Busy times for us as we have several large customers moving from TERMS on their own IT infrastructure to TERMS hosted by Westmarch. As well as the tasks of provisioning of many new servers in the Westmarch ‘server farm’ and getting them set up for Hosted TERMS this is also an opportunity for a ‘spring clean’ on the customers data. The current record for ‘oldest’ TERMS data seen in this exercise is July 2004, which just shows how well TERMS copes with many years worth of data. From a practical viewpoint having data going back that far has little benefit in reality as Adult Education Funding and Provision has changed radically over the last few years. As part of the Hosting migration exercise we are working with customers to look at the older data still in the system and identifying what data can be removed and also identifying potentially duplicated or obsolete data – especially with respect to Learners. We are also taking the opportunity to help some customers enhance their websites (which we also host).
The Westmarch Penrith office is moving at the end of February to new premises in Carlisle. This will be quite a change for those of us working here as we leave an office out in the countryside with very picturesque views of the Cumbrian mountains to go to one right in the centre of Carlisle. The new office has more space available for meetings and training sessions and is only 5 minutes walk from the railway station. One consequence of the move is that we are having to clean out the cupboards and have discovered lots of old equipment we have retired over the years, and which we could never use again – this includes such antiques as Parallel Printer Centronics leads, old note books with Windows XP on (and a ‘massive at the time’ 30 GB hard disk) and Dial Up Modems.