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Activ8 Blog

Here you can find the latest news on projects, updates, and developments

5-June-2009

It's not all work during the day!

Some projects are better than others. Some are more intellectually satisfying, some more creative and some are just plain enjoyable because you can make a big difference to the client. We have a

wonderful group of clients spanning education to the dairy industry but there are some real standouts. Maxum Foods is one such company

who we have seen grow amazingly over the last five years into

something really quite special.

As I sit here looking at a wall of web site concepts for Maxum amidst a heated debate over which direction to take with the design, I am reminded of why some clients are so great to work with. It's all about attitude. We throw some wacky ideas at Maxum - and they reciprocate often with equally wacky ideas. At the end of the day I'd consider we work well together as a client-designer relationship because everybody in the room is positive and wanting to move forward. The goal is clear - do everything better, faster and more cost effectively. And as a third party, being involved in such a dynamic environment is an eternal pleasure.

4-June-2009

New Hewlett Packard Generation 6 Servers

Having just installed our first generation 6 Hewlett Packard server, I can comfortably announce that they have boatloads of performance compared to their G5 predecessors! In fact its a little astounding to see the real-world performance difference between comparable G5 and G6 systems. There's a lot of bang for your buck with the new Xeon 55XX series and so far we have only seen what I would come to expect from such an industry standard server: lots of options, lots of performance, and no nasty surprises.

1-June-2009

Networks, Employees & Data Security

We have a current client considering legal action against a recently departed employee who has most obviously taken a lot of technical data with them. The question raised was, from a technical perpsective, is there any easy way to stop an employee from simply downloading the entire document shared drive? Yes and No. There are many solutions available that limit transfers, control access and generally monitor suspicious behaviour, but in my experience I have seen many that are so poorly implemented they should not even be present.

The balance of accessibility with security of data is often a terse relationship. For example in the case of this particular client, it would have been a big productivity issue to limit access or activity to a great degree. In fact the normal data transfer and access behaviour of the

staff in the office is seen as "risky" or "suspect" by most programs that

monitor this type of behaviour.

One change that this particular company is adopting is to move a lot of the controlled documents to a Sharepoint/Intranet. These documents are centrally updated but accessed by a large number of people. By moving some of the core technical documents to the sharepoint they are adding an extra level of control - and by virtue of the web-based platform, making it far more difficult for somebody to do the class drag and drop!

27-May-2009

LCP arrangements for 2010 turned upside down!

Many coordinators have contacted us in the last week to ask about Pathways development next year given the possible changes in funding and coordination for current LCP’s.

At the moment Pathways is used by a broad range of organisations, from small rural schools to metropolitan Universities. LCP’s have historically been a vital part of our company as they are, in our opinion, the epicentre of placement coordination and often the leaders in best practice.

Whatever the future may hold for LCP placement coordination units, Pathways will always strongly support the “placement broker” model as one of its key pillars. We expect there may be a lot of reporting updates and statistical changes if funding moves to a state-based approach, however rest assured we have seen many such changes in the last 15 years and don’t foresee anything dramatically difficult ahead - from a “database” perspective anyway. Come 2010, the next Pathways version will support your new requirements as it has in the past with changes such as the ASTF, ECEF and DEST updates.

20-May-2009

Continuing Professional Development

Google, Wolfram or Bing it. Most of the results are a mixed bunch of policies and random keyword matches! Why I ask? CPD is such a major part of every association and organisation that it's amazing the solutions for tracking CPD are so limited. The initial reaction may be that CPD is generally managed in the ERP's of most corporations or within the training systems. The classic problem this creates though is that by being within the ERP, only HR can access the information. Great for

multi-nationals who are used to big licencing fees, but terrible for the people who need to track CPD!

We've had a 2 year pilot for the Evolve project, which has the sole purpose of allowing associations to track the professional development of their members. However there is a twist. With Evolve, both the association AND the member can centrally log their professional deveopment themselves via a single web interface. In large assoiations this means the task of entering the development records (which are typically needed to maintain membership) is offloaded to the member themselves where it should be. Our wide scale pilot with Guidance Counselling associations in Australia has been a great proof of concept for us - and one of those surprising and rare magic bullets for a normally annoying administrative task.