February 2018 Newsletter

Whooshing away the Winter Woes

faster fibre illustration, based on images from pexels.com and unsplash.com
Faster Fibre

Now the warmth of families and friends packed into living rooms too small to hold them are left behind, the last scraps of Christmas cake and bags of nuts have been consumed, we’re here in wintry February 2018. However we’ve sped into the year with a new FTTP link. See here for more details of how to download Cradle even faster.

Cradle Features Coming Soon….

We’re all busy here, in the chilly winds and rain and sleet of Cumbria working on the features for Cradle 7.4 I can reveal that we’ve been working on some enhancements to alerts to allow more comprehensive content to be sent in emails. This will help with collaborative working, swiftly informing interested parties that an item has changed which may need their attention. Item level Workflows are being enhanced to improve automation of your product lifecycle.

GDPR

padlock over computer based on images from negativespace.co pixabay.com on pexels.com
GDPR

Time is racing towards the GDPR implementation date. We’re working hard to ensure our policies are up to date and in a fit state to deal with any data requests. However, there’s still a lot of confusion out there. Some things are obvious, were we to store sensitive information, like someone’s medical records, religious or political beliefs, its fairly obvious that this should never be swapped freely. The subject should be aware as to why we hold the data, what we hold and how we use and process it. We would then ensure any third party processors were up to the same standards before exchanging information.

At the other end of the scale, the ‘how would this ever be practical’ bit, there is little in the way of concrete guidance. If I email a company, from my desk at 3SL, my email address contains my name and associates me with 3SL. The sign off contains a phone number and an office location. By the letter of the legislation, this is personally identifiable information. Were I to leave 3SL (To become a top secret agent) and decided all previous traces of me needed to be removed, I could submit a ‘right to be forgotten’ to 3SL. They would have to remove all my personal data. (Except for ‘within date’ tax records etc.). As the data controller, all those emails with personally identifiable information within them would have to be recalled from all the recipients (who are now processors). Now how on earth could you do that?

If you’ve got any examples where the legislation appears to hit an impractical wall, drop us a line and we may feature it in a future blog. Note I’m using an anonymous email address social-GDPR@threesl.com !!

Social Media

Twitter

Image of a tweet where we ponder what the picture is
Tweet of what?

Looking at other people’s tech, we wondered what this image was.

 

We celebrated #ThesaurusDay by looking how words and meanings could give rise to ambiguous requirements.

Hints of the Month

Last month’s blog articles included:

Tidying up if you’re ever left with a dangling cross reference

What to do if you have special characters in your text and you need to write a Regex (regular expression) in Cradle

You can read Hints & Tips in the 3SL Blog