ROCC Blogs - Technical and Service

05/02/2012

Everything Everywhere - the company behind Orange and T-Mobile - along with BT Wholesale announced in January that they were extending their trial of 4G LTE in Cornwall until the end of June. 4G is the next generation of mobile infrastructure and will bring with it much faster speeds, better coverage and cheaper charges for usage. Peak download speeds for 4G LTE are as high as 1 Gbit/s when standing still, or 100 Mbit/s when moving. By contrast 3G networks offer speeds of just 200 kbit/s.

4G isn't just about speed however. It will be the answer to the issues that rural areas have with getting connected to the internet and is currently being used in Cornwall by 180 trial customers in a similar way to WiFi.

The ROCC Uniclass Mobile application is a thin client mobile worker solution that provides our clients with the flexibility of using any mobile device, no cost deployment to workers and total ease of use for any level of worker.

Uniclass Mobile has been specifically designed to load quickly and perform exceptionally well over the existing 3G infrastrcuture and provides local offline storage for when connection to the internet is a problem. The move towards 4G will further strengthen the benefits of choosing a web based mobile solution.

The Uniclass Mobile solution is suitable for both Social Housing Software and Waste Management Systems.

12/11/2011

I was overjoyed when Adobe confirmed recently that they would bid farewell to their Flash for mobile platform. We've been early adopters of HTML5 at ROCC and have ensured our new developments both for mobile and the desktop are making full use of HTML5's capabilities. Adobe have stated that HTML5 is "best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms."

02/09/2011

I'm pleased to announce the upcoming release on September 9th of the latest version of the Uniclass Mobile solution for social housing. The new release further strengthens our mobile worker solution providing enhanced levels of functionality and performance.

Personally I'm exceptionally proud of the efforts put in by our team here to make Uniclass Mobile a complete solution for modern remote workers. The attention to detail during the design and development process and constant focus on the end user experience has ensured our mobile solution gives users a modern smartphone app look and feel that is simple and fast to use. More details of our mobile worker solutions are available here: Uniclass Mobile 

13/06/2011

At the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs put another nail in the coffin of the traditional PC by announcing the launch of the iCloud in the Autumn with iOS 5. The purpose of the iCloud is to set your Apple devices free from being tethered to a traditional PC. Content will be synched automatically to the cloud and shared amongst a users Apple devices.

Great concept although I'm sure it's going to cause many a CIO a lot of headaches worrying about how to ensure personal and work related content are separated and obviously data security is going to be a huge concern.

Concerns aside, the march towards us all living and working completely in the cloud continues.

From my point of view this is exciting news as it confirms where I see our market going in the years to come and that application design has got to focus on users working from a range of mobile devices and not always traditional PC's and that delivery of software has to be manageable from the cloud.

04/05/2011

Always hungry for feedback from our customers we have recently issued an online feedback form to allow customers attending any of our Uniclass training sessions to provide confidential feedback direct to myself. This is being used for the first time next week alongside a bespoke customer training session. I'm looking forward to getting feedback fired straight from our website to my inbox.

While I'm discussing feedback I'd like to thank our ITC customers for all the feedback provided in the last couple of weeks through our Customer Care Program. The feedback has been extremely helpful and allows us to constantly review how we are performing. As a message to all our customers, if you receive a feedback request from us, I would urge you to complete it honestly and send it back to us. We always read and action all positive and negative feedback we receive.

08/04/2011

Many Windows 7 and Vista users will have noticed that Microsoft have released version 9 of their Internet Explorer web browser in March. This is a big release for the browser in that it directly responds to many of the criticisms that have been levelled at it in the past and it competes directly with Google's latest version of Chrome. The new browser has some nice features such as the enhanced tab browsing allowing you to open web pages side by side. Although there are some nice new features, it's never advisable to jump too quickly to any new release and so ROCC will begin certifying the Uniclass product set with Internet Explorer 9 in May 2011. Once we have completed our testing and sign off, I will post an update here and to our Twitter feed.

30/03/2011

The buzz about "The Cloud" has been going on for quite a while now and the people I talk to either don't understand exactly what the cloud is or they just shout in exasperation "It's just hosting!". In my opinion, whatever you want to call it, "The Cloud" is the future of IT. It seems only logical to me that as businesses and consumers want to spend less time worrying about IT and more time getting the job done, they will slowly and albeit sometimes reluctantly move towards cloud based services. With this in mind I thought it about time I put together an article which explains exactly what the cloud is and what it can do. Have a read of it here: Demystifying the Cloud 

09/02/2011

We've been busy over the last couple of month's renewing our Microsoft partnership and as always Microsoft have made it very interesting with a complete change in how partnerships are obtained. We've focused on the two main areas of our Microsoft business and have opted for the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Midmarket Solution Provider competencies.

We have achieved the ISV competency and are currently working on finalising the Midmarket Solution Provider. The ISV competency required us to put our Uniclass application through of series of test's to ensure it is fully compliant with a Windows Server 2008 environment.

02/02/2011

Back in November 2010 I made a promise to our customer base that I would make our helpdesk service more transparent to them. December saw the first phase of this promise completed with our new logging system, ensuring timely communication is fed back to the client during the lifetime of their call. The next phase has now been implemented and is up and running. Our customer portal will provide our user base with the ability to log calls online and more importantly be able to see the status of outstanding calls and send through updates to the helpdesk team.

We've run some trials in January and these have proved successful and February will see this rolled out to initially users of our Uniclass suite of software. We are currently planning the roll out of the portal to the rest of the ROCC business and I'll update this blog as soon as I have confirmation on dates.

All Uniclass users will be receiving an email during February with their login details and instructions on how to access the portal. As always I'd be more than happy to hear any thoughts or ideas anyone has so please get in touch.

20/12/2010

As promised to our user group in November, I'm pleased to announce our new helpdesk system has gone live today. The helpdesk team and especially the helpdesk manager Lesley Homer have done a great job in the last few weeks getting us ready. The new system will give us better control of all our customer's outstanding issues and enable us to easily carry out trend analysis and spot patterns.

An important step in my transparent service vision is the triggering of updates automatically to the customer on the change of status of outstanding support calls. Our customers will immediately begin seeing the benefits of this as soon as they log a new call with us from today.

The next step is our online self service portal where our customers will be able to monitor their calls through our helpdesk and see exactly what's happening. In addition they will be able to log calls online and see outstanding call reports.

Step 3 of the new system will be the populating of our new knowledge base which will be able to act both as a tool for our staff to aid in faster turn around of issues but also to be available to our customers via the portal.

08/12/2010

Predicting the future is often an extremely difficult thing to do (as Thomas Watson of IBM famously said "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers"), however we need to look to the future and see where our market is going and ensure we as an ISV keep ourselves competitive by  planning on meeting the needs of our customers for the coming years.

My big three for the next few years are Mobile Technology, Cloud Computing and Social Concepts and you can read my thoughts on these here: The Future of Information Technology - The ISV's View

ROCC Service - A Changing World
Written by Peter Luck

25/11/2010

November 23rd saw the new format ROCC Uniclass User Networking Event (bit of a mouthful that one ... perhaps we should call it R.U.U.N.E ... or maybe not) held in Birmingham at The Studio. The day was a great way for us to let our customers know what is going on with ROCC as a company and the products and services we provide.

I was excited to be able to announce some of the new initiatives we're currently trialling to help us provide a more transparent and proactive level of customer service.

These initiatives include:

• Proactive Support Service
• Monthly Customer Focus
• Performance Assessment Visits

In addition I was pleased to let everyone know our new helpdesk system would be going live on December 20th. The new system is going to enable us, in the new year to provide online call logging and reporting to our customers.

All this was received really well by our customers.

I'd like to say thanks to the customers who attended my afternoon service improvement workshop. Some good feedback and ideas were discussed and I've got a whole host of issues to look into. In fact those of you who fed back to me regarding documentation and release notes, you'll be pleased to know we had an internal service review on Friday and I'm putting together a team to look at ways we can improve this.

Welcome
Written by Peter Luck

24/11/2010

Welcome to the Technical and Service blog. This is the blog to follow if you want to keep up to date with changes and developments in ROCC Uniclass services and product enhancements.