Let's talk business

Recruitment difficulties

Boy are we finding it hard to recruit the right candidate for a support position that has become available in Softalk! It certainly seems to be an employee's market currently. In times like these, good candidates are few and far between, with the best ones being snapped up before we get a chance to interview them. And it seems recruitment companies are taking advantage of the shortage of good candidates by charging up to 40% of annual salary. This makes it incredibly difficult for smaller companies to get the best candidates and ironically it is the smaller companies that have the most to lose by recruiting the wrong staff.

I'm interested to hear from other small to medium sized businesses. How are you finding the current recruitment climate? How do you find the best staff in times like these?

Softalk Share Server beta going well

Softalk Share Server, our latest Exchange alternative product for sharing Outlook folders, has now been in beta for about four weeks and testing seems to be going very well.

The remaining piece of functionality to add is a comprehensive backup and restore mechanism. This will allow administators to make both full and incremental backups of the data store and then subsequently restore data down to the user or folder level. This is something that Exchange Server simply cannot do. If any data in the Exchange data store is lost or corrupted there is no alternative but to perform a full restore of the entire store from backup. Surprising really, that a product used by so many organizations is so light in this area of functionality.

We're still keen to hear from anyone that is interested to evaluate the beta version of Softalk Share Server. For more information and to download the beta, please go to http://www.softalkltd.com/products/softalkshareserver/beta.asp. All things going well, we're planning a release candidate by the end of April 2007.