The IT sector needs to change its image and create more opportunities if it wants to recruit more young people. We’re taking practical steps to make it happen.

The IT industry is facing a significant shortage of skilled people. Recruiting talented workers is difficult, expensive and time-consuming for companies of all sizes. IT is an exciting and innovative sector with a rock-solid future, so why are we struggling to find new recruits?

A survey carried out for insurer Prudential found that most Scottish school leavers think apprenticeships are largely in “male-dominated sectors such as construction, manufacturing, agriculture and IT”.

The same survey found that more than a third of parents believe apprenticeships are more suitable for boys than girls. And 68 per cent of 16-18 year olds – that is, potential apprentices – believe most apprenticeships are in roles that are heavily gender-specific.

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Sharing information outside your organisation is an everyday part of doing business. We look at how Office 365 makes external sharing as safe and secure as possible.

It might seem counterintuitive, but instant sharing has made it easier than ever to protect your most sensitive business data.

In the bad old days of sharing documents via USB sticks, burned CD-Rs, and casually-forwarded attachments, data security was virtually non-existent. Beyond sticking a password on your document, you had very few measures to protect it; once data was free of your organisation, it was out of your control. And in the case of staff sharing sensitive material unintentionally – or, worse, maliciously – you were on your own.

Data Loss Prevention

The cloud has changed that for the better. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems – such as the one built into enterprise versions of Office 365 – automatically identify and protect sensitive data, such as credit card details, National Insurance numbers and passport information. Try to share something sensitive, and, depending on policy, you’ll receive a gentle reminder, be stopped in your tracks, or even have the attempt silently logged and flagged up to an administrator.

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CompanyNet runs a successful apprenticeship programme for people aged 16-24 who want to start a career in technology. Find out what’s in store for this year’s recruits.

It’s a nail-biting few weeks for school pupils all across Scotland as the exam season kicks off. It’s also a time when young people start thinking about their futures, and what comes next.

Over the last few years, CompaynNet has been investing heavily in apprenticeships. We are keen to create and environment where driven young people can realise their potential and kick off their careers in IT. This year, we are giving three people aged 16-24 the opportunity to work with us, and to work towards an SVQ level 3 diploma for Information Technology and Telecommunications Professionals.

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The Scottish Government’s new digital strategy for public services reflects our experience of delivering a solution with one of their most innovative teams.

The Scottish Government recently published their Digital Strategy for Scotland, which sets out a vision for a modern public sector where digital technology underpins positive organisational change.

While the freshly-launched report contains many of the well-worn clichés we’ve come to expect of government, I couldn’t help but be struck by the many parallels between the narrative and the experiences of one of our customers – the Scottish Government’s own Digital Transformation Service (DTS).

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Don’t think through intranet navigation and you risk losing the confidence of your users. Here’s some advice for getting it right from the start.

Intranet navigation isn’t something you can guess at. It needs to reflect the way people actually think about moving through your intranet. If it’s not intuitive, they’ll quickly find shortcuts that don’t always fit your business needs. And if they can’t find an intuitive route through, people will start deserting your intranet, which is a disaster it’s difficult to come back from.

If you want people to actually use your intranet, it’s vital to get the ‘information architecture’ bang on. Your intranet is, at heart, a shared space for information and collaboration; the information architecture (IA) is how that space is organised and labelled to ensure it’s navigable. The only way to guarantee your IA is right is to let the users create it.

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Retention and deletion policies in Office 365 are changing for the better – here’s what you need to know.

What are retention policies and why are they important?

Retention policies let your organisation manage information in accordance with industry standards, legislation and internal policies. They help you implement good governance, reducing the risk of legal problems and security breaches, and letting your staff manage information in a way that keeps it structured and relevant to your business.

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Could Azure’s ability to easily create affordable, high-end virtual machines in the cloud spell the end for the ubiquitous desktop PC?

I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that promises of a “thin client revolution” come around about as often as buses. But I really do think this time is different, and that we might finally have reached the point where fixing hardware problems in software isn’t just the punchline of an old joke.

Computing has changed a lot in the last few years. Advances both in hardware and in software mean you can do more with less. Tablets and smartphones are increasingly taking on the sorts of workloads that used to be the preserve of laptops and desktops, and cloud services move many tasks away from physical machines altogether.

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Keeping tabs on intranet usage helps underpin continuous improvement, and is fundamental to getting value out of your investment. Get deeper insight by combining SharePoint usage reports with Google Analytics.

Why bother with analytics?

Collecting and analysing usage data should be a priority for every organisation with an intranet. It’s a powerful way of increasing the value of your investment and driving continuous improvement.

Monitoring your intranet analytics lets you keep track of things like:

• What areas of the site are most popular
• What parts of the site are unpopular – and why
• User adoption – whether overall site visits are increasing, have plateaued, or are in decline
• Any sudden or slow-burning problems
• Typical user journeys

By analysing how people are using your intranet, you can target content more effectively, develop a structure for your site that better reflects user needs, and identify and resolve user challenges before they become problems.

What’s wrong with the built-in usage reports?

SharePoint’s built-in analytics – known as usage reports – capture only a very limited amount of information about what’s going on.

Data is gathered on two aspects: site usage, and search usage. Site usage collects data measuring how many times a page is visited each day, and how many unique users visited that page. It then exports that data to an Excel spreadsheet. From that data, you can see how many individuals used the intranet, and how many times pages were visited, but not much else.

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Learn how Registers of Scotland and the Scottish Housing Regulator delivered digital transformation by empowering their businesses and allowing ingenuity to flourish.

Picking up a theme from an earlier blog article, What is Digital Transformation?, this recent observation from Tom Meade, Digital Director at Registers of Scotland, really resonated with us:

“We don’t look at it as digital transformation; the IT doing something to the business. We view it as business transformation; the business deciding what it wants to do with its IT capability.”
Tom Meade, Digital Director, Registers of Scotland, ‘After 400 years, the sprint’

Almost 3 years ago, Registers of Scotland (RoS) approached CompanyNet with a business problem. A significant legislative change to the Land Registration Act had just been announced. This mandated that Registers of Scotland must allow a defined set of Land Reports to be transacted online with its community of eServices business to business customers, by a fixed statutory deadline in December 2014. The deadline became known within RoS as the “Designated Day.”

This legislative change had forced RoS to seek out a digital solution to deliver this statutory requirement. And so the Reports Portal service was born.

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