How to avoid holiday computer disasters

The holiday season is here and for many it’s time for a much needed break. Before doing so it’s worthwhile taking a few precautions with your computers and other electronic equipment.

While most of us are moving our data to the cloud, there may still be some data that remains on your office systems. Bear in mind that if your router is damaged or desktop computer has gone missing, you won’t be able to access the web.

And even though your systems will spend much of the next fortnight turned off there are still risks such as power surges, fire and theft etc. There’s even the risk of a virus creeping in when you turn things on when you return. So here’s some things to consider before you leave.

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Sniper release

Over the last few months we’ve formed a new team that we’ve called the Sniper Team – and today’s release is a great example of their work.

Left to right: Vicky, Ming, Simon, Hannah (Uli was on assignment and missed photo shoot)

While the rest of the team work on larger headline features, the Sniper team are focused on taking aim at smaller enhancements and fixes.

And it’s amazing how big the impact can be. Take a look at what the team’s been up to.

• Xero will now remember the sort order on the accounts receivables/payables screens
• The total amount due/owed of selected invoices will now display
• Two new reports – customer and supplier invoice summaries
• Budget manager updates – fixed column headings, row totals and full screen support
• Bank rules allow matching on any field
• There’s the option to register an asset and add another one immediately after

And the rest of the team worked on a couple of things too:

• Two new partner feeds for CRT Co-operative and Bartercard (NZ)
• Report Pack updates for New Zealand accountants

Now we know that one man’s sniper rifle is another man’s bazooka, but if you’ve got a small feature you’d love to see, let us know.

Innovate or die

Innovation is an over-used word in the software industry (actually, its use should really be governed by some regulatory body that fines marketeers who deploy the term inappropriately) but as a part-time software industry anthropologist I’m always fascinated with how different goto-market strategies play out and how the various constituencies fare, not least the users.

At the end of last week Twitter surprised millions of users when it rolled out some huge changes to their web app on Twitter.com and completely redesigned their iPhone app. The response has been mixed. Personally speaking I think the new web client is OK and will probably just take some getting used to, but I’m really not digging the new iPhone app to the extent that I retrograded back to the previous version after only a day or so. Although I don’t pay for Twitter, it left me feeling put-out and short-changed as a frequent user of the iPhone app.

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Abandoning email

With 74,000 staff at French technology company Atos you’d expect CEO Thierry Breton to be buried in email, but he hasn’t sent an electronic mail message for three years.

Atos is implementing a zero email policy for its employees, steering them to use instant messaging and collaboration tools that reduce the need to send attachment heavy messages.

Thierry Breton claims only one in ten of the 200 messages his employees receive each day are useful and 18 percent are spam – given that over 90% of world email traffic is estimated to be unsolicited messages, Atos has a pretty good spam filter.

Email has been one of the main applications of business technology for the last 20 years, so how feasible is it really to move away from the inbox as the first and last thing you check each day?

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