Most Compelling

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets website was declared "the most compelling user experience" of all local authority websites in England at the Annual SPIN-EPI 2005 website awards.

SPIN has over 300 members, including local authorities, health agencies, libraries, museums, central government departments, voluntary organisations and private sector companies which are all key verticals to which BOCC provide web development services. The awards, organised in conjunction with Society of Information Technology Management (SOCITM), have a special relevance to BOCC which has staff members belonging to SOCTIM.

The website was re-launched last November following a focused three-month development period in conjunction with Deloittes, to bring the site in line with e-Government Priority Outcomes, with special emphasis placed on key outcomes including the News and Features which increased both user and staff experiences of the site.

The award is the second success for the Tower Hamlets website this year. Earlier in the year the site was awarded "Website of the Year" at the Charity and Public Service Publishing Awards.

Site and database hosted by BOCC.

June 2005

Outputs and Outcomes

Outputs and outcomes data extraction and reporting has been added to the extensive functions available to Union Learning Fund (ULF) contract administrators.

BOCC originally developed the ULF online portal in 2004. This allows unions to submit funding bids and the ULF to manage these through to successful contracts and during the term of the contract. Due to the portal's success, additional functionality is being added to enhance the system.

ULF reporting provides reports in a number of formats:

• browser web page (HTML)
• dynamically generated charts
• Portable Document Format (PDF)
• formatted data exports (XLS, XML and TXT)

The new summary report provides a list of outcomes for a specified date range and can be further filtered to show only one round or bid. The detail report also matches the outcome references across all bids for a given date range.

Website and database hosted by BOCC.

June 2005

ITF Americas

BOCC has created an Americas microsite for the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) regional branch in Brazil. Core content is provided in Spanish, Portuguese and English.

The ITF launched its new dynamic website, designed, developed and deployed by BOCC, in February.

The content management system (CMS) was created by BOCC to meet the exacting requirements of the ITF and link in with other back-office systems. Content can be added and managed in the core, fully functional languages of English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish and now Portuguese. Other content can also be added in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Tagalog and Turkish. The website front end then delivers this content in the user's preferred language and character set.

Key aspects of the development are:

• Multilingual content
• Standards compliant content delivery
• Fully content managed, dynamic website
• Managed administrative workflow

BOCC has been creating multilingual dynamic websites since 1996. All design and development by BOCC.

May 2005

Business Continuity

BOCC has undertaken a website resilience and disaster recovery assessment for a major organisation. The organisation's operations require continuous website availability to prevent degradation of business systems.

BOCC analysed and reported on the numerous linked systems required to provide the public-facing website, identified disaster scenarios, investigated the effects of component and systems failures and provided recommendations to increase resilience and to provide disaster recovery (DR) facilities.

The BOCC report is being used to contribute to an overall backup and resilience strategy.

BOCC provides dedicated and shared operational, standby and DR hosting solutions.

May 2005