Feedback from a new Alpha Tracker asbestos consultancy user

"The reports are excellent!"

What lovely feedback from one of our recent Alpha Tracker asbestos software installations.

We've got 10 new UK orders on the go currently, and half as many in Australia... that's as many as we have ever had in the pipeline.  Busy autumn ahead!

Welcome Jess to the UK team

Let me introduce Jess Humphries, our new Customer Services assistant working out of our Telford office.

Jess Humphries

Jess has joined us to work alongside Jack and Elaine on the support desk, helping our Alpha Tracker asbestos software customers with questions and queries.  She also prepares quotations for new work and books orders for new systems or asbestos report template changes into our own Alpha Tracker system.

Next time you call our UK support number, 0333 301 1010, you'll likely speak to Jess.  Do say hello! 

AllTold reaches a milestone - first 100 users online

The AllTold app has reached an important milestone this week with 100 users now using the platform to create life stories for family and friends.

We have been piloting the app with US healthcare giant Humana: read about the launch at their New Orleans centre here.

AllTold was designed with two psychologists as a fun tool to allow people to document their life story with photos, videos and audio clips.  Stories can be shared with friends and family and the process of documenting life stories has been proven to help older people (in particular) to combat social isolation and loneliness.

If you're interested in AllTold or want us to build an app for your business, get in touch!

New Alpha Tracker feature - capture and log an enquiry direct from your website!

Do you have a "Contact Us" form on your website? Yes!

Do you want information captured to automatically be added to your Alpha Tracker asbestos software system as an enquiry so you take it through to a quote and hopefully win the business?  Yes!

Link your website's Contact Us form directly to Alpha Tracker enquiries

Our latest Tracker Filer update will give you this feature.  Enquiries entered on your website's Contact Us page can be added to Alpha Tracker with no retyping or copying/pasting!

The best part is that you don't even need to amend your website.  If the website is sending you the information from your Contact Us page via an email, new settings in Tracker Filer can be used to link that email to your Alpha Tracker enquiry database.

Get in touch to discuss further or to arrange the update.

What happens if... read about our backup and "disaster recovery" services for Alpha Tracker

We are often asked "what happens if... a server fails, a virus strikes or - God forbid - hackers try to target an Alpha Tracker server?".  What plans do we have in place to recover a system which has failed?

We take a number of measures to ensure that your data and documents are as safe as they can possibly be.  We only use well-known, professional, secure data centres and we have procedures in place to protect your asbestos software Alpha Tracker information:

- all physical servers have redundant disks ("RAID") to protect data in the event of hardware failure

- virtual servers have daily "snapshots" to copy their information to alternative data stores

- we have backup software in place to copy information continuously from the main server to cloud backup servers in alternative data centres.

On top of these backups, we also use security software, firewalls and anti-virus systems to protect servers running Alpha Tracker systems.

Alpha Tracker users are also welcome and encouraged to take their own backups for additional peace-of-mind.

Even with these measures in place, it is possible that a server will become unavailable and we would have to rebuild a server from scratch.  This is a rare event but it does happen and clients suffer downtime while the new server is built.  To improve the service we provide to our clients we have been looking for another solution which would enable us to recover an Alpha Tracker server from a complete failure more quickly than we have previously been able to.

We have now found such a solution and we have it ready to deploy.  This additional backup and disaster recovery solution enables us to take live backups twice a day and have the ability to recreate an Alpha Tracker in 60 minutes or so from a complete failure situation.  This is industry-leading and very reassuring if you are running a busy consultancy as traditional methods needed to recreate servers take considerably longer.

Jess will be contacting each eligible Alpha Tracker user with details of the optional new scheme and how much it will cost.  The benefit is large compared to the relatively small cost - so please do give it your consideration and let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Alpha Tracker Release 29 - beta 4 is now available for download

We've just released beta 4 of asbestos software Alpha Tracker's latest update, Release 29. 

Release 28 was a cracker and Release 29 looks to be just as interesting with a whole raft of new features to make life easier for larger consultancies in particular. 

The calendar (resourcing) sub-system is something we have looked at in particular with new features to help to find gaps in diaries and make sure that travel time between sites is minimised.

Alpha Tracker's exceptional resource calendar

If you want more information, please do get in touch.  Even better, if your asbestos consultancy has an idea for a new Alpha Tracker feature to make it even better for the asbestos industry here in the UK, Australia or New Zealand, let us know how we can help!

Exciting new phase for Asbestoprobe

Regular readers of our blog will know that we are the software partners for the revolutionary Asbestoprobe handheld asbestos detecting device (see http://www.asbestoprobe.com/greenwall-team/ for details of the rest of the Asbestoprobe team).

We've had exciting news from Mark at Asbestoprobe that they are moving into their new custom-built premises on the Aerohub business park at Newquay Airport:

Asbestoprobe's new location at the Aerohub 

It's been a long road so far on the project but we are all making good progress still and we'll publish more news about Asbestoprobe here on the blog in the near future.

94% of high priority support calls resolved within 2 hours in July 2018

Our hard-working support team had another good month in July.

Start Software support performance (12 months to July 2018)

We took a total of 577 calls in July and 94% of high priority calls were resolved within our 2-hour timeframe.

In fact, our performance for the medium and low priority calls saw the biggest improvement going up to nearly 88% being resolved within the timeframes set by our customers.

You can find all of the methods for contacting support here.

More UK asbestos consultancies switch to Alpha Tracker

I've been away for a couple of weeks on holiday (returning to 2,800 emails... is this a record?!?!) and I expected our sales lines to have been pretty quiet.

However... we've had notification from another two UK asbestos consultancies that they want to switch to our asbestos software, Alpha Tracker.  Our order book is pretty full but we've accepted these two orders and we'll be working to create their customised asbestos report templates over the next few weeks ready for their training sessions.

I'll post again once we deliver the Tracker Mobile training to the asbestos surveyors and admin staff to welcome the consultancies on board.  With a total of eight (8) consultancies currently switching in the UK and five (5) in Australia/New Zealand, it looks like we're going to have another bumper summer.