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This is a generic freephone telephone number used by BT India operation to show they’ve tried to contact you. If you don’t want to be contacted by their marketing people on a regular basis then you need to phone their sales team to tell them to stop the nuisance calls.
Why do we call them nuisance calls? Well a BT representative will initiate an unsolicited call and ask for details that they should already have. Let’s put this another way! They phone as BT and ask you to supply personally identifiable information that BT should already know - suspicious or what? Don’t they see why this procedure has serious data security and privacy issues?
How do people know that the call is indeed from BT without the customer hanging up and performing a 1471? They don’t! Ringing the number back is pretty worthless anyway, as all you get is a pre-recorded message saying BT phoned and they’ll call back. Again, how do customers know this isn’t part of a scam by fraudsters? You’d suppose that calling a different known BT customer service number and asking them if they called would be a solution, but no this appears to not be the case. They don’t seem to be able to tell you why they called earlier, a point revealed this morning when such an incident happened at our office. .
How do companies like BT fix this problem? They need to set-up a reverse security check system that allows us, the customers, to verify their identity! No one should be giving away data that could compromise their privacy to any person making an unsolicited telephone call.
For those of you who may have missed it, Microsoft Small Business Accounting was released a short time ago. Even although our US cousins have had their version for over a year, it took a while to get the UK version ready! It would appear that the UK and US have incompatible tax procedures and systems.
However, most people don’t realise that Microsoft have made available a simple cut down version for FREE. Yes, that’s right: zero pounds and zero pence is all you have to fork out! Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2008 will be suitable for many startup small businesses that rely on Excel and / or Word to do invoicing. It must be worth giving it a try when it’s not going to cost you a penny.
For those people who need a more feature rich version, the “Pro” version is competitively priced at £149.95. A 60 day trial is available if you’d like to see what all the buzz is about!
Microsoft looks to have designed a Sage and Quickbooks killer! Providing the Express (free) version will result in a rapid adoption of this new accounting package and result in this becoming the No1 accounting package in the UK. Move over Sage, the days of buying out any decent competition has now gone!
More information and downloads of the software can be found here.
A customer phoned this evening despondent about Sage Instant Accounts not restarting after an earlier program crash. When he tried to start it up it would report:
Username in use
The solution is fairly straight forward: delete the “QUEUE.DTA” file from the ACCDATA folder, which is usually found in one of the subfolders of the Sage program files install directory e.g. c:\Program Files\Sage\Accounts or c:\Program Files\Instant.
Sage should fire up as normal after deleting this file.
More information can be found here if you need it.
If you run into trouble finding the directory or file then try a file search with QUEUE.DTA as the filename you’re interested in finding.
Our hat goes off to the Office team for making such a difference, but then it goes back on again when we start to question why such an obvious issue was missed before the release to manufacturing of Office 2007.
If you’ve been having issues with Office 2007, and in particular Outlook, then it is definitely worth installing. You will need to go get it yourself as Microsoft aren’t pushing this out through Microsoft Update for a few months.
Thank you Microsoft and a big thank you Office Team.
Skype users may have noticed a login problem currently affecting the network. According to the updates being issued on the Skype website and status webpage, the problem should be resolved soon!
The Security Matters blog is reporting a proof of concept (PoC) that has been posted which allows denial of service (DOS) attacks on Skype. Maybe someone has taken the PoC and turned it into a real attack on the Skype system thereby bringing it to its knees. However, a Skype response denies this to be the case, instead blaming some bad programming on their part. The truth is likely to come out in the wash!
There is an important lesson in this for everyone… don’t rely on one form of communications medium. Many organisation may have or are looking at going the voice over IP (VOIP) route and this incident should show how badly an outage could affect you. It is always worth having some form of landline or mobile phone still available for use and in most cases is essential for the correct routing of emergency calls to the emergency services located in your area.
Many people will remember those conversation in the school playground where kids would brag about the fighting prowess of their respective fathers. Let us consider the modern Internet variation of this game!
For those business and people whom are obsessed with web traffic, and more in particular hits and page views, you should question the business rationale for such a craving. Would it not be better to have in place procedures and systems that monitor and report the revenue being generated through your web presence?
Some of our customers have bought new systems with Windows Vista preinstalled. Many have found it usable, but some have found it torture.
Q. Will Microsoft fix the issues with Windows Vista?
A. Undoubtable and it will become a stable and worthy successor to Windows XP.
Q. When will Microsoft get it fixed?
A. Don’t expect to see the first service pack until later this year or maybe earlier next.
Q. Should I try Vista?
A. Only try it on non-critical systems i.e. best avoided for business systems at the moment in our opinion.
Domestic customers may feel it less of a risk to give it a try.
We’re building and bring together some exciting technologies to better serve Freuchie Cricket Club, its committee, fans, sponsors and the local community here in Freuchie, Fife. Keep watching to see the developments over the coming weeks and months.
Freuchie Cricket Club is most famous for winning the Village Cricket Competition in 1985. It certainly put the village onto the map and illustrated to our neightbours over the border that us Scots are every bit as good at cricket.
All our telephone numbers, both landline and mobile have now been registered which strengthens any incident reports that may be filed with the Information Commissioner. Actually, the landlines were done a while back and it has certainly reduced the number of cold calls we’ve been receiving.
We’re also going to start recording these types of calls and starting our conversation out with a warning that “Calls may be recorded for legal purposes.”
Just got a missed call from 02920 368701 ( 02920368701 ) on one of our mobiles. Since it isn’t a recognised number we use here it was worth a quick Google to find out why the number may be calling us. This blog posting was No1 in Google and it pretty much says it all.
Unfortunately, it would seem that our number has been sold onto cold callers, who are in effect just SPAMMERS of the telephone world. It is amazing that the annual contract will be due within the next few weeks. Coincidence, we think not!
When they phone back we’ll go along with their sales speech thereby costing them both time, resources and call charges before saying we’re not really interested. We will also try to find out who they are and how they got our details, thereafter reporting this incident to the Information Commissioner.
We’re all aware of the current trend to outsource call centre support to the emerging countries e.g. India. Unfortunately, the staff at these centres on a Saturday evening don’t have a clue about computer support except to follow the script on their screens.
Last night we spent about fifteen minutes, over three telephone calls talking to the support team at one of the largest ISPs in the UK. The nature of the calls was to resolve an authentication issue i.e. the user had the wrong username and password details and the ISP network wasn’t for letting the router connect. Even before making the first call we knew this was the issue through the errors being generated.
However, the support staff weren’t for having anything to do with the information we were presenting, instead they insisted on having us follow them through the script! We knew what we wanted checked but they had to see everything getting turned off and on, modems being switched over, etc. Eventually we spoke with someone with better English and they quickly identified that their customer service representative had incorrectly spelt the username during the customer sign-up a few weeks ago! What! The username was indeed wrong and what a surprise that was to all of us in Fife!!!
[Please note: This isn't work safe and should only be viewed if you're not easily offended]
These outsourcing operators need to train their staff much better to think outside the script. Time will tell if they improve!
As a company, we always favour suppliers with UK call centres. The haemorrhage of UK jobs to low cost offshore call centres is a threat to all our jobs - remember this the next time you hear of more job losses in a UK company!
A while back we reported on the problems people were having during the installation of Microsoft CRM v3. Andy Goodman, a MS SBS-MVP, has produced a fabulous guide to a problem free install:
A number of our customers work in the golf industry. Our work for them ranges from simple support work to professional quality hosting and domain name management.
Roundtrip Solutions recently became aware of a number of green keepers who were building a website to support their peers and the general golfing industry. Since we firmly believe in community initiatives of this ilk we will be sponsoring BIGGA Central Section with free hosting, domain name registration, and assistance and advice on continuous improvement of their site.
Please give them a visit if you work within the golfing industry or have an interest in seeing their ongoing work to improve the green keepers lot.
It has been decided that it was about time for a new look ‘n’ feel for the Roundtrip Solutions Blog. We hope you like it.
There are a few tweaks required to fix some issues caused by the upgrade to V2 of Wordpress. Hopefully, readers won’t even observe any problems while we make those fixes.
