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A couple of our Charity clients have mentioned recently that setting up an Amazon Wish List is an excellent way of obtaining products they would otherwise have to raise cash for. The way it works is that you do some hypothetical shopping, and then create and share a link to your Wish List via your website, twitter, email or facebook page. Potential donors can now easily buy you these products – or indeed suggest an alternative source – rather than giving you money.
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Our love affair with tablet computers shows no sign of abating, with 100m reportedly sold in 2012, compared with just 20m or so in 2010. According to some analysts, tablet sales may well exceed those of PCs before long and even last years’ sales are said to be more than trebling by 2015. Such high sales figures just can’t relate to trendy ‘early adopter’ types sporting the latest sexy designs, so who is going to be buying all of these tablets?
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Here at ESP Projects, there is nearly always someone who just can’t resist tinkering with the latest kit, and this month it seems to be Morgan’s turn, with the arrival of his new Nokia Lumia 820 Windows Phone. It’s only been a matter of days, but as we’ve posted before, so much rests on the new generation of Microsoft’s operating system we thought you’d enjoy a sneak peak of his first reflections on the device:
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Have you ever wanted to text someone but haven’t had your mobile phone handy? Or needed to send information to staff who haven’t got access to the internet? Well now you can! Esendex is a new service that allows you to send text messages to mobile phones from Outlook va SMS ( Short Message Service).
There are three main pricing packages available from Esendex:
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‘Views’ is the latest online project management and impact reporting tool designed for statutory and voluntary organisations. Developed with backing from NESTA and the Government’s Cabinet Office it helps frontline deliverers of public/social services to assess and improve what they do.
‘Views’ enables organisations to record and report against different outcome frameworks and to publish comprehensive reports in a variety of online and hardcopy formats from a single dataset. ‘Views’ helps users build detailed case histories, whilst also enabling organisations to aggregate, map and measure complex data. Whether that data is hard facts or in multimedia formats, ‘Views’ can provide a single solution for a range of different reporting requirements. Because ‘Views’ is a flexible data platform, it can be easily configured by system users according to national programme templates, or bespoke local requirements.
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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform from Microsoft.
Its single integrated platform aims to support any type of organisation and give them a customer-centred system with enhanced quality and availability of data. The highly flexible platform can be fully customised to meet any business environment, small or large, commercial or civil.
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Windows 8 is nearly here. Yes! It’s really true!
For those buying a Windows 7 PC today, you can already buy a Windows 8 upgrade for £14.99. But if you wait just 6 weeks, new PCs will begin shipping with Windows 8 pre-installed. Incidentally, that day – October 26th – will also be the day that Microsoft release their own ‘Tablet’ device called ‘Surface’, which will of course feature Windows 8.
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That’s an attention-grabbing headline! What’s happened?
There are many different forms of software licencing provided by Microsoft, and the whole system is quite complex to understand. However, many ‘Third Sector’ organisations, like charities, social enterprises and other not-for-profit organisations, have historically been able to benefit from so-called ‘Education’ discounts by virtue of being defined as ‘not-for-profit charitable organisations’. This particular price band means the cost of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional under an Open agreement for example has been around £60 instead of the full commercial rate of around £350.
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The EU Cookie Law is a new piece of privacy legislation that requires visitors to give consent before allowing a website to store or retrieve any information from any device through the use of cookies. By educating visitors on how information about them is collected through the use of cookies, and allowing them to decide for themselves if they wish to allow it to take place, the aim is to protect online privacy for everyone.
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Everybody in these days of cutbacks is very cost-sensitive and has to make savings wherever possible. One area where there might be a false economy though is in cheap toner for laser printers.
We’ve recently noticed a spate of low-price ‘refill’ toners resulting in very poor quality print and worse actually leaking into the printer, causing irreparable damage. The experience won’t the same for everyone of course, but we can say that you just don’t get these problems with the manufacturers own toner cartridges.
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Over the years we’ve done as much as we can to raise awareness of the amazing discounts available to registered charities through the CTX software donations program at http://www.ctxchange.org (run by the Charity Technology Trust). Dozens of our clients have benefited from £1000’s savings in purchasing licensing in this manner.
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Mobile bills stacking up? Do you want to ‘pool’ your minutes or make free calls between your mobiles? Maybe your current contract is due for renewal and you want to get the best price? If the answer to any of these is yes, then why not talk to ESP? We have links with an independent mobile specialist who can help ensure you are on the best package for your needs – whether your priorities are to save money month in, month out; or to get the latest smartphones up and running – the choice is yours.
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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!!
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ESP Projects is delighted to announce that we have secured a deal to take over the Digital Umbrella website design portfolio. The nationally recognised brand was previously run by High Peak CVS and found a new home at ESP Projects on 21st Feb. We extend a warm welcome to all new clients and trust that you will find our commitment to excellent customer service to your liking. ESP Projects will be continuing to offer support and website development based on Digital Umbrella’s I-CMS software and can, of course, provide those customers with other IT services such as supply and installation of networks/PCs and our comprehensive IT Support Contract.
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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:
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BPOS? It’s not exactly a catchy acronym, but this is one service that may well catch on. Microsoft have recently launched themselves firmly into the cloud with the Business Productivity Online Suite, a collection of familiar services – SharePoint, Exchange, Communicator etc. – which they will host for you, backed with an impressive SLA which includes rebates for any downtime.
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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.
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As you might have seen from our recent tweets, Microsoft announced back in the spring that they would be launching a tailored version of their Dynamics CRM software for UK charities later this year. This follows hot on the heels of its release in the US.
CRM systems (CRM meaning Customer or Constituent Relationship Management) are much in demand in the sector and we have a steady flow of requests for recommendations in this area. In the past, we have always made people aware of some of the existing software in this field, ranging from commercial products like SalesForce, to open source solutions like CiviCRM. There are also several sector-specific programs like VC-Connect, ContactLink, ThirdBase and AIMS. It will be very interesting to keep an eye out for the Microsoft offering later in the year.
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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!! -
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It was, at first, hard to think of a reason to write about a new version of the global workhorse and workplace essential that is Microsoft Office but with Office2010 it must be said that the giant-on-the-block is truly developing into the go-everywhere suite of applications. Using the application and its other web-supported features at ESP, it has been interesting to see how much this new version develops and extends previous versions while also assisting some new ways of working.
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