Quality of IT contractors? Expectations?

[Gremlin]

If he's anything like me, he'll have probably seen 10 different customers, had 25 emails, 10 text messages (I hate customers that text), a couple of dozen phone calls and not remember what he did 2 hours ago, never mind the details of the job in the morning.

Just as an aside, I've found a Blackberry (plus BES server) and Addonis (available for a couple of other platforms as well I think) really good.

Logs all inbound and outbound calls to your calendar (on day and time, for duration), able to send data between email/calendar/tasks, prompts to add new numbers to your contact list and also a blacklist for incoming calls.

Really handy for trying to keep an idea of the day, especially when you have been too busy during the day, to write down everything you did. Then you have the power of outlook/exchange to search through everything if you want a summary, as all my clients have their company code in their name, in my contact list.

[scracha]

Just as an aside, I've found a Blackberry (plus BES server) and Addonis (available for a couple of other platforms as well I think) really good.

Thanks, I will look into that. My prehistoric Windows PDA has been struggling with the sheer amount of contact info I've got in it.

[Gremlin]

My prehistoric Windows PDA has been struggling with the sheer amount of contact info I've got in it.

I retired my PDA many years ago.

Even the Nokia smartphones (E71, E5) seem to handle over 1000 contacts syncing up (just takes time). The real advantage of Blackberry is stuff like txts, settings on the phone etc, are also backed up, so switching device is easy, and you have remote wipe.

BEX Express is now free, no CAL's required, so the increased cost is Telecom/Vodafone charging more for Blackberry data.