Company news
All the latest goings on for the professionally-minded.
Reserved for company announcements, appointments and product launches.
The blog is where we get to express ourselves a bit more freely,
sometimes even venturing the odd opinion (but in a purely non-confrontational and groovy way).
Our products & services section contains case studies
of our work.
“The feedback during the training has been exceptionally positive, so I must thank you for all your amazing hard work in creating this wonderful system for us.”
Charlotte Wensley, Marketing & Communications Manager, Scott Brownrigg
“Matt has been an inspirational product development partner, helping us to both clarify our initial vision and then deliver an outcome way beyond initial aspirations.”
Tony Sheehan, Learning Services Director, Ashridge
Our latest project with Sheppard Robson gets some press 23 Jan
The current issue of Construction Industry News (Feb 09) includes a great interview with Nick Dunn, IT Manager for Sheppard Robson. In the interview, Nick goes into some of the background behind the intranet we built for Sheppard Robson, and explains its impact:
"We have a dedicated team of seven IT and CAD management personnel across our three offices and in terms of our most significant recent developments we have just launched a new company intranet, which was a major project that we were able to deliver on time and to budget."
"In terms of the motivation behind this initiative, when I joined in August 2007 the company's intranet was looking a bit tired and was being underused but since the overhaul our members of staff have been able to keep track of all of the latest developments and the communication streams within the group are now very much improved."
"One of the other key drivers behind the project was to incorporate a search engine that could help us to tap into the wealth of technical information that we have on the site and the feedback we have had since going live with this has been fantastic."
- Construction Industry News, February 2009, p73
Sheppard Robson intranet launched 13 Oct
After an intense summer, the Sheppard Robson intranet has launched and is now available to all client employees. Available in a standard web browser, content authors need no technical knowledge or specialist software, meaning the maintenance of important company information will become much easier.
Integration with Active Directory and the client's own photo library produces comprehensive staff lists with minimal authoring. Extensive personalization features allow users to tag their favourite pages and subscribe to internal company blogs. Employees can even see the latest press coverage about the company, listed on the intranet homepage.
To meet the client's timescales, we specified, built, installed and tested the application within an intense two-month period. We are very pleased with the results, and look forward to seeing how the system is used and extended in the future.
“Thanks very much ... you have done a great job and all the contributors are really pleased with the site. I ... appreciate all the effort you have put in and the good ideas you came up with.”
Nick Dunn, IT Director, Sheppard Robson
Northdoor website and CMS launched 1 Jul
After months of hard work, we are very happy that Northdoor's new website and its supporting CMS are up and running. The clean and professional visual design is supported by standards-compliant coding, integration with Salesforce.com and RSS.
The CMS is pretty clever too, supporting unlimited hierarchical pages, granular administrator permissions, full versioning and rollback, image management, microsites and all sorts of other modern time-saving devices.
We look forward to seeing how the new system will help the site grow, and hope Northdoor's users will reap the benefits of all the team's hard work.
“The project ... went like clockwork. Associative Trails did an excellent job and were very responsive to any issues and requests as they arose.”
Jon Milward, General Manager, Northdoor
All systems go for Northdoor 24 Feb
We are delighted to have just been given the green light to start work on specifying and delivering a bespoke CMS for Northdoor. Creativity have produced some cracking designs, and we look forward to doing the client justice with a slick CMS and some web standards magic.
New Exchange integration capabilities 21 Sep
One of the new features introduced in the latest version of Adobe Coldfusion product is integration with Microsoft Exchange. This week, we took the plunge with this new capability and within a few hours had hooked up a client's intranet-based CRM system with their Exchange server.
This means that tasks assigned to staff in the CRM system automatically appear in the person's Outlook task lists. They can then tick the task as completed in Outlook, and the CRM system is automatically updated. We're hoping that allowing people to use existing task management tools will improve the penetration of the CRM application, and look forward to doing more work with this excellent new functionality.
New CRM system rolled out 11 May
We're pleased to announce that the final installation of the Sheppard Robson CRM application went well and the system is now up and running on the client's intranet.
The application scrutinises some of the ideas we have used in previous developments and strips them down to produce a very simple yet powerful interface that is seamlessly integrated with the client's existing systems. We're looking forward to seeing how the initial stages of real-world usage progress. Fingers crossed!
