Alas, alack, the last bank holiday of the summer has been and gone, the evenings are drawing in, and I’ve even heard talk of Christmas. Not to worry, here’s another R.E.D. News in your post tray! We may not actually hear you shout ‘hurrah’, but we’re sure you do!
Dominique has been with us again for a short while before she started her new job at the end of September teaching computer skills to disabled people to help them lead independent lives. ‘The girl done good’ as they say, getting a 2:1 for her degree. Well done Dominique, good to see you again!
The move to our lovely new offices was relatively painless, except for the somewhat interesting features of the workings of BT - we began to feel a little like a drop-in centre for BT engineers! Still, everything’s sorted out now - even the ceiling’s patched up where the cablers fell through it, so all in all we’re quite normal now and getting thoroughly settled in.
New Rain-God
We have decided that John’s motorbike is, in fact, a rain-god. Why? Because each time he goes out on it, the skies open and wet stuff comes falling down! Anybody hoping for rain can make bookings on 0181 ..... !
Office Warming
With all this talk of winter coming, we think we should do something of keep us warm. No - probably not what you’re thinking, but an office warming open day! How would you like to visit us on 19 November for drinks, eats, chit-chat and general merriment? Come any time!
Looping the Loop
The truth be told, we’re very excited about our new network cabling.
The more clients we get, the faster our file server fills up. It was recently getting to the point where we were spending far too much time housekeeping and swapping your support file on and off our file servers, so we’ve bitten the bullet and got ourselves a new main file server. This one is Windows NT running on high-spec hardware (at least it was a month ago, but computers go out of date so rapidly these days that it’s looking a little weedy already!). We’ve also swapped onto 100 Mbs networking and installed the latest version (7) of Btrieve, which comes complete with
SQL/OBDC as well. All this expenditure is aimed at improving our support - we can get at our copy of your data more quickly and run routines more speedily.
Four file servers in a company of four full-time staff seemed a little excessive, so we’ve retired our other Windows NT server, leaving the two Netware ones still going strong.
More R.E.D. Folk
Now that we have a bigger office, the next task is for us to find more people to work in it! We are currently looking for another full-time person for day-to-day support and training, and a part-time person to work with Helen on project management and co-ordination. So far, we’ve had some very positive-looking applicants and we’ll keep you posted as to how things progress. In fact, with luck, you might get to meet him/her at the next User Group meeting on:
Please note the heavy reminder! We do hope you can make it, details nearer the time.
It was lovely to see so many of you again at the Total Publishing Show at Olympia, indeed it had been such a long time since we last saw some of you that it was your voice we recognised, not your face! We had quite a party on the stand at times, and much merriment throughout the show.
We had a great time, and have already booked again for next year, though it will be on for 3 days, and we’re wondering if our feet can stand up to it!
There are to be new rules issued from the Data Protection Registrar implementing the EU Data Protection Directive. We understand the bill hasn’t yet been passed into law, so full details aren’t available, but they suggest we ‘keep abreast of latest thinking’ by visiting
and they are also running seminars for the enthusiastic!
We’ve had a few queries about covermounts and VAT so we thought you might like to know what HM Customs and Excise has to say a about them in leaflet 701/10/85 "Printed and Similar Matter" (Update 2)
If you link a cover mounted item such as a sachet of perfume or a CD to a magazine, you can treat it as zero-rated if the following conditions are met:
you do not make a separate charge for it; and
issues that contain cover mounted items are sold at the same price as those that do not; and
the cost of the cover mounted item or items included in any individual issue does not exceed:
20% of the total cost to you of the combined supply (excluding VAT); and
£1.00 (excluding VAT).
We thought that was quite interesting, hope you do too.
Some important progress has been made on this, though it might be invisible to you at the moment! It’s taking a while, because you are keeping us so busy that we have very little time left over to organise the site! Also, we need to get all our literature into a reasonably modern word-processor so that we can convert it into an HTML file, which is what web sites need. We anticipate that the site will end up quite large, with something for everybody; non-users looking for software, users looking for support, IT departments looking for technical advice, news, views and a user-only ‘forum’ where you can talk to one another.
This led us to the conclusion that we suddenly needed to become wordsmiths, and write down what we hold in our heads (no, not the sawdust, the other stuff!) This project is quite well underway but it‘s a huge task and needs to be done really carefully to give enough depth to be useful. It’s surprisingly different from a two-way conversation on the telephone where we can gear how we say something depending on the existing experience and knowledge of the person at the other end.
But don’t worry, we don’t believe that any web-site can replace the human touch of the ear or voice and we certainly don’t want to lose the relationships built up over the years with you. What we do want to achieve is to add to the services we can offer with more information on wider subjects available day or night, weekdays and weekends.
That’s the good news, now here’s the other sort! We haven’t increased our prices since 1996, and since there’s no time like the present, we’ll be increasing our prices by rather less than inflation - from November. Naturally, if you’ve had a quote from us, then a quote is a quote is a quote.
We’ll be keeping our prompt payment refund scheme, so as the prices go up, make a special note of the refund qualifying date on your invoices, as the value of your refunds will be going up too!
If you have chosen a support contract, the price of that support will never go up if you renew it before it expires, of course, so no need to worry there!