Background

The Trading Standards Institute (TSI) is the leading professional body representing Trading Standards professionals in the UK and overseas - in local authorities, the business and consumer sectors and in central government.

Our brief

TSI wanted to launch a series of enhanced member services, through their 'TS Interlink' secure members' extranet site. BOCC developed the TSI's flagship product 'TS Interlink' - a secure news, document and mail system extranet for trading standards officers (TSO's) - in 2003. TSOs view up to date and recently issued documents by the TSI, including RAPEX, Safety Notices and Product Recalls. The system also includes collaboration tools like TS Mail and syndication services like TS Broadcast.

Our solution

The Companies House XML Gateway offers electronic access to a core range of company information from Companies House Databases, including company name lookups on a free-of-charge.

The service is only accessible online to authorised XML Gateway customers. Data and documents are requested and delivered using XML (Extensible Markup Language).

BOCC used standard XML data schemas to integrate the data with the existing TS Interlink secure extranet site. The XML Gateway exchanges XML over HTTP. Requests are submitted via the HTTP POST method, with a Content-Type of text / xml.

Given a search term, the Gateway Service returns a given number of similar company names (including a marker signifying an exact match if it exists) either side of the closest match. Companies named and marked up in existing 'TS-Mail' messages by TSI members forms the basis of search terms to be served against the Companies House Company Name register. The searches are undertaken when the user has composed the TS-Mail message.

Technologies

The system utilises:

• Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
• Adobe® ColdFusion®
• XML Web Services
• Hosting on fully managed dedicated web servers at BOCC
• SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant