Application development

This accounts for half of our activity. Fellow NHS organisations and departments from other parts of the public sector ask us for a quote and we provide a high quality, vetted proposal.  It’ll be based on a set of questions we ask you and will include all the production costs and ongoing support costs in subsequent years.  We've produced over two hundred NHS web sites and at any one time we’re running about thirty (as you know, NHS organisations come and go).  That lets us offer you an unrivalled level of experience.  Our service includes scoping, specification, IG checks, graphic design, technical development, content transfer, legal statements, CMS training, deployment, domain registrations, SSL certificates, hosting and on-going support.

Developing systems is a key part of our role.  We describe them in terms of 'transactional' systems in that they carry out a process or transaction, be that on a small or large scale.  Our workforce systems are prime examples but we also specialise in administrative systems such as uBook, our resource booking system.  If there is an administrative process in your organisation which would benefit from tighter controls, being able to view summary information or better workflow, we can almost certainly create a modern, intuitive system to suit.

Popular with our NHS Trust clients for rolling out training as diverse as blood transfusion and waiting time management, our e-learning courses are high quality, reliable and high performance.  Normally we require you to provide the subject matter expertise, the text and the questions and answers for an exam at the end, but we do all the rest, such that you end up with a very robust product which you can release to your staff and thereafter control and monitor use and access fully-detailed pass/fail information.  Your learners gain new knowledge, a printable certificate and a record of their success on your system.  Your new course can be set to run stand-alone (usually with a link to it on your intranet or staff's desktops) and/or in a version which runs on the national NLMS/ESR e-learning platform.

We specialise in the Umbraco and Joomla Content Management Systems.  They are the products which you and your colleagues use to update and edit your web site.  Training in how to use the CMS is included in our proposals, but if you just need a course for your existing Umbraco or Joomla site, we'll be pleased to deliver.  We can train on your premises or, increasingly popular, as a live on-line session over Skype.

We have hosted ourselves almost every product we have developed since 2002.  We run our own web servers in modern NHS Data Centre.  In 2018 and 2019 we are migrating to Azure Cloud hosting, for the best level of resilience and performance, while complying with NHS requirements.   Any product we produce will be hosted on that platform by default, but if you already have a developed product and just need hosting, please ask us:  this is a popular service we provide, either standard shared hosting or your own virtual server, Microsoft or Ubuntu Linux.

If you are having difficulty finding N3 hosting, especially finding it at a reasonable price, please contact us.  We can provide it at a competitive rate.

We run a high-quality Service Desk, with our call centres in Chester, Birmingham and Lancashire.  The Desk is staffed by our own Analysts, who will have you and your system/web site registered as a product we support.  Therefore they can fix most requests first-time, during your call (or responding to your e-mail).  For something more advanced, they triage the call through to ourselves in the Development Team:  that’s the very same people who will have built your product.  There is no more effective level of service than having the original developers address and resolve your request.  All calls are ticketed and trackable, with automatic e-mail updates sent to you to inform you of progress.