We were involved in building a prototype of the initial site which was then followed up with analysis of business and technical requirements. We then proceeded to build phase one of the live site which included the extranet management of the leasing companies and the backbone architecture including security, administration and user management functions.

We then continued with phase 2 which encompassed an intranet site that used Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server and Microsoft Sharepoint Team services to act as a team management portal for the internal staff. We integrated the search engine functionality of Sharepoint Portal Server in order to allow staff to search on internal documents and automatically categorise them.

We added further functionality into the Sharepoint portal using Web Parts which are a part of Microsoft Dashboard technology. We used these to integrate summary SQL server data from the live web application database.

The site consisted of three main parts :

1. The intranet accessible by the internal staff.
2. An extranet accessible by the partner companies that were using the sales promotion tools.
3. The end user interface for the customers that bought using the sales tool.

Other projects included a consumer facing portal for combined gas, electricity buying, a knowledge management system for recording project / process best practice information and an oil and gas infrastructure portal.

Technologies used : Active Server Pages, MS Transaction server, XML, Oracle, SQL Server 2000, Verity, Project Central and VB.

We developed an online restaurant booking system, this involved collecting business requirements, liaising with other consultants and carrying out development work. The necessity was there to get something up and running on the web site in an extremely short time. We were given the responsibility to drive the project, and deal with the many political problems that were involved in the tradeoff of functionality to timescale. 

Once the site was live, attention turned to the backoffice functionality, to allow the restaurant business team to maintain the customer orders and produce management reports. This was developed using active server pages, as an extranet based system in order to allow the restaurants to login and use the functionality to allocate tables for Lastminute.com’s use. 

We helped with the development of a new internet only savings account that provided full functionality for dealing with normal day to day account tasks over the internet. The project gave a lot of exposure to the issues involved in a site that generates tens of millions hits per month with up to 500 concurrent users. Security was a major consideration and this involved analysing the ASP pages for security problems, using encryption where required, making sure logs were kept of any inappropriate usage.

The projects included a web application developed in conjunction with Intel Financial Services for the Intel reseller extranet (IPINet). The application was based around the MAXCredit engine that had been previously developed and allowed credit applications to be placed over the Internet by Intel resellers. The site successfully went live and had a massive impact on the efficiency of business processes employed in turning the credit around.

We developed a comprehensive user management facility that allowed the end users (once authorised) to manage their own settings. This was implemented by adding web pages to the site and further integrating the call centre management tool, Cybercall into the application.

The project embarked on after much initial investigation was an extranet based credit leasing website called MAXCredit. The key aim of this project was to reduce the time it took to give a decision to a customer on whether credit was granted. The site successfully went live for a select number of resellers and it reduced the time for credit decisions from many hours down to minutes.