This month we celebrate more success, for ourselves and our clients.  We review a  recent project (see Case Study - AJ Gundy) and we’re proud to report that Kinetics has obtained the Microsoft ‘Information Worker’ competency.  This, in addition to our recent Microsoft Gold certification, reflects that Kinetics not only designs and delivers excellent IT platforms, Information Worker is recognition that we design systems around business practices.  It’s a tribute to the solutions being designed around our customer’s work flows, business processes and their unique characteristics.  Over the last few months we have substantially increased our focus on understanding our client’s business needs, to ensure each system we install is optimised for that unique operation.  The Microsoft recognition only reflects our use of their products, in particular Sharepoint, Exchange, Project Server, Terminal Server  and Windows Mobile.

Visiting Kinetics at the moment is a bit of a trial – the office is a building site for a few weeks as we effectively double our current space and take the opportunity to freshen up the office.  As always, visitors are most welcome, but bring your hardhat!  It’s great being a growing business, but occasionally there are downsides! Needing more space is one of them!  We’ve been a little smart with the new space and are very confident that it will serve us well even if we double in size again, as indeed we plan to.

We were sorry to see David Young leave us.  He’s headed for a change in direction, heading into the education sector.  David, we wish you the best of luck in your new career; the country needs more quality teachers.  We welcome Stephen Gibbons to our team to take David’s place and are pleased to announce Bryan Kumm joining the team in April as well. (see Who's Who - Stephen Gibbons).  In the meantime, we now turn our attention to our sales team – we’re recruiting another account manager / business development person.  If you know anyone, please ask them to send us their details.

What’s Hot? 

- Mobile email, PDAs and so on remain predominant.  The ability to roam away from the office, while being able to stay in touch, is one of the most liberating new solutions and many companies are taking advantage of this freedom.  We are seeing increased interest now in how to go beyond email to allow core business systems to be accessed from a pocket device – something we ourselves are doing to great advantage. 

- Business Continuity.  2005 has been marked by a huge upswing in interest in risk prevention, and uptime solutions.  A little like airbags in a car, you don’t need this stuff until … you really need it!  There seems to be an increase in risk management with resulting interest in disaster recovery planning.  Kinetics has spent a great deal of time developing risk solutions for clients and we have some excellent consulting solutions that have been proven.  

- Document Management.  A personal interest of mine, it’s a topic that we’ve seen little from for some time, until about a year ago.  Now it seems to be the hot topic.  Use of remote solutions, document intelligence, CRMs and web portals all seem to have brought the spotlight back to what I regard as one of the most crucial components of an IT solution – a means for storing and finding files, the key service provided by most office networks!  For more read the article below by Kinetics Senior Consultant, Richard A’court (see Do you need a Document Management System)

 

Do any of the following apply to you or your company? 

• Are you forever looking for that document you know you created but can never find?

• Do you have problems working out which is the most recent version of a particular document?

• Do you have valuable information stored on employee’s hard drives or individual mail boxes that no one else can access?

• Have you ever wondered who changed a document and when?

• Do you ever wish you could just go back a few versions on a document?

• Are clients phoning you about documents you created years ago, do you want to be able to find these quickly and efficiently while they are on the phone?

• Do you hold valuable and unique paper documents within your business? What would you do if these were damaged?

If you answered yes to any of these you probably need some form of document management system. These can address all of the issues above by storing your documents in a more intelligent way and allowing you to search for them in a way that is intuitive for you. 

There are a huge variety of document management systems available, all with different features, benefits and price tags. It is important to find a solution that matches your current and future requirements and fits into your company culture and practices. Choosing the wrong system could be a very expensive mistake, too small a system may not deliver the promised benefits, while too complex a solution may go unused as people find it gets in the way of their work. 

Even when you have decided on your ideal system you need to spend a considerable amount of time designing the implementation. Document Management systems subscribe strictly to the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ philosophy of computing. You can only effectively search for documents using information you recorded at the time the document was stored. You must have a very good understanding of the information you will store and the way your staff will expect to be able search for it. 

Kinetics has knowledge of a wide variety of document management solutions and contacts with suppliers and distributors for most of the major brands. If you think document management is something that may come into your plans for the future then please contact us. We can arrange for one of our consultants to visit and perform an initial assessment of your requirements and go over the options with you.

We would like to alert you to the impending April 12, 2005 deadline for the Automatic Update and Windows Update's temporary blocking mechanism. This dateline is now less than 3 months away.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) contains major security improvements to provide better protection against hackers, viruses and worms. Based on customer feedback, Microsoft have provided the ability to temporarily block the delivery of SP2 via Automatic Update and Windows Update and giving time for deployment mechanisms to be implemented for SP2, particularly for unmanaged Windows XP PCs.

Beginning 12.01am, April 12, 2005, this temporarily blocking mechanism will expire and systems with Automatic Update enabled or systems that connect and download SP2 via Windows Update will begin receiving SP2. Note that this is also the scheduled day for the monthly cumulative release of security updates.

If you have not already done so, we strongly encourage you to take the appropriate steps to implement your SP2 deployment decisions by that time.

• For information on this temporary blocking mechanism, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/sp2aumng.mspx.

• For more information on deploying SP2, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/xpsp2dep.mspx. 

If you have questions about this reminder, please contact your Kinetics account manager..

Ian is a UK-born Kiwi at heart. He has been working in IT for 10 years, the last two of which at a software house in Auckland, specialising in billing, CIS and CRM systems.

Ian has a background in software development, project management and team leadership, and has been responsible for projects as diverse as an interface for a small scanning machine for a dental company in Gothenburg, to bespoke measurement applications creating dimensional inspection reports for clutch cases coming off the production line at Rover in Longbridge, England. 

Ian tries to balance his business life with spending time with his wife and two pre-school girls, and can occasionally be seen getting great value on the golf course in terms of shots per dollar…

SYSPRO Seminar Invitation

Software that Works will be presenting a SYSPRO  Enterprise Software seminar at the Eden Park Function Centre on Wednesday 13th April at 7.30am.

This is an opportunity to look at Planning for Success for your business.

SYSPRO enterprise software is the foundation of successful supply chain management. SYSPRO meets the comprehensive information technology needs of emerging companies with a totally integrated solution that encompasses: ERP, APS, CRM and E-Commerce. SYSPRO software enables companies in a variety of industries to maximize the planning and management of business processes to better position themselves in their respective markets, ensure customer fulfillment, and ultimately, to improve bottom-line results.

If you would like to attend, please phone Juliet on 379 8200 or email juliet@kinetics.co.nz.