Associative Trails

Arup Contacts and Events Database

An intranet application for managing client contacts and organising events.

A more robust enterprise architecture, enabling the application to blossom into a fully-fledged company-wide resource.

The challenge

Arup's existing intranet application had done sterling work for a number of years but was beginning to struggle to cope with the volume of usage it was having to deal with.

Our brief was to migrate the technical platform to a more robust enterprise architecture, enabling the application to blossom into a fully-fledged company-wide resource.

Sophisticated searching and filtering

The solution

After an extensive consultancy period, we decided on a full rebuild of the system, taking advantage of the latest developments in web standards, application architectures and rich user interfaces.

Streamlining the interface allowed us to reduce the load on the servers without sacrificing the sophisticated searching and filtering options. Integrating with central corporate HR databases reduced the administration overhead and ensured that staff data was always up to date. The ability to export contacts and events to desktop applications such as Outlook and Excel allows staff to take advantage of the system without changing their established working patterns.

Simple administration interface
Holds thousands of records
Event invitation tracking

The outcome

The finished application is fully integrated with central corporate applications and can scale to support all Arup staff. The new architecture ensures a solid platform for future development. The application is now ready to be rolled out to many more users and will save a great deal of time spent in managing client contacts and events.

Event management
Item versioning and validation support

Technologies used

Adobe Coldfusion, Oracle, XHTML, CSS, AJAX, WSDL.

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