With the kind support of Wakefield Council, we are holding a Microsoft Digital Town Hall Forum at Woolley Hall in Wakefield on Tuesday December 4th.
The Microsoft Digital Town Hall gives you an opportunity to find out about the latest developments across a range of Microsoft technologies and to hear about relevant customer projects. Among the technologies and solutions that will be covered on the day are mobility and collaboration, performance management, unified communications, case management and security.
Programme:
09:00 Registration
09:30 Welcome and opening remarks
10:00 Collaboration, web and content management
11:15 Mobile and flexible working
12:00 Workshops:
- Case & service management
- Unified communications
- Security & management
15:15 Infrastructure optimisation
16:00 Performance management
16:45 Next steps
The programme for the day is designed to be relevant to both business and IT professionals in local authorities, regional government agencies and public safety representatives (e.g. police, fire & rescue personnel). To reserve your place at the Microsoft Digital Town Hall at Woolley Hall, Wakefield on Tuesday December 4th:
Online: Digital Town Hall - North
Email: lrg@microsoft.com
Phone: 0870 166 6652
Posted By Ian
I was talking with a colleague this week and we were discussing the topic of accessibility. We know this is a major requirement for all public sector organisations and local authorities that strive to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to providing online services to citizens.
The facts surrounding the level of disability in the UK are quite startling. According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission around one in five people of working age are considered to be disabled. Other research sources indicate that 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour blindness and, overall, two million people in the UK have some form of sight problem.
It is almost in the category of one of Microsoft's best kept secrets but there is an excellent and highly informative part of the Microsoft website on accessibility. Here you will find lots of information on the accessibility features that are built into Microsoft products. It also provides more information on related assistive technologies and the tools available to help developers build more accessible applications.
Posted by Ian
If you have the willpower to pore over the detailed report Meeting the Aspirations of the British People, which you may recognise more by its sub-title: 2007 Pre-Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review (October 2007), you will see, set out in Annex C, the list of 198 (I think!) Public Service Agreement measures and the related outcome-focused performance indicators.
Monitoring performance, analysing results and achieving targets are part and parcel of everyday life in local and central Government. Now, I accept that business intelligence software on its own is not the silver bullet to all performance management challenges – but it certainly can make the process a lot more efficient.
Microsoft is running a series of regional events on our business intelligence solutions that only require ½-day of your time and you will find out more about how our extended portfolio of reporting, analysis and planning tools can help you with performance management in the public sector.
Locations, dates and how to register details are listed below:
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server Sustain Events
LONDON – 19TH November
Customer AM session – Auditorium 1, Victoria office
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032356729&Culture=en-GB
Tel: 0870 166 6680 ref 6729
LONDON - 28TH November
Customer AM session – Meeting room 5, Victoria office
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032356839&Culture=en-GB
Tel: 0870 166 6680 ref 6839
EDINBURGH - 22nd January
Customer AM session – Spey conference room, Edinburgh Office
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032355870&Culture=en-GB
Tel: 0870 166 6680 ref 5870
READING – 20th February
Customer AM session – Memphis, TVP Office
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032356963&Culture=en-GB
Tel: 0870 166 6680 ref 6963
MANCHESTER – 12th March
Customer AM session – Renaissance Hotel, Rapheal Suite
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032357157&Culture=en-GB
Tel: 0870 166 6683
TechNet is pleased to announce the second series of technical events
“TechNet on the Road”
We will again be stepping away from PPT and concentrating on a demo-packed full day. We will be visiting 5 locations (Reading, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Falkirk)
There are 3 separate sessions:1) Beyond SharePoint – a look at Microsoft Office Performance Point 2007 and Enterprise Search2) Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services and System Center3) SQL Server 2008
The Dates
22 November 2007, London: SQL Server 2008 Pervasive Insights
27 November 2007, Falkirk: Beyond SharePoint: Advanced Solutions in Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search
27 November 2007, Falkirk: How to take online backups of running applications via System Center Data Protection Manager AND how to provide secure remote access to applications via Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
27 November 2007, Falkirk: SQL Server 2008 Pervasive Insights
29 November 2007, Manchester: Beyond SharePoint: Advanced Solutions in Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search
29th November 2007, Manchester: How to take online backups of running applications via System Center Data Protection Manager AND how to provide secure remote access to applications via Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
29 November 2007, Manchester: SQL Server 2008 Pervasive Insights
4 December 2007, Newcastle: Beyond SharePoint: Advanced Solutions in Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search
4 December 2007, Newcastle: How to take online backups of running applications via System Center Data Protection Manager AND how to provide secure remote access to applications via Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
4 December 2007, Newcastle: SQL Server 2008 Pervasive Insights
5 December 2007, London: Beyond SharePoint: Advanced Solutions in Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search
5 December 2007, London: How to take online backups of running applications via System Center Data Protection Manager AND how to provide secure remote access to applications via Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
7 December 2007, Reading: Beyond SharePoint: Advanced Solutions in Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search
7 December 2007, Reading: How to take online backups of running applications via System Center Data Protection Manager AND how to provide secure remote access to applications via Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
Licensing
Again back by popular demand! Jackie Elleker scored some of the best presenter scores with these events previously! Attend this course to understand Microsoft Licensing and how best to apply it in your company to fit in with your business needs. This session is aimed at IT professionals who wish to gain a better understanding of Microsoft’s software licensing. The briefing assumes no previous or in-depth technical licensing experience.
21st November, Reading
Register Now!
Posted By Sandeep
Like last week's posting, on 10 ways to work more securely, was a handy way of reminding your staff about common sense steps that they can take to keep their own personal PCs secure, as well as contributing to the organisation security you're managing. Well, here's another list in a similar vein, that you may want to promote to them in a similar way. This may be especially important if you have staff using their laptop computers for surfing the web at home and while out and about. If they've got government data on the laptop, you want to ensure that data is as secure as possible - and the simple act of connecting to the free wireless connection at their local McDonalds could compromise it. So here's the top 7 tips:
The full article, with tips on how to enable some of these things, is on our At Work newsletter pages. Perhaps you could use the link to the Microsoft website to encourage your colleagues to follow good practice when it comes to laptop security.
Posted by Sandeep
Developing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a vital way to improve business agility, using your existing IT assets. Microsoft is holding a SOA & Business Process Management (BPM) Conference on 14 November at our Reading campus, where experts will present the latest thinking on a range of key issues.
The event includes keynote sessions covering Microsoft's future platform roadmap, as well as the choice of focused conference tracks. These tracks span subjects such as the Microsoft Office approach to SOA, Office Business Applications and Microsoft's strategy for Software-as-a-Service.
At the conference you'll gain insights from real-world SOA customer case studies. Speakers include leading analysts as well as Microsoft product teams, and you'll also benefit from valuable networking opportunities.
This event will be particularly valuable to senior IT professionals across both the public and commercial sectors who want to know more about Microsoft’s SOA and Business Process Management (BPM) strategies. Independent industry experts and Microsoft specialists will share their knowledge and vision through keynote sessions and focused conference tracks.
Agenda:
8:30am - 9:00am
Registration
9:00am - 1:00pm
SOA, BPM and Microsoft - Leading Analyst PerspectiveRealising the Potential of Service Oriented Architecture: MicrosoftBPM on the Microsoft Platform: Microsoft & BPM Partner PNMSoft
1:00pm - 2:00pm
Lunch
2:00pm - 5:30pm
Choice of focused tracksBizTalk Roadmap Next Platform: Microsoft
5:30pm
Close & Networking
You can Register now online or by phone: +44 870 166 6640 (Ref 4277)
Customers often say to me, “There is all this talk of unified communications in today’s technology press but what does it really mean?”. In simple terms, I explain that it is a way of joining an organisations’ voice and data networks in order to reduce costs and improve productivity.
This is really important to government today for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR07) will put more pressure on organisations to deliver services at existing if not better levels of quality but with less budget. Secondly, departments have clear targets to reduce business travel to cut carbon emissions. Lastly, as a result of transformational government, smarter collaborative working between colleagues, suppliers and partners is crucial. This is where a workable low cost desktop video conferencing solution can make a huge impact.
The reality is that the stand-alone technologies to deliver unified communications have been around for many years – for example, instant messaging is prevalent with consumers and web conferencing is common place. What is new is the ability to bring all these components together and integrate them with existing tools such as email and intranets. Unified communications enables individual users to signpost to others where they are, what they are doing and the best way to contact or communicate with them at any given point in time. This saves endless telephone messages going back and forth (according to Gartner, 60% of telephone calls result in a voicemail).
Of course there are challenges. Innovating at the required pace to meet the goals of transformational government is sometimes difficult with a traditional outsourcer relationship between customer and supplier. In today’s challenging environment, suppliers need to be more innovative and share risk to become a more trusted business partner.
Technology continues to change rapidly. As soon as you implement one system, the technology has changed or there is another hot topic of the day which means you have to rethink, or even worse, scrap what you have already done. Right? Well actually no, you can implement unified communications with little or no change to existing infrastructure.
There are sometime significant challenges from an infrastructure perspective. Most data networks in place today were not designed to cater for the increased bandwidth requirements of rich media. The web is about to undertake a huge transformation in the guise of Web 2.0 as a consequence of this. 3G uptake has been slower than expected and the user experience of browsing the web with a mobile device versus a business or home machine is very inconsistent. This is where leading innovators such as Nortel are setting the pace of change to address these challenges - the Innovative Communications Alliance between Microsoft and Nortel offers customers effective solutions to address their communications requirements.
You can find out more about Microsoft’s unified communications tools here and you can contact the author of this blog entry at: shaun.taylor@microsoft.com.
Posted by Shaun Taylor
Last week, Microsoft and the Cabinet Office held a conference to update local authorities and central government agencies on progress to-date with the Government Gateway - the website UK citizens use to register for online government services. It is an important part of the government's strategy of delivering 'joined up' government, enabling people to communicate and make transactions with government from a single point of entry.
Since its inception as a project in 2001, Government Gateway has come a long way. In fact, you are probably a Government Gateway user (whether you realise it or not!). If you do your tax return online, have ever asked for a pension forecast, registered to be a blood donor, applied for a provisional driving licence or booked a ticket for the Portaferry to Strangford ferry in Northern Ireland online then you are a Government Gateway user.
The Government Gateway is the centralised registration service that enables millions of users to sign up for secure Government services online. In round numbers, Government Gateway currently has 11 million users and handles 20 million transactions for 125 secure online government services spanning 12 central Government departments, 14 Government agencies and 35 local authorities.
Yes, Microsoft software is at the core of Government Gateway but that is not the reason for this blog entry. It is simply to remind you that if you have not checked recently the range of services you can transact online via the gateway then visit: http://www.gateway.gov.uk/
The next Microsoft Live Meeting for the Public Sector, on the topic of Performance Management, takes place on Tuesday October 23rd from 10:00 – 11:00.
This Live Meeting introduces the new business intelligence solution from Microsoft – Office PerformancePoint Server (MOPPS) 2007 – which provides all of the functionality that is needed for performance management including scorecards, dashboards, management reporting, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation.
Our Live Meeting will introduce you to the new technology and include a demonstration of its practical application in a local authority environment. The Microsoft partner, Information Management Group (IMGroup), will also outline their understanding of how to deploy performance management solutions on the Microsoft platform for public sector organisations such as the Home Office, the London Development Agency and the Office For Standards in Education.
All you need to do to take part in the Microsoft Live Meeting on Performance Management in the Public Sector on Tuesday October 23rd from 10:00 -11:00 is to activate the following web URL on your browser and connect to the conference call line:
Live Meeting Web URL:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032356680&Culture=en-GB
Live Meeting Conference Call Number (only required if not listening via the Internet):
Telephone: 0118 909 2000
Access Pin: 1796572
What's the biggest risk to your IT system security? Probably your users! For all of the efforts that you make, it only takes one user to do something really dumb inappropriate, and suddenly you're back to firefighting.
And how many times have you had to remind your users about some of the things in this list?
As everybody starts to get going again after their summer holidays, you might want to remind all of your users about these rules again. We recently covered this list, with further advice and actions, in our At Work newsletter, so if it adds power to your message, then send them this link, or find another way to put the page in front of them (how about redirecting their home page for a week until they get the message!). And this list is also (mostly) applicable for home users too, and with increased connectivity between home computers and your systems, the more you can encourage good practice on any computer, the better protected you are.
Posted by Ray