Latest News

ESP Projects has teamed up with a leading Digital Region ISP to bring you an amazing offer on ‘superfast’ broadband! South Yorkshire based Not-for-Profit organisations can now enjoy huge discounts on this ‘next generation’ broadband service, which is NOW LIVE IN MANY AREAS and running at speeds of up to 40Mb/s down and 10Mb/s up (subject to availability). By purchasing through ESP, one of the fastest internet services in the country is now on offer to small and medium sized third sector organisations for roughly the same price as standard business ADSL. That’s less than £40 per month!!

The Cabinet Office has launched a new £100million Transition Fund to help the charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises that are affected by public spending cuts to make necessary adjustments so that they can continue to play an important part in public service reform and the Big Society Agenda.

The Office for Civil Society has appointed BIG Fund (non-Lottery funding operation of the Big Lottery Fund) to administer the fund. There will be a briefing event in Leeds in December. The briefing event is open to charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises which meet the following criteria:

So, we did it! And we are all alive and well and here to tell the story, so here goes..!

It all started with a 2-hour trek across the Peak District straight after work on Friday, then unpacking and setting up the tents by the light of the headlamps. By 9 pm it was raining again and so it was off to the welcoming fires of the Anchor Inn to warm up and get some Dutch courage for the day ahead.

People regularly ask us about Twitter, and we are finding out for ourselves just how phenomenally useful it is to find and share information relevant to our business, so here is Part 1 of an ongoing series of mini-articles on the subject…
First, sign-up for a free Twitter account by navigating to http://www.twitter.com and creating an account. You can tweet, follow and read people’s Tweets right there in your browser. The next step is to get a desktop-application to read and control your incoming tweets. A very popular and free one that works on all computers is http://www.tweetdeck.com.  Download and install this on your computer and you can then start to add people. You can follow people, organisations and groups you hope will be interesting. You could start with http://twitter.com/espprojects. In Twitter everyone’s address is preceded by an @-sign so we are @espprojects. Good luck!!

ESP Projects are implementing a recognised environmental management system (equivalent to phase 3 of BS 8555), with the support of Groundwork. Groundwork has secured funding from CO2 Sense Yorkshire (formerly Resource Efficiency Yorkshire) and is working in partnership with Envirowise and the Manufacturing Advisory Service to provide businesses with a comprehensive package of support to improve their environmental performance and credentials.
The programme is providing ESP Projects with:

iT4C has been sponsored by the Nominet Trust to pilot a mentoring programme. iT4C has volunteers who have an IT qualification but are not currently employed. The volunteers are supported by an experienced IT professional as their mentor to help them complete an IT project for you. Do you or an organisation you know have a project that needs them?

iT4C is looking for website work, database work, some strategy or research projects that are going to help your organisation do what it does even better with good technology to assist. Would you be happy to work with a less experienced volunteer in this supported way? There will be the chance to network with others who are joining in, get access to wider advice and support from all the programme participants and via free advice and guidance seminars. If you think you have a project that is right for a less experienced but qualified volunteer then please email the following details to iT4C at info@it4communities.org.uk :

Cloud Computing is a concept you will undoubtedly be hearing more of, so we’ve written a brief introduction covering some of the advantages & disadvantages of Cloud Computing, a rapidly growing method of working.

Essentially Cloud Computing is about saving money and time. As you will no doubt be aware, computer networks are usually owned by the people using them and all of the equipment is typically installed in the owners’ offices. Every organisation has thus invested in its own infrastructure (servers, PCs, network switches etc) and must shell out for all the costs and hassle of supporting it.

“Is it compatible with our system?” will doubtless be the question on many people’s lips when considering Windows 7. That’s not an easy one to answer directly. ‘Compatibility’ comes in many shapes & sizes, from minor glitches to out-and-out refusing to work. Moreover, any ‘system’ is little more than the sum of its parts – we’d need to know what every part ‘does’ before we can even try to advise. So, to help you (and us!), we’ve put together a handy guide to try and flesh out the foreseeable compatibility issues.

Keen to know what features are new in Windows 7? Or why many people say they like it so much? There’s plenty of information available on the web, but here are our own ‘Top Ten’ best Windows 7 features, starting from 10th place…

10. Better backup & restore.

To be fair, older versions of Windows did come with a really quite powerful backup program, but it was so nasty to use that few actually mastered it, plus it was never geared up for todays backup media. Windows 7 Backup & Restore is so simple there is almost no excuse not to use it for personal backups to a network share or external Hard Drive for example. This feature – long overdue – doesn’t get any higher up this list though for one simple reason. It’s a HUGE missed opportunity – if only it could backup mapped drives it would be the best new feature…why bother buying a tape drive and expensive server software when you can run a server backup to an encrypted partition of one of your regular laptops? Sadly, this is not possible using Windows 7 Backup and we suspect this is because it might tread on too many toes (although if you are interested, another app, Karens Replicator, from www.karenware.com will do the job instead).