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Further to the support of Worcestershire children’s charity, Mentor Link, by Kidderminster Harriers FC and OGL Computer via a donation of £1 from the sale of evey replica shirt, OGL is also looking to support Mentor Link by recruiting volunteer mentors from across the company’s 180 members of staff.
Mentor Link trains and provides ‘mentors’, volunteer adults who befriend and support children who are experiencing a range of difficulties, from low confidence and bad behaviour to family-based issues. Now, Mentor Link and OGL are investigating the possibility of involving keen, committed members of OGL’s workforce as potential mentors.
For Mentor Link, if potential candidates were selected from OGL, this would provide welcome additional resources. For OGL, providing mentors would present an opportunity to further engage with and support the local community, especially considering that the majority of the company’s workforce reside in and around the Wyre Forest district.
For more information on the work of Mentor Link, visit the website www.mentorlink.org.uk
IT User magazine is now here: the new publication designed to help business users of IT, from IT directors to network administrators to IT end-users, get the most from their IT.
Download the magazine from the OGL homepage. The first issue’s feature article focuses on data backup and disaster recovery; principally, how you should backup your data and how you can create the most effective DR plan.
On a similar theme, the article Proactive Administration discusses how a hands-on approach to managing your IT with a regular ‘service’, can ensure the most effective, efficient system.
The magazine is also complete with news from OGL and the wider IT industry, with staff profiles and a customer focus.
Download the magazine now and let us know what you think by e-mailing OGL’s Marketing Manager, Alex Byles, on alex.byles@ogl.co.uk or by calling 01299 873 873.
Forget Lord Sugar: OGL has its own leader of the Apprentice in Paul Richards, Head of HR and Training, who will host an Apprentice-style competition offering six Sales Academy roles to the winning candidates of an intensive selection process, taking place throughout September and October.
OGL Computer is inviting applications until Friday 14 October from dynamic, enthusiastic candidates who are just beginning their careers in sales or who are looking for the opportunity to break into the field. Experience is a bonus, but Paul and his team are looking for candidates with the drive and dedication to progress in a sales environment, meaning that recruits with no sales training are free to apply.
Selected candidates’ commitment will be tested in OGL’s Apprentice-style selection process, which will involve group exercises, role plays, one-to-one presentations and interviews, taking place at assessment centres over the coming weeks. The six winning candidates from OGL’s assessment centres will then formally join OGL and begin the Sales Academy, involving up to 12 months’ training in techniques from across the sales spectrum, provided by OGL’s sales training team.
For OGL, this means that the company can garner the sales consultants of tomorrow, using a tested technique. Indeed, current OGL Sales Manager Lee Reece came to OGL through the same process. For the selected candidates, the Sales Academy means full sales training and the possibility of career progression within OGL.
Interested candidates should send their CV and an e-mail explaining why they wish to apply to careers@ogl.co.uk For more information visit www.ogl.co.uk/careers or call 01299 873 873.
With over 180 members of staff spread across two sites, today OGL Computer is one of central England’s biggest providers of IT Support and IT Solutions for business large and small. This August, the company is celebrating an anniversary of 35 years in business, an age which also makes it one of the oldest and most established IT companies in the UK.
Today, OGL provides premier IT Support and cutting edge IT Solutions, including IT hardware infrastructure installation, disaster recovery, business continuity, IT Security, e-commerce and website development, and the company also has partnerships with the world’s leading brands in IT, including Microsoft and HP. However, despite today’s impressive setting, OGL’s beginnings originated from a smaller scale.
In 1976, OGL was established in neighbouring Worcestershire to provide, service and repair Olivetti typewriters for businesses in the Midlands – hence the name OGL, standing for Oliquip Group Limited. In the early 1980’s and with the development of Olivetti’s first computers, coinciding with the first significant emergence of computers in the business workplace, OGL began providing and supporting the earliest models. At the same time, the company also began its work in software development with its own early stock control and accounts package.
The beginning of the 1990s saw the boom in modern computing as we know it today. The technical specifications of servers rocketed as prices dropped, allowing businesses to network PCs together to share resources, applications and data. As a result, the use of PCs in the workplace became far more prevalent. OGL identified this market trend and while increasing its installation and support of IT infrastructures, the company also became one of the UK’s earliest partners of both Microsoft and HP. Still accredited by these leading brands in IT to this day, partnership provided the most advanced training and guidance on the latest technologies, as well as affording high product availability and competitive pricing to businesses in the Midlands.
To accommodate its continued expansion in installing and supporting IT infrastructures to an increasingly large amount of business in the Midlands, in the early years of the 2000’s OGL Computer opened an additional premises, where OGL’s Technical Centre continues to be based today. With the company’s growing expertise in software development and to meet increasing market demand, the company also released its flagship software, prof.ITplus: over 60 man years in the creation, prof.ITplus remains the industry’s leading business management software for stockists and distributors of products in a variety of market sectors.
Today OGL provides IT Support & Solutions to over 1,000 organisations large and small throughout the Midlands including Gloucestershire and Cheltenham, and the company is focussed on providing for a business’ complete IT needs.
In addition to remote and onsite IT Support, provided by OGL’s team of fully qualified IT Technicians, the company can also provide solutions including disaster recovery. OGL has recently launched its own Disaster Recovery Suite, complete with PC workstations and office facilities, which a business can relocate to in the event of a disaster at their premises. Meanwhile, OGL can provide an automated backup of a business’ data and protect it at its own maximum security Data Centre, thanks to its Offsite Recovery disaster recovery solution.
“OGL Computer provides a partnership in IT with businesses in Cheltenham and around the Midlands,” says OGL’s Marketing Manager, Alex Byles. “This means that we can provide high level technical assistance on specific IT projects to an existing IT department, or we can offer comprehensive IT Support and proactive IT administration to smaller organisations which may not have capacity for their own dedicated IT expertise.”
Visit www.ogl.co.uk for all your business IT needs.
While OGL Computer and Kidderminster Harriers Football Club have confirmed the continued relationship for the 2011/12 season, both organisations are also joining forces to help Mentor Link, with £1 from each sale of the new Harriers’ shirt, sponsored by OGL, being donated to the Bewdley-based charity.
Mentor Link is a registered charity dedicated to recruiting and training volunteer mentors from the community to schools in Worcestershire. The volunteers will befriend and support those young people identified by the schools as facing difficulties for example deprivation, family breakdown, substance misuse, illness, bereavement, crime and neglect. The aim of the mentor is to listen to, support and encourage the young people with the aim of creating a more positive attitude towards themselves and learning. Mentor Link seeks to help those young people who lack a positive adult role model in their lives with the provision of regular one to one support and aim to increase their confidence, social skills and attitude towards learning. During the organisation’s eight-year history, it has had many success stories and has gained a good reputation with families, young people and schools in the area.
Volunteers to Mentor Link come from a wide variety of social and career backgrounds. For more information, visit www.mentorlink.org.uk
On 16 June OGL is very pleased to present WatchGuard Product Development Manager, James Taylor, in a choice of two webinars, where he will explain how you can maximise the security and protection of your IT network.
At 1000hrs – 1025hrs, Maximising the control and optimisation of network security, ideally suited to IT Directors & Managers, is a concise, info-packed presentation, providing technical advice on how to optimise the protection and control of your network from both external and internal threats, including Application Control and Web Blocking. James will also elaborate on the effective management of your WAN connection, explaining dynamic routing and control management using WatchGuard’s GUI.
At 1200hrs – 1225hrs, Ensuring network security: a practical business guide, is ideally suited to Managing Directors, Financial Directors and Office Managers. This presentation provides clear advice on the practical threat of network security risks and the potential cost to unprotected businesses. James will then offer fundamental advice which your business can apply to ensure maximum security from threats both external and internal to your network, and also how to maximise productivity when allowing internet access.
Register now for the free webinar – Click here!
Over the years businesses have become increasingly reliant on their IT systems. As a result server downtime could severely disrupt an organisation’s operation and the possibility of critical applications failing and causing costly disruption is a threat which every business needs to consider. Failure to monitor your server performance can result in a data backup failure, termination of operational productivity, failure to complete projects to deadline, wasted man-hours as well as virus and security threats.
You may not have the time, resources or expertise to monitor your servers and critical applications but there is a way to do this without it taking up time or the requirement for more resources or expertise. Remote monitoring maximises operational uptime by providing continuous monitoring of your Microsoft Windows servers, detecting early warning signs of potential problems and in many cases, takes preventative action before users are impacted and productivity is reduced.
Remote monitoring can be a fully managed service, meaning that the service provider is responsible for detecting and fixing any faults that may occur. In addition to remote monitoring of your servers, you can also employ monitoring of your workstations to ensure the maximum uptime of your IT infrastructure.
OGL offers a fully managed Remote Monitoring Service which monitors your servers on a continuous basis. OGL’s Remote Monitoring Service aims to validate a server error within 15 working minutes through automatic notification of the fault being received. The fault is then logged and OGL remotely connects to the server to resolve the server error.
The Remote Monitoring Service gives you confidence that your IT infrastructure can remain operational because we may find, resolve and inform you of any server-based issues often before you’re aware of the situation.
If you have your own in-house IT staff we can also provide the ability to log in to OGL’s Remote Monitoring Control Panel for self monitoring. If you want to be informed of any problems with your servers out of normal business hours, the service can send you alerts by either email or SMS. For users of web enabled PDAs or Smartphones, we also offer a mobile optimised version of our web based control panel. OGL can also provide you via email, with a daily, weekly or monthly report summarising the state of your servers.
In addition to OGL’s Remote Monitoring Service we can also carry out automated inventory scans of your workstations allowing you to obtain detailed information of both the workstation hardware and installed software.
OGL’s Remote Server Monitoring Service requires only the installation of a small secure monitoring agent on each server. This has zero impact on server performance and requires no modifications to your existing firewall. Once the agent is installed we can carry out workstation asset scans without any additional software being installed on the workstations.
The Remote Monitoring Service can be combined with OGL’s IT Support Package, providing premier IT support expertise in a reliable and cost-effective contract. Optimising the potential of your IT infrastructure, our IT support partnership provides a rapid response including remote telephone support combined with fully qualified field technicians, which maximises your IT uptime. Your OGL IT support partnership also incorporates expert consultancy in account management as part of OGL’s premier service.
For advice and consultancy on remote monitoring for your organisation, please give OGL a call on 01299 873 873 or email info@ogl.co.uk
In a recent blog post we explained how to create a robust disaster recovery plan; the culmination of which determined that the most robust and easily managed disaster recovery plan combined an offsite storage location with an automatic data transfer and a rapid data recovery system.
Should the worse happen and your business falls foul to a disaster such as a fire or flood, you need to be in a position to get up and running as soon as possible. Of course this may not always be practical as the disaster may necessitatethat you vacate your premises for a period of time. OGL has considered this possibility and added a new feature to its increasingly popular Offsite Recovery disaster recovery solution.
Now forming part of our disaster recovery and business continuity package, OGL’s Technology Centre based at our Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire Head Office, has been installed with a Disaster Recovery Suite. The Suite includes desks to accommodate up to 24 people and each of these desks comes complete with telephone, PC and internet connection.
Access to your company’s files, folders, e-mail and applications will be available to each PC as normal from our data centre, thanks to a 50mbs lease line to provide fast data access. In the event of a disaster at your premises, OGL can accommodate your business and its staff, providing an excellent business environment to help you continue with your business in the critical immediate period.
The Disaster Recovery Suite also provides all of the facilities you would expect from a modern office environment, including printing, photocopying, faxing, plus the practicalities of ample on-site parking, a meeting room, plus a kitchen and shower area.
Should your business or employees not be located in proximity to the OGL Disaster Recovery Suite in Stourport, Worcestershire – less than an hour’s commute from Cheltenham -OGL is also entering into partnership with office-space providers throughout the UK with the intention of providing the same office facilities, coupled with our Offsite Recovery disaster recovery and offsite data backup system.
Whether you opt for offsite data centre storage combined with a Disaster Recovery Suite with essential office facilities, or if you still use tapes as part of your backup system, creating a robust disaster recovery plan is essential for any business. Here are essential tips your business should follow to protect against the results of a worst case scenario:
Make a data backup every day
A daily backup minimises data loss in the event of a worst case scenario.
Ensure success of your backup
Particularly if you’re using tapes and tape drives, it’s imperative that you check rather than assume that your backup has been successfully created.
Keep it offsite
When you’ve made your data backup, ensure that the data storage device is in a separate and secure location.
Consider the time of recovery
Following a disaster, if you have access to secure premises and a working server, it could still take three or more days to reinstall your data if you’re using a tape backup device. Time is of the essence in disaster recovery and upgrading to an online data access system could easily be the more cost efficient option.
For advice and consultancy on disaster recovery for your organisation call OGL Computer on 01299 873 873 or e-mail webenquiries@ogl.co.uk
Utilising the power of the internet to sell your products could represent a big increase in sales, explains OGL Computer’s Marketing Manager, Alex Byles.
If your business is involved in selling or distributing products, using the internet is a very effective route to increasing product sales. An e-commerce website can present your business to a whole new market, uninhibited by time or geographical barriers. It is also an extremely cost effective way of displaying your product range to your existing customers and to help keep them informed of your offers and developments, therefore helping to raise your sales. It’s simple to manage what product information you choose to display on your website and while selling online – or e-commerce as it’s otherwise known – can improve the customer experience by making shopping more convenient, selling more products online can also reduce the time and cost used by your business in sales and its administration.
So you want to sell online, but how do you go about it? Your obvious need is a website. At the most basic level your website needs to have an ordering facility, and ideally a secure online payment capability that your customers can use. Ideally, your website and its order and payment facility should also be integrated with your stock and sales order database software system, and if trading online is to become a significant focus for your business, automatic integration is essential; it’s key that your website developer, if you’re using one, can achieve this. Integration between your software database and your website makes e-commerce far more efficient for your business as sales orders and stock levels are processed and adjusted automatically instead of manually. For customers visiting your online shop, it means that the information displayed on your website, such as availability of your products, is up to date and accurate.
While your website can be designed in a variety of ways to suit your marketplace, it’s usually important to retain control over the uploading and management of content on your website. Put simply, if you want to promote a new product for sale on your website or quickly change prices to suit market influences, if it’s only your website developer who can do this, it could take unacceptable time – not to mention additional cost – every time you want to change your website’s content. A CMS (Content Management System) can therefore be built into your website and the website user can change relevant content on demand, with little or no knowledge of website design required.
So now you have your website, which is integrated with your stock/order database software, designed to suit your marketplace and complete with a CMS, but how do prospective customers find your website on the internet in order to buy products from you? This is the arena of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Basically, the intention is for your website to be ranked as high as possible on internet search engines, such as Google, in the results of keywords relevant to your business and its products. If you sell golf equipment, for example, when a prospective customer searches for ‘golf clubs’, it is preferable, if not essential, to feature high on the results rankings – page one of Google if possible. It’s imperative that your website developer has competency in Search Engine Optimisation and a clear understanding of the ‘key words’ or search terms that prospective customers may use to locate the products you sell.
www.oglwebservices.co.uk can provide more information on getting started with e-commerce or progressing your company’s existing online sales, or for no obligation consultancy or advice, e-mail me at alex.byles@ogl.co.uk or call 01299 873 873.
Businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on mobile or home-based out-of-office workers. Changing lifestyles can make home-working more flexible for employees, and new emerging technologies has made more out-of-office working increasingly possible for job roles frequently based ‘in the field’, such as sales representatives or on-site technicians. So too has weather conditions had an impact, with the winter’s snow preventing many from reaching their place of work, forcing working from home if the means are available.
To maximise work possibility if your staff are forced to stay at home, or indeed if you wish to promote and enable mobile, out-of-office working, your organisation requires the right hardware. A laptop or even a netbook is an obvious requirement, and if your mobile workers don’t have access to a physical internet router connection, their laptop requires either a Wi-Fi capability, if they’re working in a Wi-Fi Hotspot, or a 3G connection ability if they wish to access the internet from a remote location.
But introducing the internet also introduces potential security risks, both to your employees’ own laptops, the files and data they contain, and also the possible connection to your business’ network. Your mobile workers will likely have to access your organisation’s network to access files and to share, save and create backup records of their work, but the key is ensuring a safe connection both to and from your organisation’s network. This is the job of a firewall, which basically controls access into and out of a network, helping to prevent unauthorised access – intentional hacking – into your network and its data.
WatchGuard is the world’s leading provider of firewalls and its SSL range is the most ideally suited protection for remote-access workers as it only requires physical hardware installation at your office premises and does not need an individual software installation on your employees’ laptops. This way, access to your network is granted to your employees via a web log in page, much like how you would log in to your bank account online. OGL Computer is a WatchGuard Enterprise Partner and we regularly provide advice to businesses on how they can best protect their IT infrastructure.
While a firewall provides an excellent level of protection against those wishing to penetrate your IT network’s defences from an external location, its strength depends on the use of a standard, static password – a single password which you use repeatedly. The problem with a ‘static’ password is that it can be guessed or even acquired as often passwords are written down and are either lost or stolen. The solution is two-factor authentication combined with a one-time only password. This means that to access your IT network your mobile workers are required to provide a standard password plus an additional password (hence the two-factors) which is instantly generated for use on one occasion only. CRYPTOCard is one of the most recognised providers of such technology, providing a one-time only password to a user generated at the touch of a button on key fob.
The final link in the mobile worker’s IT chain which requires protection is the mobile laptop, net book or data storage devices themselves. Too often we hear how laptops or data memory sticks containing sensitive and private information and belonging to the government or high-profile personalities are lost or stolen. The good news is that even if your employees’ laptops or data storage devices are lost, they can be encrypted to prevent access to your data. OGL Computer provides a solution by Check Point Technologies, which, in the event of a missing laptop, you can be assured that your data hasn’t fallen into the wrong hands.
On a similar note, in addition to providing the leading anti-virus protection according to the latest IT industry reviews, which is essential for a laptop or netbook, Kaspersky Lab can also encrypt smart phones. The new Kaspersky Mobile Security for smart phones enables lost or stolen phones to be relocated, thanks to GPS technology, and can block or wipe your phone remotely, even if the original SIM card is replaced.
If your business is considering mobile working or if you wish to expand or improve your mobile IT hardware, contact one of our Mobile Working advisors on 01299 873 873, e-mail: webenquiries@ogl.co.uk
or visit www.ogl.co.uk
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