Historically, if you wanted to use a program to, say, manage your finances or edit your photos, you had to purchase software and install it on your computer. And if you wanted to use the software, you had to use that exact device. Now, instead of purchasing and installing expensive hardware and software, users of cloud-based solutions use internet connections to link into applications powered by a provider’s network of servers. By visiting a service’s or application’s website, registering and perhaps paying to subscribe, users can then log in from any desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, tablet device or several other devices using your user name and password. All of this is accomplished by one of the advantages of cloud computing, which is a system that employs networks of computers and/or servers to run applications that people around the world can log in and use.

What Advantages Does Cloud Computing Offer?

Of considerable benefit to the end-user is not having to learn and understand the intricacies of the equipment and software behind the application. For the end user, it’s as simple as opening up a web browser, entering the web address of the application or service and logging in. For individuals, cloud computing is convenient and easy to use. For businesses, it has already become a valuable way to save money on data storage and networking costs.

A prime example of cloud computing is a cloud-based collaboration program that a group of people can use simultaneously to edit documents, photos, videos and more. This group does not need to install any software on their computers, and they don’t even have to be on the same continent. Manipulating files in the cloud instead of storing them using a device’s memory saves memory, and it doesn’t require the device to use additional processing power.

As people find new and innovative ways to handle personal and business tasks via the cloud, the future promises to be a place where geographic distance is not even an issue. Data is stored in a network of computers and servers that may be across the country or world. Some cloud-based solutions even provide increased processing power, which is useful if the person doesn’t want to purchase additional servers, software and other equipment. With some imagination and advances in technology, and telecommunications the possibilities offered by cloud computing are seemingly limitless.

Electronic and electrical equipment are necessities in the home and workplace. Although these items are valued for their specific purpose, they are easily ditched for new and upgraded models once obsolete. To ensure that these items are properly disposed of, supportive environmental legislation had been enacted to provide regulations and rules for compliance.

About the WEEE Directive

The overall aim of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive is to encourage the recovery, reuse and recycling of electrical and electronic equipment by requiring manufacturers to take responsibility in recycling their products. WEEE recycling requires compliance not only from product manufacturers but also importers, retailers, sellers and businesses with equipment to dispose.

The directive supports the establishment of take-back facilities that provides free or minimal fees for collecting WEEE equipment. As a result of the directive, some retailers take back the product themselves to ensure proper disposal and recycling.

Individuals can help enforce the direct by actively implementing WEEE recycling at home. WEEE directive, per se, does not have a provision penalizing individuals and households for disposing equipment in the bin, however, ensuring proper disposal of the items is a responsibility of all members of the community.

Recycling at Home

There are several things that households can do to ensure WEEE recycling at home. The first step is to know what items are classified under WEEE. According to the UK Environmental Agency, equipment that fall under this category includes household appliances, IT and telecommunication equipment, consumer equipment, lighting, electrical and electronic tools, toys and leisure equipment, automatic dispensers, and monitoring and control equipment. Medical devices are also included in the list but are exempted from recovery and recycling targets.

Households are encouraged to separate WEEE items using the list as a reference. Once these items are ready for recycling, the next step is to look for a list of civic amenity, take back or government-supported facilities that are required by law to receive the items.

Another option is to contact local retailers and sellers and ask for their take-back policy for previously purchased products. If the take back option is not available, obtain information about recommended facilities and recycling centers. Take note that the WEEE directive requires retailers to provide information about facilities and procedures for proper disposal of electronic and electrical items.

Proper disposal of WEEE items provide long term benefits to the community and the environment. As part of the community, households play an important role in ensuring successful compliance to the provisions of the WEEE directive and other environmental regulations.

If over a period of time an office spends roughly five dollars per patient to be high tech ,the return on investment should yield more than five dollars per patient to be considered a sound investment. What is the difference between practices that generate $5 per patient and barely cover their cost and those that see $25 revenue gains per patient and consider technology a “game changer” for their practice? The difference can be summed up in two words Vision and Execution.

Turning Vision and Execution into profit

The offices that are seeing the highest returns on investment from their technology, had a vision of increased efficiency and effectiveness in mind when they embarked on the path to becoming high tech. That general vision translated to a more specific vision of what being “high tech” would mean to their day to day operations. The “flow” of information was discussed with the staff so they understood their roles in implementing the technology to make it a success. Also, the specific efficiencies gained were conveyed to the staff in relation to their daily duties (e.g. “Mary, when the patient comes to the front desk you will always access their work to be scheduled through the patient chart and treatment plan. The entry in the patient treatment plan can be right clicked and scheduled without having to reenter it.”)

Mary immediately sees the benefit of having the information readily at hand and the elimination of her typing it in from handwritten notes. She can focus on the patient and make sure that the entire patient experience was pleasant and understood. Patient understanding is probably the single most profitable use of technology because it translates directly to scheduled appointments. Offices that are profitable with technology use their intraoral cameras and digital x-ray to create a clear visual presentation of the patients oral health. They have a process of utilization that results in clear intra-oral camera images and x-rays always being displayed when the dentist enters the room.

The dentist always has a clear, intraoral diagnostic image and x-ray one click away when he or she is conveying the need for treatment to the patient. And, the hygienist is orchestrating the exam flow by controlling two screens: one with x-rays and camera images and one with the patients electronic chart. Treatment plans are entered as they are dictated by the dentist. When the patient leaves the room, all of the information that was entered chair side is available at any other terminal in the office. At the front desk or in a consult room the person scheduling treatment can review images associated with areas that need treatment and can print or e-mail those images to the patient to solidify their commitment to keeping their scheduled appointment. In the end, offices that maximize their profit with technology use it for what it was intended: improved efficiency in dealing with information and increased effectiveness in communicating with the patient.

Training is The Missing Link

Even if you did not have an overall vision of how to use your technology when you made the leap into the digital world, it is never to late to develop a vision and put it in place. Chances are your staff has struggled with certain elements of your system since it was deployed. Maybe you get varying results in digital x-ray quality and do not know why. Perhaps most of your intraoral camera images are out of focus or foggy. In fact many times you may have no intraoral camera images waiting when you walk in the room. You may be frustrated that your office still transfers info from your paper chart into your management software even though you purchased an electronic chart.

The key to getting more from your investment in technology will be coupling a required electronic “flow” of information with training that is solely focused on helping your office achieve the “flow.” The first step is recording your existing patient experience step by step and determining how you are currently utilizing your hardware and software. When that has been completed, you can contrast your existing “flow” with an ideal flow. An ideal flow captures all information electronically and totally eliminates all redundant data entry. Patient imaging – intraoral and radiographs – are diagnostic and complete. The dentist should never have to discuss treatment without a clear image of the tooth on the screen and an accompanying radiograph. When the patient gets treatment the camera should be used to clearly demonstrate and record the procedure and the end result to build value for future treatment.

The office should seek professional training for optimization of their software and hardware – intraoral cameras and digital x-ray. Additionally, the vision should be clear and the day to day path should be clearly defined before a trainer is employed. When the path is shared with the trainer, the training can be structured to ensure a process is in place that maximizes your technology while making the patient experience more personal. If you have made the investment in technology and feel that it is more of an expense than revenue generator, perhaps it is time to visualize successful implementation and get the staff trained to make it happen!

So cloud removes all of this uncertainty? Well yes, to an extent it does. In the nature of free enterprise, myriad developers are focussing on creating hosted services that offer very viable alternatives to shrink-wrapped Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe etc. products, that allow you to enter your credit card details and be up and running in minutes and if I’m honest, most of them are a great alternative to spending hundreds on commercial products. It takes away the headache of having to manage an infrastructure just to be able to have access to the systems you need to manage your business and for once, small companies can work just like big ones and as long as you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can build your empire from your garage, your bedroom or wherever else takes your fancy.

There has to be a downside, right? I’m not sure that downside is the right term, but there may be compromises to be made. The great benefit of having a product that is designed and built from the ground up by the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe or Symantec is that there is a consistency across applications. Microsoft applications for example, allow you to move objects or data between whatever application you are using. You want a Spreadsheet in your document? No problem! You want an Access Database to feed your mail-merge? No problem! You want to integrate Microsoft Dynamics with Office? No problem! So there is a consistency of data flow and format, totally independent of the application you are using. This even works, to a certain extent, across vendors allowing me to save a Word document as a PDF and to save a PDF as a Word document. Data becomes flexible, but that flexibility comes at a cost.

Do cloud services provide this as well? In some cases yes, but I think that due to the fact that hosted applications can now pop up out of nowhere, with the design being driven purely by enthusiasm and the desire to become ‘published’, there is no control or standards and as a result, it leads to a fairly disjointed environment in the cloud where the individual elements fulfil your business needs, but the manual ‘glue’ needed to tie them all together degrades the offering as well as the benefits of the format… As an example, just recently Etonbridge was looking at adding business processes to improve customer service and reduce lost opportunities. We were looking specifically at upgraded CRM, Helpdesk and Time Tracking services and despite spending an afternoon scouring the Internet, we could find services that integrated, but that didn’t synchronise leading to a very ‘arm’s length’ arrangement of manual data entry to make it work. The only cloud services we did find that offered a ‘complete’ solution were cost prohibitive, most of which ironically started out in life as low cost alternatives to the big vendors. The cynic in me does wonder if the lure of market share and larger profits is too much to resist once a company gains traction with a decent client base and regular revenue…

In summary, are cloud services good? In short, yes, I think they are very good. At the very least, they have forced the big vendors to stop being complacent and to look at alternatives to traditional formats in order to satisfy customers that suddenly have a viable choice. Are they a viable alternative? Yes, I think they are, but you have to remember the old adage “you get what you pay for” and in most cases, I think this is true in the cloud. Should they be considered for your business? Most definitely, but they’re not Nirvana, not yet anyway, but I do hope that in the future there is more of a focus on collaboration so that companies can pick and choose the cloud modules they need, safe in the knowledge that their life will be easier and simpler.

Until that time, just make sure that you carry an umbrella.

When it comes to standard SLA Reporting, most Service Management toolsets are more than capable of providing what I refer to a ’standard’ Service Level Reporting eg: Number of incidents/changes raised, resolved, closed etc. Out of the box features can normally cater to your specific requirements using the operational data loaded within the tool with a minimal amount of effort. It’s when the business starts to ask for end to end performance reporting on a service that a totally new level of thinking and solution is required.

ITIL® describes a Service as ‘A means of delivering value to Customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific Costs and Risks’.

Building reports and SLA’s for specific Services can be a little more complex and may require you to pull from other such ITIL® processes such as Availability & Capacity Management to ensure that agreements meet both yours and the businesses requirements. Let’s use ‘email’ as a simple IT Service example, a simple corporate email service may include a Single Email Software application, Email Server and of course an Internet Connection. Your email SLA maybe to ensure email is working and is available for use 99% of the time between 7:00am and 6:00pm Monday to Friday. For this simple SLA example, to meet your agreed Email SLA you need to consider the management of 3 separate components (Email Software, Email Server & Internet Connection). Here are 5 tips to help you map out and build more effective and robust SLA’s

1. Take the time to map out all of the components involved with the end to end flow of a Service

2. Go back and validate these, with all of your stakeholders and try to validate different stakeholders from your original groups.

3. Understand the critical between each of the components, and scale of each of the components.

4. Understand the Integration points between the components and potential impacts to the end to end flow

5. Work out the maximum threshold of each component and the relationship to the end to end SLA.

Audio card issues are extremely typical. If you discover out some day that a computer system produces no audio when you make a recording, tune in to tunes or watch movies, there has to be some issues with the computer audio card. Normally, most audio cards are inexpensive but for anyone who is an audiophile who’s meticulous with the audio quality, then it could be a bit tough to replace your high priced audio card.

In order to troubleshoot audio card issues, the very first simple move to make is, obviously, examine the speaker wires to determine if they are linked and plugged on the right places at the audio card. Also, check the power wires of the speakers to determine if the power supply is okay.

Next, verify the windows volume. It should never be muted. Wave and playback volume also needs to be turned up. Uncheck the Sophisticated Controls for Playback Controls for those who have “Digital Output Only.” Looking at this occasionally results in no sound troubles.

In the event that none of these do the job, reinstall the audio card drivers. Do not forget that drivers must always be up-to-date so they will remain very suitable for your PC system. Nonetheless, if you nevertheless encounter no-sound issue, you might have to swap your audio card with a brand new one. The situation may be linked to the bond of the sound card to your motherboard.

The CPU is very substantial to the effective functioning of your PC. It does all needed calculations to run the computer system. If your CPU becomes faulty, there might be several factors: it could be overheating; the BIOS or jumper setting may very well be messed up; it’s overclocked; it is not placed properly; and the high temperature sink may not be linked to the motherboard and CPU. Hence, you ought to check if these causes the situation. Heat sink should be tightly attached. Read the owner’s manual for the motherboard. Make certain that all jumpers are set appropriately. See to it that this heat sink cools off the CPU. Maybe you have to order a brand new one in the event the heat sink does not work properly.

Most of these tips need to eliminate your issues but if none of them meet your needs, then the next best solution can be hire a pc expert to test your computer and carry out specialized computer restoration.