Thursday, July 20, 2006

An update on Companies House

The Conservative spokesman on small business and enterprise, Mark Prisk MP, has apparently taken up the issue of Companies House's web search facility only being "available from Monday to Saturday 7.00am to 12 Midnight UK Time".

I'm told - in a written question scheduled to receive a reply from the Department of Trade and Industry on 25/07/2006 - he's asked:

"why the webbased search facility of Companies House is not available twenty four hours a day and what plans his department has to extend the service hours.."

Colleagues and I have been trying to think why the system is not available overnight or in Sundays and the only reason we can come up with (bearing in mind we're all techies), is that the system is horrendously old, is probably running on some antiquated Microsoft Access database, and it requires so many outages for backups and change. It's great that Mark Prisk has tabled a question on it and I'm actually quite looking forward to the answer.

2 comments:

Ellee Seymour said...

It will be interesting the know the answer, and whether the question will knee jerk them into operating 24/7. Well done for getting the pic, how did you manage that?

dizzy said...

oh the pic is not him asking the question, I nicked it from his website! :)