Let's talk business

Did you know: Message archiving

From time to time we will be posting "Did You Know" blogs, that are intended to keep you aware of the features in the Softalk range of products. This is the first of these postings and focusses on message archiving in WorkgroupMail 8.

Did you know that WorkgroupMail version 8 can keep an archive copy of all incoming and outgoing mail messages? This is an extremely useful function as well as a legal requirement for many companies in the US.

The messages can be archived to the WorkgroupMail database or to a separate database. You can archive messages to and from all users or just a subset of users. You can also specify whether or not to archive attachments.

Because WorkgroupMail indexes the contents of the message archive, searching the archive is extremely fast. You can search for words in the subject or body of a message and you can further filter on messages that were sent during a particular date range, sent by a specific person or received by a specific person.

Seven tips to improve your success and profits

Brian Tracey, business coach writing for Entrepreneur.com gives these tips for anyone wanting to improve their success and profits.

1. The product must satisfy an immediate need
2. Offer good quality at a fair price
3. Be careful with your money
4. Cash flow is essential
5. Guard your cash carefully
6. Maximise your marketing
7. Selling is the core skill of a successful business

Small business matters as much as football?

Sir Digby Jones has told the Broadband Britain Summit 2005 that high-speed networks give every company the chance to compete on the global stage, and also let them transform their own working practices.  As reported by ZD Net UK, however, many small businesses are in danger of wasting this opportunity. More than 30 per cent of businesses now have broadband. But, Jones warned, many aren't getting full value out of it — and he believes large telecoms operators are to blame. Only relatively recently have suppliers begun paying attention to the business market, rather than the entertainment needs of consumers. The indifference felt by some companies is a legacy of this," claimed Jones. "Surely business matters as much as football or pornography on broadband."

Google Analytics - it's illegal!

CorporateBloggingBlog reports that Google Analytics could be illegal in the European Union. You see Google Analytics uses cookies which is against European Union law unless you tell visitors that you are doing it, why you are doing it and how they can avoid it.

Bob Geldof rants against email

Sir Bob Geldof has railed against emails and said that his is advice is "Don't do email". He told delegates at a London conference that he dreaded seeing lots of emails in his inbox as they imposed an agenda on him and disrupted his own plans for the day.

He also warned of the perils of a badly phrased email which he said he knows from personal experience can cause serious commercial harm. Sir Bob is a successful businessman but we shouldn't forget his rock star roots and his love of strong language which has landed him in hot water before. Perhaps Sir Bob should look at using an email server that lets you to set content filters.

Google Analytics - it's free!!

Google announced today that it has made available free web statistics, called Google Analytics. What's the catch? None really, except you're limited to five million page views per month, unless you have an AdWords account, in which case it's free! This service used to be called Urchin web analytics and used to cost hundreds of dollars per month. See Danny Sulivan's post for more details.

Windows Live is here

A few days ago, Microsoft announced a new Internet-based software service called Windows Live. The idea is to bring together all sorts of different feeds and gadgets together in one place in your web browser. For example, you can display the weather for your town or city, alongside the news headlines from your favourite news feed alongside your Hotmail inbox. You can also use it to subscribe to your favourite feeds and have them all available to you from a single web page. What is more, you can do everything by dragging and dropping. Have a look for yourself at www.live.com.

For the technical minded people out there, it uses AJAX, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. This provides a much more interactive experience to web applications and is something that I think will really take off over the next few months. Infact, it's a technology we're thinking of using for our Softalk Organizer product.

As well as providing a set of RSS feeds, Microsoft also provide a set of gadgets, which are more than just lists of the latest articles from an RSS feed. You can think of gadgets as mini-applications that will sit in your dash board, providing you with richer content, for example, Microsoft provide a weather gadget that shows a set of images portraying a 5 day weather forecast for your local area. For more information, see Michael Arrington's Techcrunch blog.

A calendar gadget would be a good addition. What gadgets do you think would be a welcome addition to Windows Live?

OfficeTalk progress update

Thanks for all your comments so far on OfficeTalk. I wanted to keep everyone up to date with how development is progressing and to comment on some of the feedback to the previous OfficeTalk blog.

Over the months, we’ve been hearing a number of requests for improved mail server functionality, especially related to multiple ISPs, anti-virus and anti-spam. John Prior of Waterfields also posed this question in feedback on the previous OfficeTalk blog. Well, we’ve decided that the most sensible way to solve this is to include, for free, our WorkgroupMail product with OfficeTalk 4.5. WorkgroupMail is our mature messaging server that we have been selling for a number of years. It is currently on version 8. This would provide you with a complete set of mail server features, such as multiple ISPs, spam filtering features, content control and message archiving. It also provides anti-spam and anti-virus, although these are optional features that you can optionally purchase.

Robert, at Finders Heath, commented on being able to add people to the black list from the mail client. This sort of thing is possible with WorkgroupMail, using the content control feature. You can set up an internal black-list email address to which you can forward all your junk mail and this will automatically add the senders of the spam message to your blacklist, causing future messages from those people to be quarantined or deleted.

WorkgroupMail would not be integrated with OfficeTalk, but providing it to you will enable you to set OfficeTalk to send and receive mail from WorkgroupMail and then use WorkgroupMail as your mail server. Of course, if you already have a separate mail server, that’s no problem. What do you think about this? Let us know your feedback.

There is still more work to do on the UI, however it is starting to take shape and beginning to look like a 21st century product. Work has now just begun on bug fixing and one or two speedups.

Florian of Between the Lines commented on fonts when replying to email messages. In 4.5, it will be possible to specify the default font for composing messages and this will also be used when replying.

We also heard from someone who said that searching of appointments displayed the wrong time in the search results. This has been fixed.

Reply to all now no longer includes your own email address.

We’re also starting to look at bugs to do with OfficeTalk failing to decode messages correctly. If you have specific examples, please zip up the raw MIME of such messages and email it to support@softalkltd.com.

Mike Spencer of upholsterers.co.uk raised a bug relating to embedded JPEG images in messages. We are unable to repeat this. Are you able to provide any more information? We were also not sure how to repeat your offline sending of mail problem. More information would be great.

Stuart Bruce, our PR guru, who is also an OfficeTalk customer, has been at our offices this week trying to reproduce the problem of duplicate messages and having to press F5 to refresh before you can delete messages, but to no avail. Can anyone provide a reliable method of reproducing this?

December is looking more likely as a release date. Given the (deliberate) short release cycle, it is not going to be possible to include everyone’s bug fixes, but we’re certainly trying to include as many of the annoying ones, that are straight forward to fix as we can in that time period.

More detail to follow in future posts.

Software developer vacancy at Softalk

We're currently working hard to fill a vacancy that exists in our Software team for a talented software engineer and we're finding it hard to find the right person. Could you be who we are looking for?

Softalk has been growing at a tremendous pace over the last 5 years. Infact, we have recently been ranked 14th fastest growing technology company in the London and South East region on the 2005 Deloitte Technology Fast 50. To sustain this growth over the next few years, we have been growing our product portfolio and as a result there is now an opportunity for a dedicated and talented individual to join our team here in Maidenhead, UK.

Qualifications for this position include a minimum of 7 years of demonstrated work experience in software development, and a degree in Computer Science or a related field. We are looking for someone with in-depth knowledge and experience of Visual C++ and MFC. Experience of multi-threaded programming, user interface programming and sockets is essential. Experience of C# under ASP.NET will be an advantage.

If you or perhaps one of your colleagues is interested, please get in touch with us by sending your CV to hr@softalkltd.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

 

Softalk ranked number 14 fastest growing technology company in London and the South

We're all very proud at Softalk today, having found out last night that we ranked 14th fastest growing technology company in London and the South on the 2005 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards.

The event was hosted by Paul Ross (Jonathan Ross's brother) at the Cafe Royal on Regent Street in London. The entrants were judged on their revenue growth over the period 2000 - 2004. The average revenue growth over the 50 finalists was in excess of 450%.

We met a lot of interesting people and enjoyed ourselves so much that we're planning to enter again next year with the aim of achieving an even better position.