Matt Salmon, May 16th, 2012
Each year all the staff at Mando Group vote to choose the charity that we would like to support during the year’s fundraising activities, and this year we are delighted to announce that our chosen charity is Claire House Children’s Hospice. Claire House offer care and support for babies, children and young people with life limiting conditions and their families from all over the North West region. We felt that Claire House was a great fit for Mando Foundation’s aim to make a difference in the local community, and with minimal government funding they need to raise in excess of £2.5 million to maintain levels of service. Claire House currently offers help to some 170 families but despite being physically located on the Wirral, over 50% of the children come from Liverpool, Sefton and Knowsley combined. Support from Liverpool based companies like Mando Group can help not only provide fundraising support but also help educate others about the wide area Claire House reaches out to.
A few weeks ago myself, Pete and Robin paid a visit to Claire House and were given a tour around the facilities by Helen Carlson, who co-ordinates fundraising activity for the charity. Helen showed us how the support available can make a huge difference to the lives not only of the individual children affected, but also their parents and siblings. As a father of 2 young boys myself, I wasn’t sure how I would feel seeing Claire House first hand. The first thing that struck me was just how homely the space is – closer to a hotel than a hospital – and Helen remarked that some of the children refer to Claire House as their ‘holiday home’. Everything seems to be designed with the child’s comfort and convenience in mind, from electronic doors which open on instruction from an approaching wheelchair, to sinks which can have their height adjusted for every visiting child. Each bedroom opens into a central courtyard filled with colour and life, overlooking gardens and playgrounds. We saw picture after picture of smiling faces, taken during the many fairs and fun-days hosted there. They showed children playing with their brothers and sisters, and parents enjoying precious moments together as a family. These were memories that just wouldn’t normally be possible in the usual routine of day-to-day life coping with a serious medical condition on top of other pressures of work, school, money and so on. After an hour being shown around I felt emotionally drained and had mixed feelings, knowing that what I had seen was the very best that could be offered to families in the very worst of circumstances.
The experience of visiting Claire House has really encouraged us in our planning of a fundraising events schedule for 2012, and with Helen’s help we already have a list of prospective activities which has been pinned to the Mando notice board and gathering names for the last fortnight. The general theme for all the events seems to be one of action, thrills and in some cases serious risk of personal injury! So over the coming months please keep an eye on the blog as we write about these activities, and please do support us with your sponsorship.
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Jonathan, May 13th, 2012
Presentation slides from ‘Beyond your website: unravelling real business value from social media hype’, a talk given on Wed 9th May by Director of Strategy Jonathan Seal as part of the TR&DE programme with Grant Thornton.
No comments yet Filed under: Business, Social, User Experience
tony.richardson, May 9th, 2012
On May 26th 2012 the 12 month lead-in period to comply with the EU E-Privacy Directive will come to an end. This has led to a last minute rush by businesses to understand what is being asked of them and how they can become compliant.
The law
The law dictates that a Cookie must not be set unless the following prerequisites have been met:
- The User or Subscriber is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage and access to the data stored in the Cookie.
- The User or Subscriber has given his or her consent
There are no definitive criteria for what information must be provided; just that it must be clear and sufficient so that the user can comprehend the consequences of what they are consenting to.
What is the impact?
All business websites in Europe must comply. However, a recent online survey of 1600 web users found that only 23% of people surveyed would be happy to say yes to having cookies stored on their machine. This would have a negative impact on the use of many widely used features such as analytics software, social media and website advertisements.
User Consent
Current guidance suggests that “consent must involve some form of communication where the individual knowingly indicates their acceptance.”
An ‘opt-out’ policy prompting users for their consent after cookies have been set will likely lead to non-compliance and relying on the principle of implied consent may create ambiguity as far as the law is concerned.
Enforcement
Business websites not in compliance by the end of the deferral period may have the following imposed on them:
- Information Notice – Notice for information to be provided by the business to the ICO.
- Undertaking – Commits a business to a particular course of action.
- Enforcement Notice – force a business to take an action within the notice period.
- Monetary Penalty Notice – Monetary penalty of up to £500,000.
The IOC guidance makes a number of high level design suggestions for presenting the user with the necessary information and obtaining their consent for saving cookies to their device.
Next steps…
Mando recommend all website owners carry out an audit of what cookies exist on their site so that they can update the websites Privacy Policy with a list of website cookies being used and their purpose. This is good practice and shows that a business is aware of the legislation and is attempting to comply.
Following this, you must decide how you want to acquire user permission to store cookies on the user’s machine. Methods of implementation will differ on a case by case basis but suggestions fall broadly across the following two options:
1. A Prominent Widget The more people who give their consent to cookies being used the more valuable a site becomes. Therefore a prominent widget which instantly appears on a user’s screen once they land on a website ensures users either accept or decline cookies at the start of their visit.
2. A more subtle request Some website owners may object to a prominent widget on their site as it interferes with the user experience, therefore they may choose to have cookies disabled as standard across their site and a more subtle request for user permission in the header or footer of the website. This approach will have a greater impact on site functionality and analytics data.
Analytics
If visitors fail to opt in or indeed opt out of cookie compliance this could have serious negative effects on your ability to report on site traffic and engagement through Google Analytics. It could negatively affect the reporting to your organisation, your ability to accurately measure ROI on your marketing activities or understand conversion performance.
Mando Group can monitor the impact of any cookie compliance measure on your analytics traffic and report to you instantly the moment site traffic shows signs of a negative down turn. This will allow us to be agile in our response to the solution and suggest improvements to foster greater opt in.
For more information and to discuss options for your specific website please contact managedservice@mandogroup.com
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Andy Hodges, May 4th, 2012
Last week Myself and Adam Burcher visited the International SharePoint conference at the QEII conference centre at Westminster in London. The three day conference which is held every year attracts some of the best speakers in the SharePoint world to speak to around 550 delegates. The conference is split into ‘tracks’ to cater for different target audiences from business users through to programmers. With 6 hour long sessions a day, there really is a lot too learn and with 6 tracks that adds up to a total of 36 hours of learning across the 3 days. As it is impossible to be in 6 places at once, luckily there are DVD recordings of every session, which I will definitely be reviewing when they arrive in a few weeks.
The conference was different to others I had previously attended. Each session in each track worked through a hypothetical scenario of an Oil company who had merged with another company, and needed to implement SharePoint to solve a number of business challenges. In fact each of the developer sessions was built on a SharePoint Server Farm that was hosted in the conference centre. Each session followed on from the last, building out a complete solution by the end of the conference.
I started the conference in the business track and saw some very good talks from Andrew Woodward and Bill English. The business track was extremely useful because often, why SharePoint is being deployed is overlooked by IT or the business users. My one takeaway from this is to ensure the business users are driving the project and to link the project to the mission, vision and values of the company, whilst ensuring the ROI or the reduction in the cost of doing business is known.
Andrew Woodward started off with “Do we need SharePoint?” looking at the business context and mapping out how we would get to the decision point.
Bill English introduced us to the words ‘putability’ and ‘findability’ in his first session, if your not putting it in the right place its hard to find. Organise your content and ensure it is findable at a later date.
The second day I fleeted between tracks. I popped into one track to see what one speaker was doing with branding SharePoint using custom CSS and how they package branding up for deployment. I then went to a case study on BI and using Analysis Services with SharePoint to surface data that could be used in reports, which was really good. At the end of the second day my mind was full with new SharePoint knowledge.
The third day concentrated on Microsoft Azure and Office365 which is going to be Microsoft’s big push next year. I visited the developer track to learn some more about Azure and deploying on-premise solutions to the cloud. I did find these sessions useful and they gave me further understanding of the technical challenges of moving solutions to the cloud.
It had been a busy three days and by the end of the conference I had plenty of ideas to take back to the office and implement. I will definitely be reviewing the DVD’s to jog my memory and also to catch up on the sessions that I missed. It was a really well run conference with a lot of people from the industry and some great speakers, I can’t wait to go back next year.
Andy Hodges
SharePoint Solutions Consultant
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Amalie, April 4th, 2012
At the end April we’ve got the exciting opportunity of speaking at the SharePoint Saturday in Belgium. If you’ve not come across SharePoint Saturday’s before then they are a brilliant, community led, conference which typically happen every year (and all over the world).
Here at Mando we use PowerShell alongside our SharePoint development which allows us to control and manage our deployments and configuration. This is what Adam Burcher, our specialist SharePoint programmer, is going to cover during his talk – showing just how flexible and useful PowerShell can really be. PowerShell isn’t just for SharePoint, but is becoming more and more common amongst a lot of Microsoft products. Whilst typically it falls into the IT Admin remit, PowerShell is extremely useful (and arguably essential) for a developer as well. The out of the box commands that come with SharePoint are very useful, but being able to exploit the SharePoint Object Model and write your own means what you can do is almost endless. It means if you can write the C# code for it, the chances are you can write the PowerShell too.
During the session Adam will be walking through how PowerShell can be used at each phase of a site roll out, from installation and through the way through to custom deployment of code, configuration and content! Watch this space for more details!
No comments yet Filed under: Technology
Siobhan, November 30th, 2011
You might recall that a few weeks ago on this blog I talked about the exciting charity event that our Mando Foundation team were putting on, to raise money in support of Countess of Chester appeal Relative Comfort. November has gone by in a bit of a blur, and I can report that all the totals from the evening are now in, and the evening was a huge success.
Over 70 guests showed up to Leaf Tea Shop & Bar on Bold Street to participate, mingle, and just generally have a good time. Entertainment in the form of our very own Matt Stephens as MC and music from excellent local covers band Duke gave the evening a great atmosphere, while support from local businesses such as Hope Street Hotel and the Everyman & Playhouse encouraged real generosity in people entering the raffle, hoping for a chance to win some awesome prizes.
All this of course was an aside to the real fun, the awesome Scalextric tournament which everyone turned up for. The 8-lane Scalextric track was brilliant – bells, 
whistles, and really cool glowing lights – and dominated the room, and the pre-tournament free-for-all really ramped up excitement for the main event. A number of our clients, friends, and local businesses kindly sponsored a car for the evening, were given the opportunity to brand it however they saw fit – my personal favourite was the glitzy, bedazzled Glitterbug from Liverpool Science Park – and nominated a driving team to lead them to glory or (in some cases) despair in our miniature Grand Prix.
In the end, River Professional Services’ designated driver demonstrated an impressive aptitude for speeding around the track and led to them scooping the 1st prize of a bottle of bubbly and a rather impressive trophy. The had close competition all evening in the form of local architecture firm Falconer Chester, who followed them to second place, while our Gemma’s determined driving gave third spot on the podium to Mando Group!
There was of course a design competition held to acknowledge the effort put in by those who branded their car – it turns out that apparently not everyone’s tastes runs to diamantes like mine does, as the prize for best dressed automobile went to Curly Productions’ Batmobile-inspired creation, which was a demon on the track despite narrowly missing out on a podium spot.
Ultimately, the generosity of everyone involved helped to raise just shy of £3500 for the Relative Comfort appeal, pushing them past their £300,000 target just in time for the 31st December deadline.
Janet Ratcliffe, Fundraising Manager for the Relative Comfort appeal, said: “It was a brilliant evening– a fundraising event with a difference where everybody could participate and have fun. Sadly I didn’t back the winning car but nevertheless it was thoroughly enjoyable and the icing on the cake was to find out later what a fantastic amount had been raised for our appeal”
1 comment Filed under: Awesomeness, Charity
Anthony, November 16th, 2011
The now world famous TED conferencing arrived in Liverpool in the shape of TEDx Liverpool, an independently organised event with a focus on the mobile technology industry. Interest was high for the event that encourages inspirational speakers to share ideas with their audience, and it played out to a full house at FACT, Wood Street.
The crowd were treated to talks from various sectors of the mobile industry. Mobile gaming and design was particularly well represented in the form of ustwo, Zolmo and Matmi.
ustwo were particularly interesting with self-professed ‘Chief Wonka’, Mills, who took the audience through several of ustwo’s ipad and iphone apps with the focus being primarily on sales failure, and how a company can learn a great deal by being inspired and forward thinking. Not necessarily setting out to make big bucks but earning good reputation, canvassing your market and getting a feel for what users really want and desire on their mobile devices.
Ian Wharton of Zolmo talked at length about the problems and successes of their Jamie Oliver apps; from working closely with Oliver and listening to user feedback and getting people engaged enough to see the value in paying for it right through to harnessing and refining the product. He commented on the industry being largely misunderstood, but one that will be defined in the next 5 years and how users must begin to understand the value of digital products compared to their physical representations.
Stephen Mellish gave us a ‘Mystic Meg’ insight into the seemingly hellish terminator esq future we face, as mobile phones take over. Everything from diagnosing our illnesses via microchip implants to our homes dictating to us how we should live.
Tom Scott provided some light relief in between chats with a clever and amusing use of twitter with the audience and Nicholas Cuminsky from Google talked at length about branding and performance solutions.
Roger McNamee (through video) spoke about the stunning statistics regarding mobile smartphone adoption – that smartphones have taken 96% of desktop internet access to less than 50% in three years. And according to him this leads us to the conclusion that App beats web and that Index search is dying. However he pointed out that with the emergence of HTML5 it all changes again –watch this space!
Dan Lyons, Newsweek Technology Editor that was the pick of the bunch, with his colourful opinion on Steve Jobs and his forthright views on the current mobile market thats dominated by Apple. The event was an enjoyable and informative collective of views and ideas, not to mention the free Krispy Kreme donuts.
TEDx returns to the Northwest very soon at TEDx Manchester, be sure to get your tickets!
No comments yet Filed under: Business, Creative, Social, Technology, User Experience
Siobhan, November 3rd, 2011
The month formerly known as November has closed in on us quickly this year, and the Mando men are once again exercising their Gentleman’s right to grow upper lip facial hair in exotic and decorative styles. This year’s ManMo team are brazenly disregarding loved ones’ objections, friends’ advice, and colleagues’ horror in the pursuit of fame and fortune in the world of luscious lip caterpillars.
As always, it’s all in a good cause under the Movember banner, supporting mens prostate cancer charities and generating awareness of mens health.
Please donate generously if you can, as again this year Mando Group have pledged to match whatever the team raise pound for pound. You can either donate to the team, or to individuals. Donations can be made via the website http://mobro.co/ManMo or see any of the team members individually to donate via cash.
Team Captain:
Matt Stephens
Team members:
Adam Clifford
Andrew Laidman
Matt Guthrie
Matt Salmon
Stephen Roughley
Tim Myers
Henrik Stacke
Tom Riley
Check back here throughout Movember for updates as to how their luxurious lip warmers are coming along!
No comments yet Filed under: Awesomeness, Charity, Social
Siobhan, November 1st, 2011
Earlier this year, we ran several ‘We Make SharePoint Beautiful’ events, small gatherings for like-minded IT professionals who were interested in hearing what we had to say about Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 Technology platform.
Well, we’re going to be running the series of events again across the North West into early 2012. As before, we’ll be painting a picture of what SharePoint 2010 can achieve as a public facing web platform when it’s combined with the right User Experience-led approach. To whet your appetite, a little bit more information about what SharePoint can do can be found over at our dedicated showcase wwww.WeMakeSharePointBeautiful.com
Our next event is on 23rd November 2011 at Malmaison in Manchester, featuring the Mando Team alongside some key guests from Business Link, Microsoft, and the world’s leading hosting company, Rackspace.
If you’re interested in attending, or for more info about any of our upcoming events, please contact Amalie.
No comments yet Filed under: Awesomeness, Business, Technology
Siobhan, October 12th, 2011
Here at Mando Group, we believe that one of the most important aspects of our ethos is our commitment to supporting the local community and offering aid to worthy causes through our charitable enterprise, the Mando Group Foundation.
Working in partnership with the Community Foundation for Merseyside, the Foundation enables our staff & clients to offer their time and energy to helping those who need it.
To this end, we’re hosting a charity fundraising event on 10th November.
The event, ‘Motor Mayhem’, hopes to encourage participation from our friends & clients by appealing to their inner-child with its Scalextric theme.
For a charitable donation, participating clients will be presented with a plain Scalextric car chassis – a blank slate for their company to design & decorate in any way they see fit, before pitting their incredible electric car racing skills against others.
In addition to the nostalgia-fuelled main event, the evening will include live music and a charity auction with some great prizes. All proceeds from the evening will go to Mando Group’s Adopted Charity for 2011, Relative Comfort, which is an appeal set up by the Countess of Chester to create a ‘home from home’ environment for relatives of patients who are in the critical care unit. The Foundation adopts a charity on an annual basis and encourages individuals at the company to put forward charities which are close to their hearts.
We’re supporting Relative Comfort this year because we think that what they’re trying to do is something that more critical care units need to think about – support not only for patients, but their relatives, because everyone could need this support at some point in their life.
Our aim with this event was to come up with something that was a little bit different, that would have universal appeal – and we thought that the Scalextric theme was a great way of exciting people who maybe wouldn’t ordinarily consider attending an event like this. Hopefully, it’s the first of many more exciting events from the Mando Group Foundation.
So please – throw down the scalextric gauntlet, relive a bit of your childhood, and help support a great cause – join us for some Motor Mayhem!
Contact Amalie for more information or to enquire about purchasing a ticket, and read more about the Mando Group Foundation’s activities here.
No comments yet Filed under: Awesomeness, Charity, Social
