NHP - Nursing Home Portfolio Management

NHP's main business is the ownership of a large portfolio of nursing homes, which it then leases out to a various operators on long-term leases. NHP Management is a stock-exchange listed UK public company.

NHP's portfolio comprises 367 care homes with a total of 17,754 beds, making NHP the largest owner of private care beds in the UK.

NHP support and finance care homes all over the country.

NHP is determined to provide the very highest quality buildings for its tenants and to provide the highest quality care to residents in its homes. To do this, NHP have to have instant, accurate, information about their property portfolio available across their organization. Obviously this needs a robust, well-designed database and a sophisticated easy-to-use but powerful user interface.

Riverhall have worked with NHP since 1999 to develop this system, and as NHP has grown and developed, so the system has been enlarged and enhanced.

The system acts as a repository for all the information about NHP's property portfolio. Not only financial data such as costs, rents, valuations etc but also data such as documents, photographs and so on are all accessible from a single point.

Joanne Haines of NHP said "It is no exaggeration to say that NHP's entire operation depends on the CareHome system. We depend on Riverhall who have developed this system very successfully over the last few years.

"I like Riverhall because not only do they write programs that work reliably, but also they have taken the trouble to find out how our business works and come up with solutions that meet our real requirements."

Is Email Still a Neat Idea?

By now you're probably so used to email that you've forgotten how you used to manage before it. It's rare these days to ask someone for their phone number without getting their email address too.

Spam: over half of all email traffic.

However, email was never intended for the use to which it is being put today and the infrastructure is straining under a mountain of abuse.

The original designers of Internet email were a close-knit community and they saw no reason to complicate the system with any means to verify the sender's credentials. Email users were trusted to be who they claimed to be.

The same can't be said for many email users today. A large proportion of email messages now use forged or invented sender addresses to hide the real origin of the email.

The reasons for this subterfuge vary but are rarely honourable. They include: spam, viruses (or, more correctly trojans or worms), phishing and extortion.

These unsolicited messages now account for over half of all email traffic and are a serious inconvenience for businesses who are dealing with thousands of messages daily.

A small but determined industry has developed around the need for email filtering software with two approaches dominating: scored filtering and challenge/response.

The scored filtering technique uses a statistical analysis of the content of the email to distinguish spam from ham (wanted emails).

It needs training with samples of both types of email but the results are quite impressive.

Challenge/response filtering depends on the assumption that spammers don't use a genuine reply address. A request for confirmation is sent to the sender address of emails from unrecognised sources. If no reply is received within an acceptable period, the arrested email is deleted.

A new proposal looks like the beginning of the road to fix email's problems, instead of patching them.

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) adds a small piece of information to that already held about your email server and allows receiving servers to check that the address is genuine.

As soon as a server starts to receive an email, it checks if the server sending the message is an authorised origin for the sender's domain. If not, the mail is rejected without even being transmitted, saving bandwidth.

SPF won't kill spam but it will mean that spammers will have to use genuine domain names. It will also mean that you can be confident that an email is from who it claims to be from. The benefits for on-line banking and commerce will be dramatic.

SPF is voluntary and needs to be implemented by both sender and receiving domains for the full benefits to be appreciated. However, a receiving domain can choose not to accept emails from a sending domain that hasn't implemented SPF.

If you're concerned about the authenticity of email, get your ISP to implement SPF.

You can get more details from the SPF web site: http://spf.pobox.com