ITF Congress

A new microsite has been launched for the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) ready for their Congress event being held in Africa in August.

The ITF is holding its largest ever world congress in Durban, South Africa this year. To date, over 1,100 people from 342 unions in 108 countries have registered for the event. Congress sets the ITF's agenda for the next four years and this year's theme is "Organising Globally: Fighting for our Rights".

The microsite provides:

• online registration
• dynamic programme
• documents library (such as motions and resolutions, guides, media library)
• daily notice posting (during Congress)

The multi-lingual content management system (CMS) was developed for ITF by BOCC.

June 2006

Conan Doyle Googled

Last month, BOCC's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle website appeared twice in the top three links Google.com and Google.co.uk provided to users clicking on the Sherlock Holmes themed masthead.

BOCC designed and created the website 6 years ago, and it has proven popular with researchers and enthusiasts. However, it has never been so popular as when Google created it's Sherlock Holmes masthead to commemorate the birth of Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle in Edinburgh in 1859.

This is the official web site of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate. It includes a specially written biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and information on his books and the films which were inspired by his writing.

BOCC created a Victoriana themed site with wooden and brass styling, and cut-out areas for the illustrations.

Hosting provided by BOCC.

June 2006

Local Directgov

The UK's Local Directgov Programme is developing technology to seamlessly connect the national Directgov website to Local Authority websites.

Stratford-on-Avon District Council are taking part in the Local DirectGov Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema pilot with BOCC's assistance. The pilot requires that participating councils export their A-Z of services as an XML file that conforms to the published Local DirectGov XML schema v1.1.

Initially BOCC has had to convert the meta data tagging of the website to Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) and programmatically re-map page and service data to this encoding scheme. Once this was completed, a new module was added to allow the council's staff to maintain the data and generate the Local Directgov XML export file at the touch of a button.

This will provide businesses and the public with a single point of entry into both Central Government and Local Authority services. The aim is to improve the take-up of local authority services.

Website and databases hosted by BOCC.

June 2006

Overpayments

BOCC has added another payment service to the leading online payment system, originally developed for the London Borough of Camden 5 years ago.

The new payment stream is for housing benefit overpayments, and as such is rather like sundry debtor invoices. These overpayments usually relate to large-scale organisations such as housing associations where changes to property and their occupancy can mean that adjustments are required.

BOCC worked with Camden's staff to ensure that the data from back-office systems could be imported correctly and that the daily transactions could be returned into the cash system.

The payments system has won praise for its usability, accessibility and flexibility. Merchant services are provided through Datacash.

Databases and website hosted by BOCC.

June 2006