rb|it : blog

How to get the best deal on hardware and software

Historically, small businesses and educational institutions like schools have had a raw deal when buying hardware and software.  Baffled by jargon, preyed upon by unscrupulous resellers who see them as a 'cash cow', people have developed an unhealthy mistrust of people trying to sell them computers and computer services.

It used to be that decent pricing was beyond the reach of any small business, because they were too small to get an account with the larger distributors, so the only option was high street, or a reseller.
Now, things are different.  Online IT suppliers like ebuyer.com and it247.com have opened up distributor pricing to the small company, but you do have to find it.

Do not despair though!  It's actually very simple.  If you can browse the web, you can find good prices.  I've set out below how I looked for a price for a laptop, pointing out the best places to go, the pitfalls to avoid, and the end result.

1. Start with something simple, define what your requirements are.  Get advice from someone you trust on what specification of equipment (e.g. laptop) you actually need.  If you don't have a qualified trusted IT person, try one of the following websites;
2. 1. http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/buyersguide/laptops/
   2. http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/co_841-laptop-guide-laptop-buyers-guide.html
   3. http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/features/2146409/buyers-guide-notebooks
3. Having defined your requirements you now need to search for some prices.   Don’t assume any of the following price comparison sites are perfect, try them all, make notes, and compare.  Make sure you search using the model name of the system in quotes, e.g. "HP 6720s".
4. 1. Google Product Search - http://www.google.co.uk/prdhp?hl=en&tab=wf
   2. Pricerunner UK - http://www.pricerunner.co.uk
5. When you look at the results, there’s a few pointers to remember
6. 1. The results will often be sorted ‘by popularity’ or ‘by rating’.  Make sure you change the sort order to ‘by price’ and make sure it’s in ascending order.
   2. When making notes and comparing prices, make sure you include the basic specification.  Specification can mask the true price in both directions.  For example, you could find much cheaper model, but then find it doesn’t have wireless, or a DVD writer drive.  On the other hand, you might find a model which has a smaller hard drive, but it’s 20% cheaper!  All you need to do, in both cases, is decide is the difference in specification reflected in the price, and is it worth it.
   3. Make sure you compare the total cost of the unit, i.e. including all shipping costs (and VAT if appropriate).
7. Now compare your prices, check that they still work out the best offer after shipping and taxes, and see how much you saved!

I’ve used Pricerunner for years, and Google Product Search for the last year or so, and I expect I’ve saved on average at least 10%.  In many cases I’ve been able to save myself (or clients) hundreds of pounds with an hours work.  Try it.  It’s all open to you, you just need to make the effort to go and get it!

Another Small Business trying to go green

With marketing departments across private industry jumping on the eco bandwagon there is (understandably)  a great deal of cynicism about companies making claims about their 'Green Credentials'.  However, I personally wanted to try and operate a 'green business' from the moment I started, and could see no reason why a home office based IT Consultant should create much waste and shouldn't be able to minimise the direct and indirect impact they have on the environment.

Well, I've started by researching lots of material, and there is a wealth of it, and it's a very confusing area!  There are generalisations, wild claims, but a distinct lack of clear numbers and guidance.  The priorities are clear though, regardless of all the flannel which surrounds them; Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

This is how I've initially set out measures to meet these intentions with actual action;

1. Reduce.  Ensure travel is kept to a minimum to reduce fuel consumption, and wherever possible combine multiple meetings in one visit.  Reduce power consumption by turning off any devices not required (e.g. turning off wireless routers overnight).  Reduce consumption of paper and ink by only printing where appropriate, and try and source paper which is recycled or from a renewable resource.  Use paper free communication with any suppliers or service providers (e.g. paperless banking and changing communication preferences with suppliers to email).
2. Reuse.  Rather than throwing old computer hardware away either remploy it in the business, or pass it on to schools, voluntary organisations and charities to use.
3. Recycle.  Where the output from my business does need disposing of, recycle wherever possible.  All paper is recycled via local authority collection services, and any confidential paperwork is shredded beforehand.  Printer cartridges will be recycled via Oxfam.  Post including junk email is recycled as far as possible (you have to remove the plastic envelops on the windows though!).  Any old hardware that cannot be reused is disposed of at a local Valtek recycling centre.

The next steps for me are clarifying with my local authorities what I can and cannot dispose of as a home office worker (there's a think line between personal and business, and the waste I generate is effectively identical to someone who is full time employed but works from home).

After that is the bigger challenges;

• Making sure that all my suppliers have effective and measurable green policies. 
• Encouraging customers to follow practices to reduce, reuse and recycle.

One key thing to remember (especially in an economic downturn!) is that step 1, Reduce, could save you significant amounts of money.  More on that soon as I measure the changes in my bottom line as a result of reducing my consumption of resource.

Network and server monitoring, can you afford not to have it?

Problem:
One of the problems small businesses often suffer from is a gap between a systems failure and diagnosis.  With few or no IT staff and a small IT budget only allowing a partial support service, it can be hours between a problem occurring and someone actually diagnosing the fault.  Systems monitoring software can help bridge that gap, saving hours of downtime and potentially thousands of pounds of lost revenue or staff productivity.

The Solution for Small Businesses:
For small businesses up to 20 employees it’s unlikely that there will be any dedicated or qualified IT staff, as the cost is just too high.  In those businesses a well implemented systems monitoring system will allow faults to be spotted immediately, possibly corrected automatically, or a notification sent by email or sms to the right person (the 3rd party providing technical support, service supplier etc.)  That bridges the gap between the fault occurring and the people who can fix it knowing about it.  It also gives the person who’s fixing is very specific information about the fault which should decrease diagnosis and fix times, (for example instead of “the network is down” they’ll get ‘dhcp service on sbs-srv1 is down’).

The Solution for Small to Medium Enterprises:
For businesses from 20-200, who have one or more dedicated IT staff, systems monitoring allows them to see faults as soon as they occur (not when a user reports them), which may allow them to fix or work around the issue before users are aware, or before business is disrupted.  It can also allow them to see problems coming (e.g. monitoring % disk space on system and data volumes), so they can take preventative action.

The Cost:
Comparisons of these systems are difficult because you’re never comparing like for like, there will always be small functionality differences between systems.  However, comparing Windows based network and server monitoring systems came out with one clear winner, Woodstone’s ‘Servers Alive’.  Coming in at £312 including one year support it offers a comprehensive set of checks including IP, TCP and UDP, various Windows aware and SNMP checks.  Compared with Tembria Server Monitor (£716), WhatsUpGold (£660+), Serverscheck (£651) it beat all comers by a long way.

Cost Benefit Analysis:
A complex area to work in, and the best I can do is describe a scenario to demonstrate how much a systems monitoring system could save you.

• Scenario 1 – No systems monitoring: You don’t know why, but at 14:00 on Friday suddenly your server goes down.  Everything is on it, and now you can’t see, send or receive any email, access your stock and sales system etc.  You try turning the server on and off, that doesn’t work, so you call your tech support company and sit in a queue, only to be told they can’t get to your server remotely, and engineer can’t get to site until Monday as you’re on 4 hour response.  You miss the email from your shipping company telling you a shipment has arrived, so you don’t fax over the customs documents to release it.  On Monday it turns out the system drive on your server ran out of free disk space, causing the server to crash when downloading updates
  Cost of this outage; £250 storage fees + 50% drop in sales staff productivity + one lost sale of £75 due to a lack of response to an email.  That’s somewhere between £300-500 depending on how much you pay your sales staff!
• Scenario 2 – Systems monitoring installed:  At 08:30 on Tuesday Servers Alive reports that there is less than 1GB free space on the system drive on your server.  You call your tech support company and ask what to do; they remotely connect to your server, delete or archive some files, and you now have 5GB free space.  Nothing goes wrong on Friday.

These scenarios are based on actual known incidents in real companies, and demonstrate how just preventing one fault could save more money than you spent on the software, meaning it’s now earning you money!

For information on Servers Alive see http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/index.asp, and for information on Services from RG Bartlett IT Services (including network monitoring) see http://www.rgbartlett.co.uk/services.

Low cost content filtering .. finally!

When I posted back on 8th May "I'm working on it, and I'll report back next week!" I didn't imagine it would take this long, but it did.  Initially my problems were with the scripts which populate a URL set or Domain Set in ISA Server from a text file.  The domains file from the 'Adult' category is 14MB and contains over 850,000 domains (and that's just one category, though it is the largest).

After trying to resolve this (scripts running over 8 hours!) I started looking for some alternatives, and found a script by Rob Bosch, (ISA expert and co-founder of iPremise) which did the trick.

So now we have a very low cost internet filtering option!

The process is this;

1. Subscribe to and download the blacklist from URLBlacklist.com (£36 per year for a small business or school to download once a month, which should be sufficient for most).
2. Uncompress the file (use gzip -d bigblacklist.tar.gz and tar -xf bigblacklist.tar, requires cygwin utils)
3. Create the files BuildXML.vbs, includes.txt, linetemplate.txt and template.xml from the post by Rob
4. Edit the includes.txt file to include the categories you want to blacklist
5. Run BuildXML.vbs
6. Import the resulting blacklist.xml file into a URL Set in ISA Server 2004 and apply the change.

This process all took a fraction of the time taken by the scripts I was using before, and provides you with the best low cost option for content filtering, which is entirely under your control!

If you're looking for an alternative option whilst looking into alternatives I find OpenDNS, which provides a free DNS service with an option to filter sites by category, whitelist sites and blacklist individual domains.  The service is based on the St Bernard iGuard service and their own PhishTank service.  The downside?  If someone on your network types in a URL which isn't found, it will offer up "clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo we can fix".  For many, this could be cheap at the price.

For more advice on reducing your IT spend contact richard@rgbartlett.co.uk, or see the website for more details.