One of my customers has been trying to address a couple of issues with their mobile work force.

• They sell items that are out of stock
• They don't sell items that are in stock
• They call head office too often to check prices

Before talking to NettMore they had started off down the route of a Windows Mobile application that synchronized the data each time the user conected, however this prooved to be pretty time consuming to develop, tied them into their existing mobile devices and the data was out of date almost immediately.

We took the approach of using a web application. Each night an inventory file is sent to a server in our data centre. A process loads the data into the database. Users can log in and see what is available.

We spent a lot of time working out what the best search strategy was. Whether to show results with all words, or any word (ranked), and ended up with all words. We can also control whether the results returnd are in stock or not, and whether they are "fast moving stock" (current) items. They can search by part code too.

There's 2 bits of price information. The RRP Price. There's also a price code which tells the rep what level of discount they can offer.

This project delivered a number of bonuses to the customer:

1. The reps actually use it (they didn't trust the old system)
2. We know the reps are using it, and what they are searching for
3. The internal customer services use it to look up prices as it's quicker than any other system
4. I've got a list of their products with a short description of each.

Why is number 5 a bonus? Because it means that, as I host their website, I could create some pages on the website that listed all their products. And they gave me some images named by product code, so I could automatically show these next to the product.

They weren't sure at first, however they are convinced now. When they look at their web analysis stats, a significant number are arriving at the site as a result of a product specific search, and these are often tracked straight through to them requesting a catalogue.

Content is king. Even better if you can use automatically generated content appropriately!

I must be old, becuase I hate twitter. I hate the fact that you only get a limited number of characters.  I hate the fact that people put such mundane aspects of their life on it. I hate that so many people using it have no idea why they are doing so!

One of out servers is hosted at RackSpace, and last week it went down for a little while. I tried to phone, and that wasn't working either. So I went to twitter and there was already 3 or 4 people commenting on the fact that their servers were down. This is the IT equivalent of, during a power cut, sticking your head out of the front door to see whether it's just your house or the whole street. It turns out that it was the whole street.

I admit that I am a fan of Racksace. Generally their response times are incredible (fanatical even!) and while our server was down for a few minutes, it came up pretty soon. I know that we pay handsomly for this, however for this application it is worth it. I'd say it was almost as fast as I could have worked out that something was wrong and walked into my server room to see what the problem was.

Out of interest, I went back to twitter, and there they were. 10 or 12 people already moaning about the failure of their rackspace web server. I hate twitter.

I've got a client with a relatively large site - 50 odd pages - that needs re-writing to a new format. We're bringing the site up to date and developing the calls to action. The client can write copy, but they are really busy and so far we've only managed to get some of the site wrritten.

Writing copy for websites is one of those skills that, I have to admit, I've always undervalued. Generally, I've advocated getting the client to write their own copy:

• they know the business, and are usually passionate about it
• they should know their customers
• they know what they are hoping to achieve

This week, I've been doing some research on what copywriting costs and how it "works" - I mean the process of getting it done rather than how the copy works.

What I found was I read a lot. And I kept reading.

Obviously, a top position in Google should indicate some of the world's best copywriters, but I was still surprised that I wanted to keep reading, that they maintained and managed my interest. Even if the site was poorly designed and unattractive I was still prepared to keep reading.

I'm nearly converted.

I've put this client in contact with a copywriter I encountered a few months ago and given them enough information about where we're going with the website. I'll let you know how it goes!

And the cost? - Pretty much every website I read used the "how long is a piece of string" analagy. Specifically for this project  - I'm not going to tell you - though it is a lot cheaper than a busy business owner not quite getting it done.

We've done a few sites for schools. I've just been looking at the stats for a couple of these sites, and it's been really interesting.

We've had a lot of snow this week, and some schools are closed, some are open.

Both schools have a CMS on their website that's easy to use, and they've used it to update their home pages to give parents information about whether the schools are open or closed.

Even if half of the vists to the site saved a phone call then being able to update the site saved approximately 1000 phone calls a day for the school.

Well, NettMore has gone slightly greener over the Christmas break.

Over time, the number of servers that we run has slowly increased. Each time that I want to do some testing, show something to a customer or test something slightly unusual then it's safer to put it in it's own server. Many of these are only live for a short time, however a few survive.

Over Christmas, I took the plunge and set up the infrastructure for virtual servers, and have managed to move all the development servers onto a single box.

Generally the processor usage seems reasonable so far.

My only diffiiculty now is that I have to do something with the old hardware!

I’ve been trying to find a way to keep abreast of technology, learn  from others about new developments and generally have an excuse to play about with some stuff the I wouldn’t usually find the time to look at. Having not found an existing group that suits me, I thought that I’d try to see whether I could get a group of people together for a day to investigate a topic, brainstorm and discuss it possibly leading to actually building something.

From my point of view, it has to be:
- Fun and relaxed
- Interesting
- Teach me something
- Open and non competitive
- Fairly contained (i.e. up to a day long) unless otherwise decided

As a vision, it might be that at the end of the day we could have produced a “mini product”, however this might be a bit ambitions.

The sort of topics I’d like to look at are

• Silverlight
• Augmented reality
• Twitter and its API (and other social networking stuff maybe)
• Mobile apps – probably IPhone
• JQuery
• Real time search
• Cloud computing opportunities

So, what I've done is invite a few people round to my office. I'm a bit uncertain about how it's going to work as I don't want to spend lots and lots of time doing something that doesn't add any value to anyone, and I also want it to be fairly free and flexible. At the moment the outline plan is:

• Meet at the shed at 10:00 on the end of January
• 10 mins introduction and discussing what you want from the day
• 2 hours investigation, brainstorming
• Pizza for lunch
• Decide if we want to spend the afternoon actually implementing what we’ve talked about (if we’re bored, then it’s fine to finish here)

I'm quite excited as the people that I've invited are all people that I respect and admire. Some have different skills - most, though not all - are microsoft based and they range from a business focus to designers to geeks like me.

If there's any topics you think we should look at, please comment...

Having thought about it a while, I've decided to publish the prices for What Am I Doing on the website.

 Have also added pages about the addins available to help with getting better information from Outlook and Visual Studio.