The trend towards working from home has increased along with the advancements in technology that make this option possible. This can many times be a better situation for both employees and their employers. Allowing employees to work from home can save companies money in energy costs and leasing office space and working from home offers a lot of flexibility to employees.
Workers in the UK have a right to make a request to work from home or to have flexible work schedules. This allows workers with families, especially those with young children, to make time for their activities, or take them to and from school. It’s not just parents who can benefit from flexible working. Flexible start and finish times provide options for juggling work life and personal commitments. The flexible working law gives all employees the right to request to work from home so long as they can come to terms with their employer.
To make a request, workers are required to have been employed by the company for a minimum of 26 weeks. Employers are required to deal with such requests in a timely manner. Of course, employers are not bound to honor a specific request. They are simply required to consider it and render a decision. The employer may deny the request if they feel it is not in their best interest and the worker can make an appeal to an employment tribunal.
The flexible working law can include several types. Job sharing allows for two people to perform a single job while splitting the hours. Working part-time hours is an option as is working compressed hours, which means working longer hours over fewer days. Flexitime allows for employees to choose their starting and ending times, although these times need to be agreed upon by employers. Annualised hours allow employees to work a certain amount of hours over the course of a year with flexibility about when those hours are. Staggered hours may see an employee work at different times than their coworkers. Phased retirement allows employees to choose the age at which they will retire. A reduction in hours is also an option for these employees.
In order to take advantage of this law, an employee must make a statutory application where he or she puts their request in writing after which the employer has three months to make a decision. Upon agreement, the necessary changes are made to the employee contract. If the employer declines, they must state their reasons in writing and the employee can then make a complaint to an employment tribunal.
Working from home can be accomplished with a remote desktop, a VPN or virtual private network and software such as Teamviewer or LogMeIn. These SaaS (Software as a Service) companies use cloud storage to allow people to work remotely while staying connected.
If your request to work remotely has been granted by your employer, you’ll need to make sure your home office is suitably equipped. You’ll need a reliable network connection and proper IT support. AGT Computers can help set your home office up in Preston, Lytham or Blackpool. Call us today.
Now hold on a minute, back up. We couldn’t let such an important event as World Backup Day go by without mentioning it. World Backup Day commences on 31st March this year which gives us an opportunity to remind both individuals and business owners about the importance of backing up their files. It is estimated that as much as 30 percent of computer users have never backed up their files. Ever. If a disaster struck that left their hard drives permanently disabled, how could they ever recover their files? They couldn’t, and as a result they would lose family photos, important documents and other files they will be hard pressed to replace. This is bad enough for an individual, but if you’re a business, you can’t afford to lose your customers’ data, or your own for that matter. It is absolutely necessary to perform regular system backups to protect yourself and others.
You never know when a disaster may strike. It could be a case of severe weather that floods equipment, or an electrical storm that causes damage to a network — even a flood could sink your data files. It’s hard to put a monetary value on all that lost data, but it would be quite expensive. To combat this, all of your system software and information should be backed up on a regular basis. Performing a cloud backup is well advised, and using a professional service such as AGT Computer Services can help safeguard your systems. USB hard drives and rotating hard drives may not offer enough protection by themselves. Even using a fireproof safe to protect a portable drive may not be enough to protect against damage entirely. Storing files in the cloud is added protection from any harmful event that may occur. A cloud backup can either involve a subscription backup service or an off-site FTP server with the backup performed over the Internet.
World Backup Day is a good time to start thinking about the future of data storage as well. Over the course of the next few years, data storage will be seeing a transition in format. 512-byte sector hard disk drives will be changing over to 4,096-byte sector drives. This may present an issue with users of Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2011. This sector, also known at 4K or 4KB, is more reliable and has an increased capacity, but this may cause issues with compatibility in current software applications and operating systems. If you use Windows operating systems it will be important to stay on top of this issue to ensure a smooth transition.
While World Backup Day may serve as a reminder of the importance of performing backups, but this should not be considered an annual event. Small businesses should be backing up their files continuously. If you operate a business in Blackpool, Preston or Lytham, contact AGT Computer Services to find out how we can help you protect your systems and data. Everyone who uses a computer should consider every day to be World Backup Day. We do.
If your company needs to make a Microsoft Office 365 migration, but you don’t employ in-house IT support, this need not be an obstacle for you. If you are operating your business in Blackpool, Lytham, Preston or Lancashire and you need to perform an Office 365 Migration to Microsoft Servers, AGT Computer Services offers solutions to make this transition seamless. We can also help you set up and maintain Office 365 Exchange Online so that you can stay connected to your employees and your customers and maintain complete control of calendars, mailboxes and contact managers.
Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium
Office 365 is available in several different packages, but the Business Premium Plan provides the overall best value. With this plan your company will receive the full installation of Microsoft Office applications for up to five PCs or Macs. This includes Excel, Word, Powerpoint, OneNote and Publisher, as well as one terabyte of file sharing and storage space. Full installation is also available for up to five phones and tablets. Some of the outstanding features that come standard with the Business Premium Plan include business class email, calendars and online audio and video conferencing capabilities with Skype and instant messaging. Access to the Yammer platform allows employees to connect and collaborate no matter which business applications they use. You’ll always have access to the latest versions of Office applications across all devices and the Business Premium Plan supports up to 300 users. Syncing files is a cinch and multiple users can edit documents in real time. Office 365 is easy to set up and use. In fact, it’s all the IT you need and the yearly cost is only £93.60 plus VAT.
Office 365 Exchange Online
Once migration to the new Microsoft Exchange server has been achieved, your business is ready to set up Microsoft Exchange Online. This e-mail based server allows for collaborative communication between multiple users throughout your company. As an authorized Microsoft reseller, AGT can assist your business with this transition.When your business needs to migrate to the Cloud in Blackpool or Lytham, Preston or Lancashire, AGT Computer Services can perform that task for £30.00 per year plus VAT. For a charge of £95.00 per mailbox, our Exchange Online migration offers solutions to protect your company’s information. Security experts provide 24 hour monitoring to protect data. Malware and antivirus protection and anti-spam filtering offers protection to your mailboxes, and you can rest easy knowing your sensitive data is secure on multiple servers so that data can be recovered fully in the event of an emergency. With 99.9% uptime, your e-mail will never be down and communication will be constant between you, your employees and your customers. The admin center is intuitive and allows you to stay in control, which eliminates the need for in-house IT support.
Start Your Migration Today
If you operate in Blackpool, Lytham, Preston, Lancashire or the surrounding area, AGT Computer Services offers reliability and protection for your Office 365 applications and Exchange Online. As an authorised Microsoft reseller, we deliver personalised, customisable IT solutions and support for your Office applications. Big or small, we provide plans that fit your company’s size and budget and allow you to stay connected while being protected.
The Grand Twenty Two is an expansion on their current hotel. requests for a full hotel wireless system throughout the hotel so staff and customers would be able to connect via laptops, tablets and smartphones.
A Full secure wireless system throughout four floors, kitchen and lounging area. It was the Grand Hotels commitment to providing guests with a first class WIFI experience using the highest specification Wireless and Wired networking solution.
In Microsoft’s License terms they will allow you to Downgrade Windows 8 to Windows 7 but unfortunately it has to be the Professional version. So you will need;
Windows 8 Professional Key (more about this later)
The most important thing to do is to find your product key, with windows 7 this used to be a sticky lable on the bottom of your laptop/computer, now they it’s imbeded into your laptop which you can’t physically see. This is great when installing windows 8 because it automatically finds the key and activates! but when downgrading to windows 7 this can be a pain. To find your windows 8 key you have a couple of free options see here;
Make sure you keep your product key in a safe place, if everything goes wrong and you want to revert back to windows 8 you will need this key.
Do your Driver Homework
This next step is equally important, you will need to find out if you hardware supports windows 7. For this you will need to visit the manufactors website and check out the drivers – for todays example i am using a Lenovo Ideapad U310 UltraBook.
As you can see from the screenshot below the laptop was purchased for windows 8 pro but DOES support windows 7. I have downgraded a few windows 8 pro laptops recently and the wireless driver was the one i had the most problems with so just triple check it clearly has one like below.
Backup!
Please backup all your music, documents, pictures, movies, favourites, and any program license keys! the next step is where we wipe everything!
Change UEFI Settings and Enable Legacy Boot
Next, we need to change the bios settings, please follow my instructions as booting straight into the bios by pressing the del key, will for some unknown reason make windows 7 crash during installation. So first hover to the bottom right corner and open up the charms bar and click on the gear icon.
Click Change PC Settings at the very bottom, then into general on the left hand side, scroll to the bottom on the right hand side and click Restart now underneath Advance Start Up.
This will open up a blue screen, select troubleshoot, advanced options, then select UEFI Firmware settings, then restart.
This will open up your bios screen, in the advanced settings part of this screen you may have a few different options and is really down to how the bios is written, take a look at these examples that it could be;
Enable Legacy boot from UEFI boot
Disable UEFI boot.
Disable Secure Boot
In my case i had to change the boot mode, see below.
Installation and Activation
While you’re in the bios change the boot order either USB, CD/DVD, or Network and save settings then reboot. After you have installed windows 7 with ALL!!! Drivers, it is the time to activate. For this you will need to click on windows activation, click on the telephone activation and you will need to speak with an advisor. Tell them you have windows 8 pro and you are downgrading to windows 7 pro, give them your key over the phone and they will convert it into the numeric id that you will need to enter into the activation box and this will give you the fully genuine actvated version of windows 7 and we are done!
PLEASE NOTE every time i have phoned windows for telephone activation a couple of the call centre people did not know what i was on about and they said i can’t do it, i had to put the phone down and re-dial until somebody knew what to do.
BT and other competitors are taking orders for Fibre optic broadband in the Fylde Area.
BT have been upgrading the Exchanges in rapid time and on schedule. Some orders for our clients have already been carried out last week! The cost of the upgrade is a massive £2.5 billion from BT which aims to cover two-thirds of the all UK homes and Business by 2015.
Oh Lancashire is wonderful! Now with Fibre Optic Broadband
The first areas to start accepting orders are St Annes, Poulton, Cleveleys and Fleetwood. So call your supplier now and Demand Fibre Optic!
Next up will be Lytham St Annes and Great Eccleston by the end of September This Year!
By the end of 2013 the center of Blackpool and Kirkham
By the end of 2014 North Shore, South Shore, Marton, Freckleton, Hambleton, Knott End and Pilling
and finally by the end of 2015 Weeton (Sorry Guys!)
Click the Map
How Fast, is fast?
Some say fibre optic broadband is so fast that when you turn your light out, you can be in bed before it gets dark!
To give you an idea on how fast fibre optic broadband is, see the table below.
FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) this is the faster option out of the two, it’s a full fibre based product from the exchange to your home with speeds from 100mb download and 30mb upload. Unfortunately for us in st annes and lytham we will only be getting, FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet). This is fibre from your exchange up to the green cabinets in the streets. (the BT Chaps sitting on little stools are always at them!) Then from the green cabinets, a black copper wire from the telephone poles into your home. I am not complaining though! Honest! the FTTC speeds are up to 80mb download and 20mb upload. Hurray!
