Thankyou to South Tyneside

I thought I would have to dedicate this Blog entry to the staff at South Tyneside, who made me very welcome last week, and booked me into a lovely hotel overlooking the harbour mouth. South Shields must surely be one of Britain's lesser known seaside resorts, but it really has a magificent sandy beach second to none, brilliant restaurants and a fascinating history with connections with Grace Darling and the Venerable Bede.

Part of the purpose of the latest photo competition in The Caseworker is to promote the destinations where our customers work, and this is a real hidden gem. The photo is the view from my bedroom window (yes, a port hole) in the Little Haven Hotel. I will get my web developer to set up a photo gallery to show readers my other pictures.

Oh, and it was two days of hard work, as well, productive for me and the Client I think.

Memory for Caseworks

This is the first blog entry for a month. An unbelievably busy one, in which I have been working on the Leeds implementation for a part of every day, and found time to visit customers in the Midlands, Scotland and the North East and have two days holiday on the continent.

However, back on the Blog now, and keen to share with customers a little learning experience about memory. I have come to the conclusion that you cant have too much of it, and the "recommended memory" for new customers needs to be considerably increased. It came as a bit of a shock when the new Leeds system was unbearably slow in training. The server never seemed to be working very hard, but the relatively small amount of on-board memory (1 GByte) was permanently used to capacity. I recommended they increase it, and within 24 hours an upgrade to 3 GBytes was performed and the problem was resolved. Since then I have been looking at the memory other customers have, and found the record to be held by South Tyneside at a staggering 10 GBytes. I had the pleasure of using their system on Thursday and Friday, and the benefit was obvious. Every page - including some of their staggering 500 + link cases - loaded with lightning speed.

The lesson, memory is cheap, waiting is expensive!