Two thousand posts - onwards & upwards!

[Phil]

This is my 2,000th post at our Forum; it took ten years to reach my 1,000th post, the second thousand took 2 days short of 11 months!

Yes, it’s getting busy round here.


Here’s a very quick ‘state of the union’ summary:

1. Six weeks into 2019 and it’s still all about Hikvision.
2. Nobody could ever call me a fanboy for Hikvision; we at use-IP fell-out with them in 2017 and went rogue for a year!
3. But, we are now back and firmly in the fold again (Authorised).
4. Hikvision remain focused on CCTV.
5. Hikvision remain the biggest CCTV manufacturer in the world.
6. Hikvision continue to provide great products at a great price.
7. Hikvision provide you with the comfort of a long warranty.
8. Hikvision continue to innovate.
9. Hikvision make it simple for you to implement their solutions - e.g. their Hik-Connect portal and App.
10. Take a look at this Hikvision IP camera catalogue. That is just their IP CCTV products - it is huge, and includes just about every product or solution you might require.
11. There’s another for analogue CCTV products.
12. Our discussions seldom stray far from Hikvision solutions.

Are they perfect?
No, but nobody is!

Here’s a quick list of a few things I’d like to see Hikvision improve:

1. Communication - just keep us all better updated and informed; own your problems; tell us when there is a problem / tell us what you are doing about it / tell us when we can expect a fix.
2. Firmware - sort the portals out, and always include Release Notes.
3. Browsers - Apple have knobbled Safari for use with web cameras. We are going to need to be able to use more than just Internet Explorer very soon! (it's getting embarrassing )
4. Marketing - oddly, in this one respect the Chinese manufacturers have become truly Western - they started talking about products in the middle of last year that are still not available yet! (EasyIP 4.0 / AccuSense / ColorVu).
5. Keep your product lines rational - help us all to understand EasyIP 2, 2+, 3, 4, 5-line, 7-line. Make the succession clear AND the benefits!

In BREAKING NEWS I have been reliably informed just this morning that Hikvision UK do not intend to bring the EasyIP 4.0 range to the UK market!



The state of the world:

Brexit - lord knows what the outcome will be, but the end is nigh and I have a sneaky feeling that whatever it takes it’ll be pretty much business as usual for us (and most). [Oh no, I used the 'B' word ]

Hikvision and other Chinese manufacturers have taken a lot of flack for projects they have been involved with in their own country. More so in the USA, and a few other countries, but there is the possibility that there will be an increase in the pushback against them in the UK too. Such things are definitely above my pay grade, we can only monitor and respond if/when necessary. We remain alert to the possibilities sector-wide - Hikvision is the latest manufacturer that we have determined to be best for our customers. There were many before, and we continue to support those customers with their Axis, ACTi, Vivotek, etc. solutions.

But hey, who knows what 2019 brings? We are Keeping Calm & Carrying On. I'll stick to trying to respond to the 'easy' questions!


The state of use-IP:

We plan to carry on with our knitting. We are a small team, completely focused on IP CCTV. It’s worked for almost 11 years now, we will continue to specialise and aim to guide and serve you well.


Some of the things we have planned for this year:

1. We are recruiting again - we have weathered the storm over this winter with our smallest team in many years! (just four people)
2. We are looking to update the webshop, the Magento 1 software technology that it uses is eleven years old now, but with over 7,000 products it’s no small feat to move and update that (and ecommerce itself is in somewhat a state of flux in 2019 with a very much increased focus on website speed and mobile access). We need to pick the correct next platform - that may take some time!
3. We don’t want to ‘risk the farm’ with ecommerce developments, so we have purchased a new domain name to play with and see what Google makes of the things we try. Things should evolve over the next few months at ipcameras.co.uk. We want to make it faster, but also would like to make it simpler for our customers.
4. We need to sort this forum out, it’s a good platform, but far from optimised. A lot of the sub-forums are virtually unused. So, some development work here too.
5. We need to get back to doing regular tests, regular new YouTube video uploads, and regular reviews. We know that these resources are highly valued by our followers. Our use-IP Ltd YouTube channel is one of the most popular in this sector with over 3,000 subscribers and more than 1.1 Million views!
6. We developed our IP Camera Reviews website last year - we need to return to that and provide new tests, reviews and information from practical tests of more recent cameras than the current best IP camera.

So, we have begun another busy year!

Thank you for your custom and your questions - please keep the orders and the queries coming, we will continue to try to constantly improve our knowledge and experience, and to guide you with the best solutions and setup for your application.

 

[RBW]

Very interesting Phil and I for one really appreciate your input on this forum.

That Hikvision catalogue is insane! A brief glance is all I could afford without becoming overwhelmed with the quantity of different products.

A big thumbs up for USE-IP

 

[StewartM]

You have created and maintain a valuable resource with this forum. Thank you for your dedication Phil.

 

[malford]

Great Forum Phil and my first point of call for anything Hikvision.
Lets hope any future firmware is fully tested before release, the recent buggy updates have put me right off updating clients systems.

 

[Phil]

Thanks for your feedback, and especially for your contributions to the forum too

Lets hope any future firmware is fully tested before release, the recent buggy updates have put me right off updating clients systems.

Agreed, it's not been great; having to ask people what version of firmware they are on and maybe ask them to downgrade! As you say hopefully Hikvision will get on top of these issues and get their house in order soon.

 

[fullboogie]

Just finished installing a 7608 and three 2355 cameras this weekend. This install and programming is just at the cusp of my tech abilities, and there's no way I could have done it without all the great info on this forum and advice from Phil and others. Very much appreciated from a DIYer like me.

 

[wardie]

This is my 2,000th post at our Forum; it took ten years to reach my 1,000th post, the second thousand took 2 days short of 11 months!

Yes, it’s getting busy round here.

Hi Phil I’m absolutely loving both my new Hikvision kit and also your team’s help so thank you. Picture quality on the new 8MP AcuSense cameras is stunning, the smart events eliminate false alarms for me, and the Hik-Connect app is super simple and effective remote access. Also having an active forum for users makes a real difference to self-help and asking questions.

Right... forum structure & use... There are tons of stickies now and loads of posts then below it. Have you thought about adding some sub-forums here and restructuring? For example you could split by hardware NVR/Cam or by topics like smart events, hardware issues, firmware issues, etc etc. Maybe there are examples from other manufacturer forums here, although I’m guessing this is already the biggest.

Also can you enable Tapatalk integration on the BB software you use easily? Myself and I’m sure others use that to aggregate forum content for quick browsing.

 

[Phil]

Hi @wardie thanks for the feedback.

Forum improvements is very near the top of the list of tasks for @Kyle
(and hoping that @Dan will be able to produce and upload some new YouTube videos to our channel soon)

Job number one for @Kyle was to refresh and rewrite the Hikvision Megathread Tutorial to bring it u to date for all the Hikvision changes, and that mammoth task is taking a long time to complete - there's a lot to it!

We recently added the coloured pre-labels to help with filtering:

I agree, there are too many stickies.
We can look at sub-forums.

The forum takes a lot of admin, generally new users just throw things at us randomly that basically just say "help me"!
So, despite our best efforts, as well as responding we do put a fair bit of work into organising AND a lot of work into stopping spam and keeping the forum clean and useful e.g. most Thread titles need to be re-written to something useful / helpful.

I've not heard of Tapatalk before, I will investigate.

 

[wardie]

Thanks - here is Tapatalk it's a mobile platform people use to aggregate forums: Tapatalk
There's a page on their about integration. It may just be a module you can switch on, I don't know. I wouldn't bust yourselves over it given the day job! I also expect wider on the redesign you could probably ask the community what would work and maybe even get some moderator help from people or volunteer as subject matter experts for example.
Good luck!

 

[fullboogie]

Poor Kyle - we should take up donations to send him a case of beer