Three months of exciting developments

It has been a long time since the last Blog. Why? Overwork! The whole team has been working flat out adding functionality to the system and meeting customer needs. My own thing has been the Domestic Abuse Module for Portmouth and the Supported Housing Module for Riverside, but I may save them for a later blog. I want to dedicate this blog to the amazing achievements of my developers, who have all expanded the system in different directions and stretched their own skills to the limit.

A Generic Report Writer

One of the clearest benefits of beginning the process of converting the system to ".net" has been the availability of third party products which we can manipulate and add to the system. The new Report Writer, integrated into the system by Krish in an amazingly short period of time is one example. Here is a combination of screen shots.

This new tool answers the problem of an entirely new report request, not fully covered by any of our library of Excel Pivot Tables. The user can select any field from any table to list, select and sort. The output can be written to Excel or Adobe. The system - Easy Query - really is easy to use. Completely intuitive with all of the selection options appearing as pick lists.

A hot mapping product

The next invention, with truly breathtaking potential is a hot-spotting "addin" for Microsoft Mappoint.

It genuinely turns this £300 package into a serious tool rivalling its more expensive rivals.

The screen shot opposite is data imported into mappoint. It isnt strictly a hotspot map.

Below it is the same data automatically converted to "hot spot" squares where the shading indicates the number of points in the sqaure. This is Prathibha's work, and it doesnt stop there. She has created a facility to draw your own boundaries, label them and then automatically shade them according to the number of imported points within the boundary.

The ASB Module goes Mobile

Selvi, meanwhile has been developing a mobile version of the ASB Module. The latest "touch phones" with powerful browser facilites, really make the use of the system in the street, on a mobile, a real option. We could have just left it at that, and told customers that it is 100% web based, browse away on your matchbox size window. However, any mobile user will tell you that there is a world of difference between the BBC web site which is actually designed for mobile use and most others where you are scrolling around a screen three times bigger than your mobile.

I think the results of Selvi's efforts are quite stunning - at first site it looks more like an "app", so beloved of iphone users, than a web site.