Create a shortcut to CS-VUE on your desktop:
Simply drag and drop the small CS icon on the left of the URL bar onto your desktop. From now on, all you need to do to access CS-VUE online is double click the desktop icon.

Automatically enter CS-VUE website URL:
To automatically enter the www. and .com into the Internet Explorer’s address bar and go straight to our site, simply type CS-VUE and press CTRL + ENTER on the keyboard.

Quickly bookmark CS-VUE to your favourites:
Quickly bookmark CS-VUE from all major browsers by pressing CTRL + D on your keyboard. Pressing these two keys together will open the bookmarks or favorites for your browser and allow you to quickly place a bookmark for the page you’re currently at. (See picture)

Full screen CS-VUE:
Make your Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox the full screen without all the toolbars by pressing the F11 key. To restore the window back to how it was press F11 again.

Quickly scroll through a consent view using the space bar:
Quickly scroll through the page, one screen at a time in Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox by pressing the spacebar. Move backup a page at a time by pressing shift + spacebar.

Open another CS-VUE view in a new window:
Open a link in a new Internet Explorer browser window by holding down the shift key on the keyboard and clicking on the link.

Increase decrease size of font with wheel on mouse:
Quickly increase and decrease the size of a font on a web page by holding down the CTRL key on the keyboard and scrolling up or down with the wheel on a wheel mouse.

Quickly find text on a consent view:
Quickly find anything on the current page or frame by holding down the CTRL key and pressing F.

Many large companies have long avoided hosted services because of concerns about security, customisation, integration and long-term costs.

But in recent interviews, IT managers at some organisations say they are turning to, or at least evaluating, hosted products as a way to offload management of some non-mission-critical applications. Further, some say the subscription-based pricing model can keep IT budget costs consistent and often lower than packaged or homegrown software.

In a report released in March, Forrester Research said that the use of hosted software products in companies with more than 1,000 employees grew by 33% from 2006 to 2007. The survey of 1,017 IT professionals found that the most popular hosted services are human resources, CRM and collaboration tools.

Ben Pring, an analyst at Gartner, says that despite IT managers’ interest in hosted systems, many of them are “conflicted”, in some cases because business units are signing contracts on their own. “[IT managers] see this as a threat,” he says. “It’s loosening their control and introducing security, vulnerability and integration headaches.”

Nonetheless, managers are starting to realise that at some point, IT will become responsible for hosted products, whether it oversees implementation or not.

“They know at some stage, the business people who’ve gone out and bought this stuff will throw it at them,” Pring says.

Basil Blume, executive vice president and CIO of Colorado Capital Bank, says his organisation uses more than 30 hosted applications, which account for 60%-70% of its software library.

He agrees that the thought of hosted systems can be “very disconcerting” because of fears that IT could lose control of applications and data. “They’re concerned about their data,” Blume says. “I am as well”.

Still, the benefits of using hosted software have allowed the bank’s systems to keep up with its rapid growth, Blume says.

About five years after its founding in 1998, the bank turned to hosted software to quickly add several new programs for customers. At the time, “we were a $50 million bank,” Blume said. “Today, we’re a $700 million bank, and many of those [first hosted] solutions are still the same.”

The bank’s IT managers have concluded that “the ability to scale without having to reinvent that infrastructure is a huge benefit,” he says.

The hosted systems that Colorado Capital used include a key internet banking system hosted by Intuit’s Digital Insight.

To internally implement that system, Blume says, the company would have had to spend significant amounts of money to bolster firewalls, hire a chief security officer, buy new servers and backup systems, and establish off-site disaster recovery facilities.

Mark Buzby, human resource information systems director at The Pep Boys, an auto parts supplier, says he is “optimistic” about the firm’s plan to use a new hosted compensation system from Xactly.

“Obviously, with the economy the way it is, we’re looking to cut costs just like any other retailer,” he says. “[But] to be honest, there is a little caution going into this.”

The company was set to start evaluating the service at 60 stores late last month to calculate the sales commissions of service desk workers. If that goes smoothly, Pep Boys will deploy the hosted software to 1,500 employees at its 500 remaining stores over a six-month period, Buzby says.

The company also hopes to use the software as a password-protected reporting tool for employees, managers and executives.

Buzby noted that Xactly has already successfully tweaked the application for Pep Boys in response to a change in its needs.

Xactly chief operating officer Evan Ellis says that vendors of hosted software are under growing pressure from corporate customers to provide applications that can be easily tweaked to fit IT and business needs.

IT demands are also forcing vendors to link internal legacy software and hosted systems and to offer corporate users improved service-level agreements.

Pricing scheme and SLA policies can vary among vendors, and IT managers should take a close look at each, analysts say.

“If you’re looking at years three, four and five, is there a crossover at some point?” asks Forrester analyst Liz Herbert. “Some corporations believe that in the long run, software as a service is more expensive.”

Gartner estimates that more than 60% of hosted software users today lack an SLA, despite the potential for service delivery interruptions, performance problems or changes in ownership.

Tom Lockwood, director of IS and logistics at Car Toys, says an outage at PivotLink Corp., the company’s provider of hosted business intelligence software, convinced him of the value of a strong SLA.

Lockwood says the outage came when PivotLink opted to move Car Toys’ data to new hardware late on a Saturday night without advance warning. PivotLink thought that installing new hardware on the last day of the month would cause little disruption, he says.

But it disrupted the creation of Car Toys’ monthly reports. “That happened once, and never again,” Lockwood says.

After the incident, the two firms signed an SLA that requires PivotLink to notify Car Toys about any planned upgrades, maintenance or outages.

Since then, Car Toys has become a believer in SaaS, Lockwood says, and it is now evaluating a hosted payroll application from Automatic Data Processing.

Gartner predicts that corporate adoption of hosted software will grow by 22.1% annually through 2011, more than double the projected growth rate for packaged applications.

But IT managers using hosted business applications warn that potential adopters should proceed carefully when selecting a vendor and conduct background checks, contact referees and perform due-diligence assessments of service-delivery track records.

“When you get past that honeymoon period,” Lockwood noted, “things can sour in a hurry if you don’t have the right people and the right relationship in place.”

Please login to the members only area on the right, using your CS-VUE Login to view the rest of this post.

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The new ‘un-snooze’ function allows the consent manager to remove the snooze marker from a condition. This in turn allows the user to sign-off a condition as soon as there is evidence of compliance, and not have to wait for the snooze date to be reached. This allows easier management of the consent, and can reduce the reporting of the consent as non-compliant.

For example, a condition might be snoozed for two weeks if it requires a monitoring report to be produced and for some reason there is a delay in the production of the report. If the monitoring report is actually provided well before the two weeks, then previously the user had to wait until the two weeks was up before being able to sign-off the condition. Now, the user can immediately sign-off the condition (and attach the report) by un-snoozing the condition and then signing off.

If you , or any of your colleagues, would like further clarification about this new feature or  assistance  with any  other aspect of CS-VUE then please  feel free to get in touch with your Customer Care Manager.  We will also be updating the training manual shortly, and this can be found under the Docs tab within the CS-VUE system.

If you have any suggestions about future enhancements or improvements, please let us know.

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All environmental managers should be aware of the importance of explaining fully the conditions associated with each new project involving “subbies”.

To facilitate this it is vital to undertake a “pre-start” meeting with all key stakeholders (including contractors and regulators) and bring to everyone’s attention any specific consent requirements.

Lack of a pre start meeting tends to lead to misunderstanding in regard to compliance responsibilities, which in turn can lead to non compliance events. Many regulators rate these meetings as the single most important activity to undertake at pre-commencement.

This article was written by Allan Wright (BSc Hons), Compliance Manager, Greenlight Onsite Environmental Compliance, Andrew.Stewart Ltd.

• Building Warrant of Fitness
• Heritage and Archaeological Consents
• Utility Consents
• Management Plans
• Lease Agreements
• Legal Agreements
• Property Owner Approvals
• Contract Instructions and Variations
• Standard Compliance procedures and Protocols
• Compliance Training and Licensing
• and many more!

If you would like to try putting another type of document into the CS-VUE system, click here for assistance.