Welcome to the February Edition of That's Correct!
- Was your first Notebook about 400kgs and as thick as a plank? Haven’t things changed! We take a look at some options for all you style warriors.
- Wayne and Kevin visit Microsoft in Redmond, WA, USA. They immerse themselves in Microsoft’s Surface, as well as exploring the Enterprise Engineering Centre (EEC); enabling us to stay on the leading edge of emerging technology!
- If you’ve called in lately you’ve no doubt heard a fresh voice on the phones! Meet Alison, the newest addition to the Correct Solutions’ team…
Who can remember their very first notebook PC? Was it inches thick and liable to break your arm off at the shoulder if carried in its bag for extended periods of time without rest stops? Long gone are those days, thank goodness!
If you haven't noticed, corporate notebooks have gone super stylish. We're talking brushed aluminium, inspired by aircraft stylish. While consumer grade PCs are getting their colour on and home operating systems host media rich features, business grade mobility products are all about durability, form and function.
Take HP's EliteBook range for example. We weren't kidding about drawing inspiration from aircraft! These PCs are designed with the true travelling executive in mind, with some smart accessories like the Auto/Air/AC Combo Power Adapter and docking station options to extend the usability at the office.
Toshiba also have some fantastic options for anyone wanting a superlight, powerful travel companion. We love the Toshiba Portege R600, with a Solid State Hard Drive this is one tough little competitor.
Buying a business-grade notebook doesn’t exclude you from having some fun with colour! There are a great range of notebook cases that extend far beyond the boring black. Look at the Targus range for instance; they have backpacks and rolling cases, Messenger Bags as well as a range just for women.
So next time you’re in the market for a notebook, talk to us about finding something to suit your unique style!
Microsoft this month has officially released Microsoft Surface. This product is more a technology than a package you can buy off the shelf as it involves the use of table top environments combined with their software to produce the end result.
Imagine if you will a computer monitor that was in fact your table top. You can then use your hands on the table top to do everything you would normally do to control the computer and the application. So far this does not sound much different to a large touch screen computer, but that is where the similarities end...Surface has been designed right from the start to not only be controlled by you with nothing more than your hands, but to also interact with other devices you might have!
For instance, place a wireless camera on the surface top and it may recognise what it is and then quickly export all your photos to the table top for you to manipulate. At the Microsoft Partner Conference in the USA last year, they had Surface tables and all attendees could interact with each other using their conference badges. By placing your conference badge on the table top you could quickly exchange details with other attendees and later access all this information from a web portal. Now that’s a cool use of technology.
Immediate potential markets for this include the education market where these devices can be used to help students learn in a more interactive manner than simple input devices such as the keyboard and mouse.
Recently Kevin Tso and Wayne Small were in the USA and got to experience these Surface devices a number of times and they both believe that there is some amazing potential with them moving into the future.
Stay tuned to "That's Correct" for more product developments from Microsoft!
Kevin Tso and I recently spent a week at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, USA. We were there being trained on a major upcoming server product that one of our customers (Noni B) will be running well before the official launch. Now due to Non Disclosure Agreements we can’t talk about the specifics of this, but we wanted to highlight some of the efforts Microsoft goes to in order to understand their customers’ situations.
As part of this we spent some time in the Enterprise Engineering Centre (EEC) which is where Microsoft does a load of customer specific testing of scenarios that we face in the real world. They have the capacity here to take a customer environment and virtualise it. This then allows them to fully test out potential scenarios that customers are faced with before they deploy the software “in the real world”.
Microsoft had rack after rack of high end servers dedicated to the function of supporting the EEC, in addition to smaller computer lab environments which we used to build and test the scenarios that we were interested in. The key thing that we observed is that without the use of server virtualisation, the hardware requirements to do this testing would have been tenfold greater than what we had at our disposal.
This visit gave Correct Solutions a rare and valuable insight into the emerging product. Our deep relationship with Microsoft means that Noni B has access to a development program that others are excluded from and enables us to be in a position to provide leading edge technology to the market, long before our rivals!
We'd like to introduce the newest member of the Correct Team, Alison Byrne.
Alison is joining Correct Solutions as an Administration Officer and will be assisting Martine in day to day office tasks such as reception, accounts enquiries and customer orders. She is returning to the workforce after an eight year hiatus spent bringing up three daughters, aged 8, 6 and 3.
Alison has over 15 years experience in secretarial and administration roles and has worked for several large companies. She is looking forward to joining a smaller company to allow for a better work/life balance.
Outside of work Alison enjoys spending time with family and friends and keeps very busy ferrying kids from netball, soccer, swimming, dancing and Little A’s (not to mention school and pre-school). In her spare time (there isn’t much) Alison is studying part time with Open Universities and is two years into a Bachelor of Arts with Macquarie, majoring in Philosophy and Sociology.
That's all for this month! If you would like more information on any of these articles, please give us a call on 02 8831 8200.
