Heres the online Prison database example

Dabbledb provides a nice overview here of the prisoner information:

Base Overview

And now the simple count that the DG requires:

Count 

Of course some more detail is required, so here’s a breakdown per prison:

Per Prison Breakdown 

Finally, to update information Dabbledb provides a simple online form to collate changes:

Change Form 

Now I’m wishing I’d looked into Snap a little earlier and maybe i’ll produce an Amberjack tour as well.

Dabbledb…One hour later

Well we took the challenge and here are the results a fully fledged example of an online flexible database for Phil Wheatley the Director of the HM prison service.

Using Dabbledb we created a quick database with prisoner, prison, id number, date absonded, date captured and finally a field to see if they have been captured.

The director general would be able to view how many total prisoners have absconded, from what prison and at what dates. He could manipluate the data to his hearts content.

And the data could be updated or added to with the simple online form that Dabbledb creates automatically from the data. The DG could also be kept abreast of changes with the RSS ability, as soon an entry is changed he’d know about it.

I’ll make all the exports available over the next day or so. But there we are web2.0 generates a database in an hour, lets see how long the traditional IT industry takes to deliver something and at what cost.

HM Prisons need a new database please help!

The head of the UK prison service came out in the media today to suggest the Prison service require a new national database of prisoners in open prisoners.

As soon as he said it I saw around £10 million of UK taxpayers money drain away, helping to pay for a system that will be delivered probably by 2010 that wouldn’t even be fit for purpose.

Here’s a suggestion for the guys at Zoho or DabbleDB. Licence your technology (as it would have to be behind the firewall due to security requirements) to HM Prisons and I bet we could have a database up and running by the end of the week.

It would be a great publicity stunt for the guys, it would get the HM prisons the app it needed quick sharp and would save the UK taxpayer lots of money – everyone could be a winner.

Google Reader, RSS Feeds and WordPress

Google Reader has turned into an essential office tool for Datacom. I’d now say it’s our primary collection source of information from the internet, so much so that visiting a website from a bookmark seems old hat.

Being a web2.0 application Reader has sharing built into the product and you can see the results of the sharing efforts on this blog. Along the sidebar I’ve inserted three RSS feeds relevant to this blog. These feeds are taken directly from my Reader account and shared via RSS in WordPress.

At the moment only the heading is displayed, ideally I’d like to get a preview in the pane or the author of the item.

I have over 80 subcriptions managed by Reader but the tagging feature allows me to share only relevant posts in this blog. Afterall I’m not sure how many people would be interested in keeping up with the Patriots Injury report through Mike Reiss’ excellent Boston Globe blog…….

Good luck to the Patriots this weekend by the way…..keep those superbowl hopes alive!

Webos?

I was looking through some of our old posts from last year on a different blog and with everyone doing predictions I’m going to stick my neck out and say Google will announce a large Browser development in 07.

Here’s the article from June 06.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently let it be known that Google are not working on their on web browser given the choice that is already out in the market.

I think there is an engineering point that comes out in favour of Google not developing their own browser but I think if I were a commercial guy at Google I’d put the development of a browser as almost number one on my list.

From an engineering perspective the argument against development maybe that the browser is merely a neutral delivery mechanism, all the special ’sauce’ is implemented on the server side. Google should continue to focus resource on the server side and applications rather than divert valuable engineering resource into a browser.

The commercial argument goes that Google is setting itself up to be the dominant consumer and application provider of the 21st Century, with all applications delivered through a browser. Yet If Google don’t control the delivery mechanism they will not be the dominant player they wish to be.

The computer industry has been dominated by Game Theory’s Network Externalities – the more people who have the product the more popular it becomes.

Microsoft understood this perfectly when they captured the OS market and because of their dominance in the OS all other application providers had to follow. Without the OS/application lockin Windows would not be the monopoly it is today.

Google have to provide an application/browser/OS lockin to gain dominance. They can’t afford to have their applications reliant on a third party delivery mechanism. Would Microsoft Office be as dominant if Windows was not the operating system?

If Google provide all consumer and business applications through a Google Web browser why pay $80 for a Microsoft OS or upto $1000 for a Microsoft Office suite?

If Google get to that position then Dell will have to start paying Google money not the other way round and Google will have cemented their position as the business of the 21st Century.

Eat your own dog food

One of the funniest meetings I ever had was with Siemens a few years ago, they gave a very flashy demonstration and presentation on voice convergence with of course the Siemens product at the core of everything. They implored us that the entire world should be using whatever they were selling.

The first question asked: I guess Siemens use this technology in their own business? Oh no the Siemans salesmen said its much too complicated, buggy and too reliant on top end windows laptops (for the voip client) for our current IT systems. Meeting over.

So any application that Datacom recommend must be good enough to use for ourselves, here’s a quick list:

Voice: Asterisk Server and Skype
Office apps: Google docs and spreadsheet and zoho (although we do still use Exel)
Website Server: Red Hat 9
Email: Gmail and their hosted service
Blog: WordPress
Website forms: Wufoo, Jotform and Zoho Creator
Maps: Google Maps API
RSS Reader: Google Reader
CRM and tasks: SugarCRM
Collabroation: Zoho, Google Apps and Vyew
Secure Remote Access: OpenVPN
Firewall: IPCop variant
internal CMS: Drupal 5.0
Browser: Firefox 2
IM: A real mixture of Campfire, Skype and Wildfire

We still use Windows OS but we don’t recommend customers move away but nor would we recommend an upgrade to vista. We haven’t really found anything to replace Visio.

New Year New Blog

I wonder how many blogs have been started in the past couple of days? Well we sometimes like to be part of the crowd so we are starting a new company blog on wordpress.

First impressions of wordpress are good but i guess it will take a few posts to get used to the site. The new blog is also in response to the reluanch of our website www.ukdatacom.com.

We think Enterprise2.0 will be a large growth trend in 2007. Why? Becuase it simplifies IT for business, provides great looking and feeling applications and to top it off can provide significant cost reductions.

Look forward to discussing with you in the future.