Wednesday 22nd February -Business South Expedition@ Rose Bowl Southampton

09.00-5.30

Wednesday 14th March- Andover B2B Expedition @ The lights Andover

Stand 14

09.00-5.30

We look forward to seeing you there

The phone, which had been labelled the “iPhone Killer”, was finally launched in the UK and is the flagship device for Google’s foray into the world of mobile. The device is very sleek and21st century but it is also huge! The Nexus is over 12cm in length making it one of the largest Smartphones currently available in the UK. The justification for this states that the Nexus’ large viewing screen makes it ideal for media on the move. The phone is packed with a pretty impressive spec, which includes a 1.2Ghz dual core processor, but I was quite surprised by the inclusion of a measly 5 Megapixel camera.

The real news is that this is the first device to run the new “Ice Cream Sandwich” software (ICS) which has been even more eagerly anticipated than the handset itself. So what do we get with this new Google operating system?

Look and Feel
There is no denying that ICS is visually stunning. It is far more elegant and grown up than any of it’s rivals and seems to be pitched (despite it’s rather child like name) at the adult/business market. Google’s core aim with ICS is to unify both Smartphone and tablet device with a single, identical operating system. The intuitive nature of the platform, and excellent on screen help options, mean that jumping straight into the world of Nexus is incredibly easy.

Bespoke
 There is a big drive to make your ICS-utilising device your own. The ability to resize and customise icons, design your homepage and choose what opens on start up means you have far more control over how you use this device to your own specific needs.

Apps
Another big win is the clear use and ease of adding the huge array of Android applications. These are quick to load and many offer a range of ways to integrate themselves with other key software components. There is even a voice search function, which may not be quite as good as SIRI, but does add a level of fun to proceedings.

The other big news is the inclusion of “face recognition” technology. This was rumoured to be taking a number of forms but it would seem at the moment it’s only use is in the form of “Face Lock”. This clever little app allows you to open your device simply by looking at it. We also see the inclusion of “Android Beam” which uses NFC technology to instantly transfer large chunks of data between ICS devices.

The integration between the Nexus and standard Google services, such as Google +, adwords, trend and analytics means this phone could be the marketing manager’s dream device.

We have only had a brief play with the Nexus and whilst what we saw was impressive, it is clearly no “iPhone Killer”. The issue Google must face is that this device may get lost in the noise being generated by the 4S and Nokia’s Lumia range. Don’t forget, Silver Lining are business mobile specialists. Call us today to see how we can help your business with your mobile requirements.

The Future
SIP plays a central role in the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS). This is a family of protocols which is set to define the architecture of the next generation of mobile networks. This new environment will provide a vast array of text, voice, video and data services for the business and consumer market.

Numbers, Anywhere
SIP removes historic, geographic boundaries. Do you want a New York telephone number but your office is in Hull? No problem! Do you need a London number for your Newcastle based call centre? Then SIP is your answer! The SIP “number, anywhere” service uses the same process as traditional non geographic numbers. It also means you can take your business number with you, no matter where you may relocate to in the UK.

Instant Divert
Another powerful SIP feature is the ability to instantly divert your number to another location. This makes SIP a vital part of your business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. Whilst BT offer a divert solution, unlike its SIP alternative, you can only divert the main number. The DDI number will also point to this new location. In the SIP world you can divert every DDI to a different destination.

Cost
I would never suggest that a move to SIP should purely be based on cost. However, there are clear savings in both line rentals and call costs when looking at a SIP solution. It is also worth noting the long contracts, high line rental charges and inflexibility of ISDN are all eliminated when you move to a SIP service.

Flexibility
SIP is infinitely more flexible than its ISDN counterpart. If you wish to increase your ISDN lines you are subject to significant lead times, installation charges and long term commitments. If you wish to increase (or decrease) your SIP lines you are able to do it within minutes, without the cost or commitment. This means a SIP solution is ideal for businesses that operate in a seasonally fluctuating market.

I could go on and on about SIP and how it will radically alter your business but the only way to prove it to you, is for you to see for yourself. Silver Lining is currently offering a free SIP trial, so call us today to get your trial underway!

OFCOM has announced it intends to hold an auction for shares in the UK 4G network in mid-2012 and has already set out it’s guidelines on the terms and conditions attached to the auction process. It is these guidelines that have caused such uproar in the mobile community which has culminated in both O2 and Vodafone threatening legal action if the guidelines for the auction remain the same. The dispute has arisen because the new 4G network will utilise some elements of the old 2G network, mainly because it has a better potential to penetrate modern building structures due to it’s low frequency. However, the provider Three has lodged a complaint against this as it does not own a share of this historic network and therefore will be precluded from the 4G auction. OFCOM countered this by setting a series of mechanisms which would guarantee Three a portion of the 4G network. This has led to O2 and Vodafone claiming that this amounts to state-aid for the fledgling network. It is this school-ground argument that threatens to delay the 4G roll out even more.

So what will the 4G network bring when it finally does arrive?

Well, if you consider that the current UK mobile network is a patchwork of second and third generation technologies, then the 4G network aims for blanket coverage across the UK. At present we all experience the frustrations of fast web access one moment, then a slow crawl (or crash) seconds later; 4G will fix this and provide high speed everywhere. We have been briefed to expect speeds comparable to modern wired or WiFi connection which, currently stand at 42.2Mb/s. The average mobile data connection at the moment (in a 3G area) is roughly 22.2Mb/s.

This increase in speed and bandwidth will give rise to a vast array of new services and technologies such as high-quality video calls or the long awaited mobile TV service. It is clear that this significant enhancement will also have a huge impact on the business world. This change will mean we may soon have only a single business handset and single business number, rather than a desk phone and mobile device. It will mean you are contactable everywhere! Plus we will all have instant access to our businesses internal files, software and services no matter where we are; at home, in the office or on the road.

This upgrade will also deliver a range of cost saving implication via the reduced need for hardware and through faster response times. We will also be able to replace our mobile broadband dongles with our single mobile device as high speed tethering becomes the norm in modern handsets. This change could also mean the ability to utilise VoIP protocol on a mobile device which would reduce cost and increase our usage of unified communications.
To discover the latest news about the 4G network, why not subscribe to our news feed above.

JD guest blogs for Silver Lining and has 15 years experience working in the telecommunications industry. Choosing a life of anonymity, some say he has USB drives for fingers. All we know is you can’t download experience.

This new software, Windows Phone 7.5, or Mango as it is affectionately known within Nokia, was officially launched in October but, the Lumia range is the first to fully utilise the platform. Al Hiva, Product specialist at Nokia, whilst at Nokia World 2011 said: “Mango is a huge release. The number of new features and capabilities on Mango compared to the solution that came out a year ago is stunning. Windows phone developers and those from other systems such as Symbian will feel like kids in a candy store”. The core focus of the Windows team was to deliver an ever extending range of apps that will eventually threaten the strangle hold of the Apple App Store.

The Lumia range has all the things we have come to expect from a modern Smartphone such as, a high end camera, IM and a fast processor. The Lumia range does have a few key selling points though. These handsets are the first to use a mobile version of the impressive Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 browser to allow the ultimate level of mobile connectivity. This also leads upto the range’s other key selling point, it’s full integration with not only Twitter and Facebook but also Linkedin. This addition should make the range a big hit in the business world. The connectivity of these handsets is further enhanced by their ability to use a range of services to connect. These include HSDPA,
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a range of quad radio bands. This means your connection should always be strong. The other big
feature to highlight is the inclusion of Nokia Drive. This application is a 100% free, turn by turn satellite navigation system.

The new Nokia range is certainly impressive and it is clear that the business user was at the forefront of the developers mind’s when creating this selection of Smartphones. It does mean that we now have an even larger range of handsets to trawl through in our quest for the ultimate business phone! Let Silver Lining help with the search. Their mobile experts can help you discover the perfect handset and package for your business.

Check out the video review of the new Lumia 800 from the guys at CNET UK:

So, here are a few things to consider:

Hours
It is vital that the maintainer you choose is contactable 24/7, even if you do take out a 24/7 coverage plan. If your system breaks down in the early hours of Monday morning, you have a few hours to resolve the issue before it affects the day’s trading.

Engineers
You must discover if your potential maintainer actually employs their own engineers rather than simply outsourcing this service. Whilst there is nothing wrong with outsourcing such skills it does add an extra level of communication and often cost to the contract. You must understand who will deal with the fault and in what time frame.

Flexibility
Your business is unique. It is also true that your use and configuration of your chosen telephone system is unique. Therefore, you need a support contract that reflects this. Are you able to adjust the contract to your working hours? Can you get ad-hoc support/help when needed? Simply make sure your support package fits your business and not the other way round.

Reporting
Another important factor is how you are able to report faults or services issues. If your phones go down being able to only report issues by phone is not ideal. A good maintenance company will have a range of communication methods for reporting issues and receiving updates. This could be in the form of an SMS service or a web based portal.

Support Type
Most maintenance companies are purely reactive. This can mean problems are solved at a much slower rate. You must ask the potential maintainer how they plan to proactively support your business. It is always a great idea to contact a current customer and enquire about service levels to receive a more rounded picture.

Company Type
Telecoms is a confusing, multi-faceted area of modern business and it is changing all the time. It is vital you pick a maintainer that understands this and reflects this opinion. Does the company sell other telecoms equipment? Does it still sell the phone system you use? Do they offer IT support? This final question could produce a very attractive outcome as a company that understands both IT and telecoms is far more likely to be able to look at a fault or issue from a more holistic vantage point and thus solve it quicker.

Hopefully this guide can help you make a more informed choice when choosing a maintenance partner. Please always remember you are putting your business in the hands of this chosen provider. If you want to talk to a company that ticks all of the boxes mentioned above, call Silver Lining today.

JD guest blogs for Silver Lining and has 15 years experience working in the telecommunications industry. Choosing a life of anonymity, some say he has USB drives for fingers. All we know is you can’t download experience.

There is a common misconception in many businesses that seems to suggest moving towards a hosted environment is an “all or nothing” opportunity. This is simply not true and I would actually advise against such a move. I am much more in favour of a “toe in the water” approach which will prove to you just how much your business could achieve in moving towards cloud based technologies.

But where do you start?

I would recommend looking at a hosted email services as your first step into this world. Email is at the heart of most UK business’ communications and hosting your own service, in your own office is actually a pretty risky, and expensive, strategy. These deployments are expensive to manage and maintain plus you are putting yourself at a higher risk of cyber attacks. This is why a move to a hosted email exchange service is a smart first step and a great way to experience, and start to trust, Cloud computing.

There are a number of key benefits you will gain by moving to a hosted email exchange service, such as:

Total Cost of Ownership

When using a hosted alternative, your business is no longer responsible for the daily management, maintenance or upkeep of your email system. This move takes away the headaches of maintaining and managing an increasingly complex platform, giving you back valuable time and resource.

Security

This move allows you to leave email security to the experts. All anti-virus, security patches and software updates are dealt with by your providers who make it their business to know the latest issues and weaknesses of their chosen solution. This change means you can focus on your core business and not your technology.

Smartphone Integration

Whilst moving to a cloud based service is predominantly associated with your PC and laptop hardware, you also gain the added benefit of activating a more advanced form of mobile email integration. You will now have a single, hosted mailbox. Hopefully you are beginning to see that this very small step will actually penetrate and benefit your business on a much deeper level.

Access

A cloud based service will enable you to gain full access to all of your email, folders, calendars and shared documents anywhere in the world in a secured environment. It also means your various means of accessing email are 100% synchronised.

There are plenty more benefits associated with this very small move but I want you to commit to this change and discover them for yourself. To take this first step you should call the experts. Silver Lining pride themselves on their dedication to providing a secure, reliable range of hosted services (including email exchange hosting) and their knowledgeable experts are available now to help you with these important first steps. you can also download their data sheet on Hosted Exchange to take away and think about.

JD guest blogs for Silver Lining and has 15 years experience working in the telecommunications industry. Choosing a life of anonymity, some say he has USB drives for fingers. All we know is you can’t download experience.

The European commission has announced it aims to invest 9.2bn Euros (£8bn) into an ambitious rollout of superfast broadband across the whole of mainland Europe. The overall aim is to provide all EU households and businesses with a service that can deliver a minimum of 30mbps by 2020. The plan even includes poorly serviced rural areas!

The key driver in this deployment is to unite Europe and provide common service provisions. The plan also aims to encourage rural locations to innovate and develop businesses in once baron areas. An EU source commented “Europe needs these fast broadband networks to allows its united economy to become more competitive in the future, and so create more jobs and prosperity” The source continued “This money will stimulate much greater investment of private and other public money. Each of the commission Euros spent would give rise to a further 6 to 15 Euros more”.

A speech given last week by Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, focussed heavily on the need for significant investment in rural broadband services. He highlighted that there are many areas which are significantly underserviced by the major telecoms providers.

There is clearly a desire in the EU to provide more online, Europe-wide services such as e-ID platforms, e-procurement, electronic health care records and e-justice services. There is also a clear secondary benefit that such an ambitious deployment would create 1000s of jobs across the Eurozone.

In the UK there has never been a better time to review your business connectivity services. The price of data connectivity has fallen sharply in the past 12 months whilst the range of connectivity products has significantly increased. The success of LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) and the release of EFM services are just a few of the developments allowing UK businesses to communicate more efficiently. Businesses are no longer faced with the limited choice of low end, SLA lacking broadband services or expensive leased line products. Silver Lining are data connectivity specialists and their vast portfolio of products is certain to feature a solution that can enhance your business connectivity. Call one of their trained experts today to see what is now available in your location.

JD guest blogs for Silver Lining and has 15 years experience working in the telecommunications industry. Choosing a life of anonymity, some say he has USB drives for fingers. All we know is you can’t download experience.

Twitter, Facebook and forums across Europe have been buzzing with the collective rage of millions of BlackBerry users. The issue, which affected browsing, email and the increasingly popular BBM feature, has been attributed to a serious infrastructure failure. RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry, stated “The faults were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s internal infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a backup switch, the failover did not function as previously tested”.

This statement has been dubbed “too little, too late” by many BlackBerry customers who have heavily criticised how the company has communicated throughout the failure with regards to the issue and how it was being remedied. RIM’s handling of the whole episode has been described as “a business school case study on how not to communicate with your customers” And things got much worse before they got ‘better’, as the problem spread to the United States before being fixed.

This serious failure has occurred during a nightmare period for the smartphone manufacturer. The organisation has received some significant body blows in the past few years. RIM’s market share is under constant threat from global players like Apple, HTC and Microsoft. Many commentators have highlighted that with every new smartphone release, the once mighty BlackBerry falls further behind. This is of course completely juxtaposed by the fact that BlackBerry users are still subjected to “premium pricing” for their BlackBerry service. In fact, BlackBerry’s consumer service charges are often 3 times that of their rival smartphones.

In the past 12 months RIM have seen their share price fall by 50% and profit warnings have been issued throughout the 2010 and 2011. So is this the end of the line for this once dominant smartphone? Should business BlackBerry users look to move away from this once trusted service?

It would be very easy for me to jump on the bandwagon and sound the death knoll for the BlackBerry but this would ignore the consistent strengths of BlackBerry as an awesome business device. There are a number of reasons why businesses should not allow this temporary blip to mean they discount BlackBerry as a valid business device.

Security: The BlackBerry is still the most secure handset on the market. All BlackBerry devices are the only handsets that compress and encrypt data at handset level before transmitting it. Apple and other core players rely on the mobile networks to provide security. So if data integrity is vital to your business, the BlackBerry still has something to offer you.

Storage: As we use our mobile devices for more and more business tasks, our reliance on storage increases. The BlackBerry is a big winner on the storage front as it utilises Micro SDHC card. This makes the storage virtually unlimited.

Keyboard: Love it or hate it, independent studies show people still prefer the BlackBerry’s approach to qwerty keyboards over the touch screen alternatives.

Ultimately the choice of mobile, for personal or business use, is an emotive one. The BlackBerry name and brand values still command a high level of loyalty. It will be interesting to see if the recent incident and the response from RIM erode any of this good will in the long term.

Silver Lining is an independent provider of business mobile phones. They are able to offer unbiased advice on the best handset, package and technology for you business, and are BlackBerry specialists. During the recent ‘BlackBerry Crumble’ Silver Lining was able to support it’s business customers with service updates and provide an immediate front line helpdesk whilst the RIM/BlackBerry customer support lines were struggling under the sheer volume of calls.

JD guest blogs for Silver Lining and has 15 years experience working in the telecommunications industry. Choosing a life of anonymity, some say he has USB drives for fingers. All we know is you can’t download experience.

Earlier this week, security experts, McAfee stated they have found significant evidence to suggest “a historic, unprecedented transfer or wealth and closely guarded national secrets” falling into the hands of organised cyber criminals. This worrying revelation follows the news of some very high profile attacks being released to the public. This week saw 2 large blue chip companies actually attach a value to their own security breaches. Sony and RSA announced that calculated cyber attacks on their internal systems had cost them over £107m and £40m respectively. There is also an untold cost which focuses on the loss of company trust and reputation – Sony suggested, in their case, this could actually treble the cost of these attacks.

In reality, cyber attacks are increasing on a daily basis – in terms of their quantity and their sophistication. Security expert, Ashar Aziz, stated “The bad guys have resorted to highly dynamic Malware” Aziz continued “We have observed this from hundreds of enterprises, large and small, across the world. All of these organisations display significant infiltration rates”. Malware, short for malicious software, gathers information and aims to lead to data theft or exploitation. The real concern is that everyday Malware programmes are becoming increasingly advanced and that turning the tide against these renegade developers is becoming a real battle.

Many IT departments are unaware of the level of these infiltrations and deem them as minor but from these small security holes grow much larger issues. The first attack usually probes an organisation’s infrastructure, searching for weaknesses, and then comes a full scale attack. The end goal is to gain valuable information, bank details or confidential data, sensitive information which could be used against your business.

Some businesses feel such attacks and practices are merely the concern of larger organisations. Unfortunately this is simply not true; hackers are increasingly targeting unprepared SMEs. Modern cyber criminals see these smaller entities as easy prey due to their lack of security. Anti-hack software developers, Clearwater PLC, released research this week suggesting over 40% of SMEs have experienced a security breach stemming from employees’ unsecure use of the internet which has opened a path for a Malware attack. This report also revealed that over 70% of SMEs invest in and use web monitoring software simply to see what staff are looking at on the internet whilst network security and potential breeches are a far lower priority.

Whilst adequate security is a must for all businesses, in my humble opinion it can become a double edged sword. Suppliers of internet security benefit from a very easy sales pitch based on scare tactics and frightening statistics. This can lead to businesses “over-policing” their networks – and their staff. Detecting false alarms, restricting usage and blocking content can actually be more dangerous and damaging than a system infection – costing the business both time and money.

You need to have the correct level of security in place. It is all a matter of calculated balancing. Silver Lining are experts in network design and security. Their security and network experts can design a system to support and work with your business, so your employees are not overly restricted whilst guarding you against the little things too.

JD guest blogs for Silver Lining and has 15 years experience working in the telecommunications industry. Choosing a life of anonymity, some say he has USB drives for fingers. All we know is you can’t download experience.