eyeontheblog.co.uk

We have just implemented a feature which was first requested some time ago and was, in the end, quite easy to bring to life.

Now, when you log into the eyeontheplace.com system and get to your camera pages, and you click the “motion detection” option in the menu, as well as seeing your motion detection timetable, at the bottom of the page you will see the email address and the phone number for the receipt of email and SMS text message alerts respectively (used to alert you when one of your cameras detects movement).

To change these details, simply click on the “edit” button, in the same way as if you were editing the motion detection timetable.  This brings up the editing page where you can now also edit the email address and phone number!

Well, what a fortnight it has been – and not in a good way!

For the first time in our six-year history we had a major interruption to service that lasted for about three hours.  This was caused by a sudden “work to rule” at one of our service providers – they reviewed the settings on our service policy and realised that things needed to be “tightened up”.  This tightening up effectively locked all of our cameras out of the system!  No notice was given, and no notification was sent.  I did not know what had happened and spent hours trying to find the cause of the problem.  When I finally contacted the service provider they did, in fairness, reverse what they had done so that I had the chance to make alternative arrangements.  They wanted to sell me a more expensive package which would have more flexibility and not come with the same problem, but this was horrendously expensive and to be honest I was pretty fed up with them in any case because of the trouble they caused us.

Fortunately, I soon found an alternative provider for this part of our system and the migration was fairly uneventful and easy.

During the down-time, we switched to our main backup system, which we have never had to do before!  This itself was, shall we say, eventful – we soon realised that the backup system was not quite as it should be. It worked, but only just!  So, as well as switching main suppliers, we are also now reviewing the backup systems to make them more resilient.

So it’s been stressful, but we have come out of it with a better system.

Well, it’s been a while since our blog was updated, but there is some very interesting news!

Basically, we have been working very hard over the past few months on a new version of the customer pages of eyeontheplace.com that enables you to view CCTV on the new generation of smart phones.  (If you are not yet a customer, the customer pages I am referring to are what you get – your own private web pages – where you can view live and recorded images, change your motion detection timetable and so on.)

When we were contemplating the whole “cctv on your mobile phone” thing, we looked at several options.  We could have written a CCTV “app”, but this would have been horrendously expensive to develop – and we would have had to make an extra charge for it.  Instead, we developed a solution that all of our customers get with no additional payment.  Even better, our way of doing it does not require you to download anything to the phone – it just works!  You also still use the same web address for accessing your camera pages, whether you are using a computer or a mobile phone, so it’s all really easy.

The next step is rolling out this new mobile version to all of our existing customers, which will take a little while, but we expect to have everyone on the new version by the end of the month.

There is a heated debate at the office about how we can drag the main eyeontheplace.com website into 2009 instead of something that looks like it was from the dawn of the internet!

There is divided opinion on whether we should use a platform like Wordpress, which is becoming very popular even for business websites, or whether we should go down the bespoke route again.

It’s not that we don’t have the skills in-house to do it – we do.  No, it’s a question of doing the best with our limited resources, and we are busy enough as it is.  So we’re looking for something that is fast to set up, easy to maintain and easy for visitors to use – probably in reverse order of priority to be honest.  Wordpress  can be all these, and of course you can change the theme with very little work as long as you don’t go overboard with complex changes in the php code.  It would mean getting rid of all the asp/vbscript from the sales pages, as they are on a Windows server at the moment.  This is the main overhead if we use Wordpress.

My feeling is that we have a go on Wordpress and set up a little test to see how it looks and how easy it is.  I am very wary of creating a complex bespoke site that will be hard to maintain.  However, the decision has not yet been made…

Today we officially launched a service that we have provided for ages but never really publicised – our internet CCTV camera service for installers.

Basically this is aimed at installers of traditional analogue CCTV systems who really don’t want to get into the computing side, but want to safeguard their businesses by offering IP technology to their customers, which, let’s face it, is a very good idea given then IP camera sales are forecast to overtake analogue CCTV camera sales by 2012.  Personally I think analogue cameras will more-or-less vanish from the marketplace over the next five years except maybe as “toys” at the very lowest end of the market.

Anyway, our service involves us doing all of the technical side of the camera set up, and the installer doing what he is good at, namely the physical installation.  We already know there is a big demand for this, because basically it’s a lifeline for CCTV installers and is a rare win-win situation.

Here’s the eyeontheplace.com web page on IP Camera Help for CCTV Installers.

This is my first post here on eyeontheblog.co.uk, the official blog of eyeontheplace.com, the internet CCTV camera pack provider.

As I write this, we are about to launch three new camera packs featuring the Axis “M” series of cameras that we have just finished evaluating. It’s great to have some new cameras to work with, and their lower price compared to the Axis 207 range is very welcome in this age of tighter than usual household finances.

Another new development is our information site, at http://internet-cctv-info.co.uk.  This is designed to share all of the tips and information we have gathered here at eyeontheplace.com over the years.

Watch out for more news on the new cameras and how we get on with them over coming weeks.

Wow – the official blog of eyeontheplace.com is up and running at last!