Day Five: XL Financial Services

Took the laptop home for the weekend to see what else Vista can do away from all the business applications we have put it through. 

My son has been desperate to get his hands on my laptop since it arrived on Tuesday and I did promise him a chance to have a play this weekend.  However this is a business machine and as such has lots of applications I wouldn’t want altered or deleted by accident.

This is where Vista really comes into its own.  I set up a new user for him and then clicked on parental controls.  This has a number of applications to set but all of these where really easy to do and so it ended up that William was able to use the laptop safely as I had set the applications he could use, but more importantly the ones that he couldn’t.

Also had a couple of colleagues turn up and needed to run through some items with them.  As I wanted them to work with us on this we loaded the Windows Meeting Space.  Simply started a new meeting, added the programs/functions I wanted to share and invited them to join.  Such a simple idea and such a great tool.  As they could see what I was doing clearly it made it all run smoothly and gave them the ideas of exactly how this was going to work and look like on their laptops.  When we then got onto the practical side of now do what I showed you, it went a lot quicker as they all knew exactly what was expected.

We then spent the rest of the day dealing with clients by using all the skills we had learn throughout the last week.  I am keen to look at other applications such as VPN based meeting space but we just have not had the time this week to go for the advanced functions that may be available to us.

So in summary let’s look at what we have learnt this week:

By combining the facilities given we have moved our business from paper based to PC based in just a week.  The filing cabinets will now grow cobwebs as we just do not need them.  Data can be stored securely, can be accessed anywhere, can be updated automatically upon return to the office and the clients are happy as we now are faster than we have ever been.  A number of clients are now happy just o work with us on email and telephone as they are confident that the work will be done quicker and they get their paperwork a lot quicker.  We are even exploring the feasibility of tablet laptops so they can sign the documents on screen with no need to print hard copies at all.  With the changes the providers have made for inputting data this really means that XL Financial has entered the 21st century all guns blazing. In addition we are seeing an upturn in enquiries but we are using less time to deal with them.  This has shown an increase in referrals as well which in our business is the best advertising you can get.

In conclusion I would just like to thank James and Matt at Future Publishing and Aileen at Microsoft for the opportunity to take part in this challenge.  Also big thanks to Mike Gibbs of Technos for setting the machine up for us, and for his patience in loading all the required technical software we use.  Luckily having IFA’s for clients prepared him for this but it is still always fun to do.  Thanks Mike, and only 2 calls in the week as well, said I would make it up to you.

And so to the end of the weeks challenge, good luck to all taking part and fingers crossed.

Mark