I spent Bank Holiday Monday at the Heritage Inn Community Event. It was good to meet with my neighbors and to build bridges, so we can work together for the benefit of our locality. Viva Cricklewood!

Lovely chicken too.

Brent Council recently signed a deal with Crapita Business Services for council tax and business rates administration and IT support systems. Reported to be worth £15m over 5 years, the function of the contract is to increase the council tax collection rate, with Crapita giving a guaranteed a collection rate for council tax and an anticipated £4.6 million in savings for the Council over the initial term of the contract.

The Council General Purposes Committee recently set the 2011/12 collection rate for council tax at 97.5%, as it has been since 2001/02. As you can see, in recent years there is still a considerable way to go to reach 97.5% and apart from 2009/10 the collection is still considerably short of the 97.5%
target.

Let’s hope the arrangement with Crapita can squeeze out the extra 2% that Brent Council can’t quite manage. I wonder what the collection rate guarantee for council tax is… and if its 97.5% or greater…

Figures on page 6 of Public Document Pack downloaded from Agenda and minutes pages of General Purposes Committee Tuesday, 25 January 2011 7.00 pm.

After much fruitless searching for helpful documentation to assist me in setting up the VPN services on a Cisco RV 120W to work with the open source client from Shrew Soft, I thought I’d better make a post here to help others.

I’m setting up the VPN to use xauth (usernames and passwords) to authenticate sessions. I want to allow DNS/WINS through the VPN tunnel and I want to allow ‘split tunnelling’ so that internet access still functions while the tunnel is up.

I found a very helpful PDF guide to getting the Cisco device configured from TheGreenBow who produce VPN client software. The PDF for that guide is here.

I also found a PDF guide written by Cisco to getting the Shrew Soft client to talk to a Cisco SA 500. There is another technote on configuring the SA500 to accept the connections from a Shrew Soft client too, which is quite helpful.

Read on for the recipe.

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After the twitter feed of UK Gov ICT contracts emerged from the recent LinkedGov hackday I’ve been subscribed to searches for open source and linux.

Now, aside from the useless daily email of ‘no results found’, the contracts finder does throw up some interesting things, like this procurement note from West Sussex Country Council for information technology services, Official EU reference: 31260-2011.

This procurement note is for a schools management information system. What’s interesting about it, as that it is an announcement of an ‘Award of a contract without prior publication of a contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union’ under SECTION IV: PROCEDURE IV.1) TYPE OF PROCEDURE IV.1.1) Type of procedure

Reason: the “services provided under the existing arrangements cannot be undertaken by other parties. The solution is the Intellectual Property of Capita Children’s Services and they have not granted licenses to third parties to amend and enhance these MIS products (such as in an open source arrangement), this means that Capita Children’s Services are the only people with the necessary rights to maintain their product suite.”

The value of the contract awarded is £407,500 GBP. Not small beer then. Multiplied that by each County Council with statutory education provision duties… and the beer gets more bigger.

All the Craptia system, called SIMS, does is provide a few data capture forms and some analytics. I know from experience that the system has many weaknesses and that it does not play well with other systems.

There are plenty of opensource ERP/MIS systems out there … with a bit customisation and some add-ons of interoperability, could this marketplace be disrupted by open source practices? I think so.

Anyway… back to healthcare

Brent Council must be expecting numbers as the hearing. The Licensing Committee has got the main chamber for tonight’s session.