff were using Office 2003. Office was a pain. Every new PC had office 2007 trial installed and I hated it. It was also a real pain to uninstall. Step in cross platform, easy to use Open Office. We send all documents out as PDF's and Open Office's compatability with Microsoft Office is excellent. I can use it on my Mac and the PC version opens the same documents in the same way. Free, easy to use and easy to maintain. Highly recommended.
Phone System - We have mutiple offices and remote workers so wanted a flexible phone system. Free was attractive again so I researched the Asterisk thing and trialled a number of systems. We have settled on Digium switchVox right now which is a great VOIP PBX that allows flexibility with our calls. We have sip trunks provided by Voicelfex and Coms.com and on the whole the system is stable. Security is a big issue - we once got hacked and some annoying person placed 8 concurrent calls all night long to Uganda which made us take security more seriously. We are still developing our phone systems and wish VOIP was 5% more reliable but it's way cheaper than ISDN so we will persevere with it.