Law

I am in the process of moving house so my posts will be infrequent for the next 2 months. :(

Anyway I have complained before to companies who put me on their email marketing list without my consent and surprise surprise a new study has come out stating that email marketing abuse is rife. Basically firms are not following the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications by asking for customers to opt-in and not sending out unsolicited mail to non-customers.

Another new law that has come to my attention is the UK government's Amendments to the Companies Act that makes it clear that from January 2007 every company is required to list its company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its web site, order forms and other electronic business letters.

I have not checked how many UK companies are complying with the new law that I deal with but due to the rushed nature of the Act I reckon lots of companies are breaching it.


Technorati Tags: law, Computers, technology

Email

I have sent company emails to my home email account. I done this for two reasons either the employer is abusive and I need a record of my interaction of them, or if I need to think something over.

However The New York Times reports on companies spending millions to keep coporate email safe. This is due to a large number of workers sending business emails to their webmail accounts so they can access them at home as for a variety of reasons. Having read the entire article there is nothing sinster in the employees actions. They basically want a simple way that they can connect to the office and sort out work-related problems unfortunately in the real world lots of companies don't realise that setting up webaccess to an employees inbox will sort this out. I have only worked for one company that has managed this and I didn't need to sent emails to a webaddress.

Technorati Tags: Email, Computers, technology, Trust

User Levels and spreadsheets

I've not been writing since Xmas because I've taken a break from the computer world and sorting out moving house.

Anyway yesterday I realised again it's not a good idea to think that all users can use standard technology on whatever level they work at and have to be shown, lead or taught depending on their technology level.

I'm pretty useless at writing macros and using MS Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc, but there are high level technology users in my office who are equally as bad, and low level users who are brillant.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, spreadsheet, software