Custom Technology Solutions / Application Development
Contact Point IT Services has been involved in many projects requiring the development of complex applications. We nearly always deliver these applications using web technology as this provides our clients with the following benefits:
- Rapid application development enabled by our ever growing code base of solutions combined with customisable solutions provided through open source communities.
- Ease of maintenance and deployment as the applications are deployed on a web server and accessed by browser clients (rather than software that needs to be installed on the computer of each end user). This translates to quicker turn around of enhancements, costing our client's less.
- Usability and enhanced user experience achieved through the use of continually improving user interface technologies created for the internet.
Below we have provided case studies of just some of the applications Contact Point has had the privilege to build for our clients, and include: workshop / event management, online resource centre, member networking portal, property management, 360 degree review solution, online obituaries and more.
Case Studies
The Last Post - online obituaries and Australian funeral notices
The Challenge
The founders of The Last Post saw the need for an easy way for Australians to find the details about funerals such as where they are being held, what time, whether flowers are welcome etc. At the same time, the cost of placing a short obituary in a major newspaper presented an opporutnity for The Last Post to make it cheaper and more satisfying for loved ones of a deceased person to be able to create an online Tribute Site about the deceased person, allowing [moderated] comments to be added by family members and friends, and creating a permanent record to share with the world about the deceased person's life.
Funeral Directors were also to be invited to assist the responsible person for a funeral to start a Tribute Site and to ensure that the details about the funeral had been accurately entered into The Last Post database which is to be updated on a daily basis by a team of staff around the country.
The Solution
Contact Point was very pleased to be engaged by Logical Ideas Pty Ltd to assist with the creation of this new online service
called "The Last Post", and worked closely with the founders to identify the most user friendly ways to allow the for the
tremendous volume of data to be entered by staff and searched through by visitors. We've been excited by the development
which incorporates some very useful web technologies including:
- Natural language searching, with results sorted by relevance. This is a function that website users have come to expect due to the way Google operates, and we were able to utilise the latest version of mySQL's inbuilt capabilities in this area.
- Use of auto-complete in form fields allows the staff of The Last Post to much more quickly and consistently enter data about funerals occurring Australia-wide. There are already more than 16,000 funerals listed, which have all been entered by a rapidly appointed labour force around Australia, so ensuring ease of data entry and consistency of data is paramount.
- Allowing the responsible person for a funeral to create a Tribute Site for their loved one, with functionality similar to eBay in that they can choose a theme for their page (our designers enjoyed the challenge of creating a series of themes for this purpose), add a bold listing, add extra photos, add and format the text for their Tribute Site using a simple HTML editor, and of course view a preview of their Tribute Site before publishing. The responsible person can also return at a later date and add extra features.
- Slide-show of images attached to a Tribute Site dynamically generated on the fly with smooth transition of images loaded by the responsible person (no flash required).
Not only have we enjoyed working on the technology, we've been impressed by way the owners of The Last Post have gone about the development and execution of their idea. We look forward to the site being a great success.
Commercial Health Project - Online Resource Centre
The Challenge
Commercial Health Project is a provider of health screening, health expos, seminars, massage, personal and group fitness training, ergonomic assessment and training, and other tailored programs to help ensure the health and vitality of your staff.
Being primarily a service provider to large corporates, Commercial Health Project needed to be able to disseminate information and resources to staff of their client's in an efficient and interesting manner.
The Solution
An online
resource centre was incorporated into the Commercial Health Project website, allowing pass through of
credentials from the client site, so that employees of Commercial Health Project clients can access online resources
including a Referral Centre, a BMI Calculator and other similar tools, quizzes delivered via Flash technology to re-enforce
health education, video presentations previously delivered to the client, recipes and more. Each resource
within the resource centre can be allocated on a client by client basis, to ensure that the right material is presented
to each logged in person. Client access has a start and expiry date administered by Health Project.
The solution adds significant value to the service provided to Commercial Health Project's clients.
Our partnership with Contact Point dates back to 2007, we were initially introduced to Heather and Contact Point
through a friend and a pleased customer of Contact Point. The initial service started as a shift from our previous system
of managing the content on our website to the Contact Point CMS system. Happy with the product and service, we started
using eNudge for our emarketing strategies. We found the synchronisation between Contact Point CMS and eNudge simplified
our web and e-mail marketing. Over this time both Contact Point and eNudge services have grown, yet the level of service
has remained outstanding. Contact Point are continually adding and fine tuning their products and services which has
enabled our website and emarketing to grow. At the beginning of 2009 we added a client only resource centre which houses
online seminars in video format, recipe and fact sheets, flash quiz's and a BMI calculator, this has been a great value
add for our existing clients and beneficial in attracting new clients to our services. Our most recent project with
Contact Point has been the overhaul of our website, which was completed within our expected time frame, at a very
reasonable cost not to mention the sleek look of our website which really blew us away. The team at Contact Point take
the time to understand our service and style, they know exactly how we want our company to be presented in the web format
and then deliver exactly that.
Linda Bernardi - Commercial Health Project Pty Ltd, 04/11/2009
JHW - Style Quadrant Analysis
The Challenge
JHW's mission is to improve business management skills and promote productivity through building better business relationships through Consulting Skills Workshops, Presentation Skills Workshops, Focused Sales Workshops, and Quality Leadership Programs.
One of the components of their courses involves enabling course delegates to obtain a 360 degree review of their personality / work style. JHW had their own unique formula for determining a person's work style, and wanted to provide an online tool to carry out the 360 degree review of on an individual by his / her peers, direct reports and manager. The data obtained needed to be captured and stored securely and confidentially, yet allow the delegate to see aggregated results to derive meaning.
The Solution
Contact Point worked closely with JHW to determine exactly how the 360 degree feedback would be collected in a way
that was easy to use and interpret for the course delegate, the people providing feedback, and JHW, and also allowed
corporate stakeholders to see the benefits of the 360 degree review process. The application needed to allow course
delegates to have future 360 degree reviews carried out, perhaps by different persons, and compare.
Using the internet to gather delegate feedback was an obvious choice due to the ease of data access for both the delegates, the people providing feedback, and JHW. As security and confidentiality of information was paramount multiple layers of security were employed.
The solution employs a chart generation tool to show the results of the feedback graphically, a set of reminder messages to ensure that persons giving feedback do so in a timely manner, and role based security to ensure that each user only has access to the appropriate functionality depending on whether they are a delegate, a person giving feedback, a corporate stakeholder, or a JHW administrator.
The solution is a great value-add to the JHW consulting skills course delegates, and leads into the course material and workshop.
You can view and try out the full solution here: http://www.jhw.com.au/sqa/
High Ideals - Online Membership and Networking Service
The Challenge
High Ideals was the birth child of Karina Butera with a mission is to connect and promote those who raise the bar in business practice. High Ideals is a member-based association, with the entrance criteria being based on how our members conduct themselves in business. It is of primary importance that all of our members are committed to the very best of standards of positivity, integrity and impact in the work they do.
In order to make High Ideals work from the member point of view, it was necessary to provide an online forum whereby members register their details, list special offers to members, and submit newsletter advertisements. The general public needed to be able to search through the High Ideals directory to find accredited individuals, and members could be offered specials by other members in recognition of their business calibre. In addition, the High Ideals management team needed to be able to fairly receive, evaluate and process member applications to ensure that a high and consistent standard of member is maintained, and that all details of the evaluation and assessment process were well documented.
The Solution
Contact Point was very pleased to work closely with the High Ideals team to not only design and build their website, but also determine the functional requirements of the online system to handle the assessment and mathematical calculation of whether an individual passes or fails the assessment process, and the front end portal for members and general public use. Members and member special offers are randomly show-cased on the front page of the site, members can be searched for making use of meta tags controlled by the members themselves, different levels of membership are provided and different features extended to these different levels, members can setup their own profile including adding an image of themselves, members can review pending members and provide feedback, and separate sets of resources available to members and the general public can be administered through the High Ideals online adminstration.
The Contact Point role-based security solution was employed to ensure that each logged in user only gets access to the appropriate functionality, and that the security solution is easily extended as new features and roles are added, such as the handling of invoice generation and reminder notices for member renewals and other fees.
In addition, the High Ideals team utilises a closed WIKI installed and configured by Contact Point to allow collaboration on future High Ideals initiatives, and practices and procedures of the High Ideals team.
Appoint Me - bringing together job seekers, employers and recruitment agents
The Challenge
Seeing a need in the marketplace for employers trying to quickly find pre-qualified candidates to meet their personnel requirements, Anna Colella engaged Contact Point to provide a technology solution to facilitate bringing together job seekers, employers and recruitment agents in the most efficient and mutually beneficial way. Some of the key challenges were:
- to make it easy for job seekers to provide meaningful and searchable information about themselves so that employers could find the right candidates through a search
- to ensure that the online database was always up to date with regard to the job seekers availability, particularly for part time work
- ensuring that recruitment agents were quickly notified when their candidates were sought by employers
- making it easy for employers to find appropriately qualified staff
The Solution
Contact Point IT Services worked closely with Appoint Me to specify the required functionality to ensure that all the objectives were met. We worked hard to ensure that it is easy and intuitive for each different type of visitor to the site to carry out their required tasks.
The site employs these special features:
- Calendars to allow easy date selection for setting job seeker availability.
- Scheduled tasks to remind participants when information needs updating, and to send through information pertaining to regular alerts setup by employers.
- Ability for job seekers to generate a PDF of their resume based on all the information entered into their profile, for use when going to job interviews or applying for a position.
JHW - Workshop / Event Management
The Challenge
JHW, in their provision of numerous workshops running simultaneously both within Australia and in other countries, needs to co-ordinate a large number of course delegates, trainers, venues, resource materials, and pre and post meetings with course delegates. They needed a solution to help minimise the administrative effort required to manage all the components of each course to ensure a excellent experience for all involved.
The Solution
The dispersed nature of JHW staff, courses and course participants meant that an online solution was ideal for receiving
applications to attend courses, co-ordinating pre and post-workshop meetings, confirming details of attendees with course
venues, assisting course facilitators to prepare for the course, and generally managing the delivery of workshops.
Contact Point worked closely with JHW to determine all the requirements of the online system to manage workshop attendance including:
- online workshop booking and group workshop booking forms delivered through the JHW website
- integration with eNudge to allow easy email follow up of course participants, categorised by course
- ability to securely disseminate information arising out of the course, to course participants
- automated capture of feedback from course attendees
- client specific courses handled through dedicated website access points
Collins Commercial and Industrial - Real Estate Agent
The Challenge
During the mid 1990's Collins Commercial and Industrial, a real estate agent focused on buying and selling commercial and industrial properties, were manually handling all their property listings, keeping track of current listings in Word documents. This was an inefficient way to store the information, and meant that data regarding transactions was very hard to collate and analyse, and searches through previously held listings were virtually impossible.
Building a solution from ground up requires all the disciplines of the software development lifecycle to ensure that a flexible and robust solution is developed that meets the requirements of staff and management alike.
The Solution
Contact Point worked very closely with Collins Commercial & Industrial over a number of years to develop an application that is now used internally and relied upon by in excess of 20 staff on a minute by minute basis.
The application is tailored made for the way that Collins Commercial work, and allows them to retain history on all their listings indefinitely, providing a extremely valuable resource for the business.
Day to day operations of the business are now significantly more efficient, and they are able to rapidly embrace changes in the industry which now relies much more heavily on the use of email and the internet to communicate with potential purchasers and investors, including integration with external websites such as RealEstate.com.au and Domain.
If you have processes in your organisation that need streamlining, or if you require a particular technology application we look forward to discussing your requirements.