Technical Specification

The specification for an innovative electronic commissioning and appraisal system (eCAS) has been approved by NHS Service Delivery and Organisation (SDO) R&D Programme.

Following a successful competitive bid for the project, BOCC's consultants undertook detailed requirements analysis and created a comprehensive specification for the online grant application and processing system. BOCC has delivered similar systems successfully previously, but every project has its own particular functions, preferences, security and systems integration.

BOCC is now working on the implementation phase of the project.

The SDO R&D Programme aims to produce and promote the use of research evidence about how the organisation and delivery of services can be improved to increase the quality of patient care, ensure better strategic outcomes and contribute to improved public health.

June 2006

Network Security

BOCC has been appointed to act as security consultants to a City company to advise on network and e-commerce security in the following areas.

• technical architecture
• network arrangement and configuration (including firewalls, IDS, protocols)
• server redundancy, clustering and backup
• data security
• data protection and recovery

The client needs to ensure that their network and web systems are set up, developed and maintained in a secure and robust manner, and that they are scaleable for future known requirements.

BOCC will also assist with regulatory regimes compliance, guidance on standards such as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard and provide advice on security best practice.

May 2006

Google Sitemaps

BOCC is participating in the Google Sitemaps Beta programme to improve the information gathered by search engine crawlers (or robots) about a website. This is in addition to the usual search engine optimisation work and meta tagging already implemented on our websites.

Google Sitemaps provides:

• deeper crawl coverage and fresher search results to help people find more web pages
• a way to inform Google when a web page was last modified or how frequently a page changes, to improve crawling
• detailed reports about how Google directs traffic to your site and how the Googlebot crawler sees the web pages

BOCC automatically builds and submits an XML sitemap file using Sitemap Protocol to inform compliant search engines about addresses (URLs) on our website that are available for crawling. Optional attributes of the last modified date, change frequency and relative importance are also specified automatically.

BOCC takes part in technology programmes early in their development lifecycle, so that information can be provided to our clients in a timely and considered manner.

May 2006

RSA SecurID

RSA Security SecurID Two-Factor authentication has been implemented by BOCC to secure one of it's clients website content management systems (CMS).

The client has multiple websites with numerous administrators - some have access to all sites and others to only one. Many are based at the organisation's London head office, but some administrators are based at several regional offices across the United Kingdom.

BOCC recommended that the CMS administration areas should be restricted to either authenticated users on the internal network (and virtual private network) or remote administrators using two-factor authentication for access control.

The system was implemented on time and to budget without any server downtime.

BOCC is an accredited access partner for RSA Security.

May 2006