The Diamond Family Circle Web Site

The Diamond Family Circle Web Site documents the history of the Diamond Family since the emigration from Romania to America at the turn on the century.
It's purpose is to act as a repository for accounts, artefacts and documents related to the family and to promote communication between the existing family members.

The site features simple and elegant design principles and a member forum running in the php language.

After initial design it was important to facilitate easy additions and updates to the web site by the site owner as it is a site that is being constantly updated and added to.

 Medical Equipment Transport Services

Medical Equipment Transport Services is a volunteer service of the Savannah area Rotary Internation Club.

They collect unused and donated medical equipment and supplies and distribute them to poorer countries around the world that have need for them.

Aside from requiring a web site explaining their operations to people and companies that may donate equipment and supplies, the web site was required to provide the ability for potential recipients to make an application by filling in the extensive application form.

Abacus Computer Services created the original design reflecting METS' objectives and the online application form and contact form was written using php scripting technology.

 The Perfect Sausage Company Web Site

The Perfect Sausage Company manufactures healthy sausage products made from chicken. They approached Abacus Computer Services for a web site to represent their product and to provide factual information about their company and its products, its advantages and suggested ways to prepare it.

An elegant design was required to accentuate the gourmet quality of their product.

 Rolls-Royce Customer Service Web Application

Rolls-Royce have a team of customer service managers overseeing the service of their engines fitted to thousands of aircraft throughout the world.

Their job entails tracking which engines are fitted to which aircraft, their owners, maintenance schedules, customer visits, warranty information and status and to project when engines will need to come out of service for maintenance based on flight times or calendar intervals.

A system was required that would provide a central repository of "up to the minute" information and be available world-wide to the various customer service managers at any time of the day.
It was necessary to provide quick and easy search facilities to locate engines based on multiple criteria and to provide reports, views and "snapshots" of the database filtered according to the aircraft under the control of the currently logged in user. Various security constraints were needed to ensure that the system users had differing permissions according to their responsibilities and geographical location.

Given the international nature of their business and the sheer number of units involved, it was suggested that the optimum architecture would be a web-based application using Active Server Page (ASP) technology interfacing to a Microsoft SQL Server database on a central server in North America.

A prototype was commissioned before "go ahead" for development could be given.

Upon delivery of the prototype and projected costs/timescale involved, authorisation was given for development in a "two-phase" approach.

Phase one of the application was developed in time and under budget and is now being used daily as an integral tool for the customer service managers.

It has been noted that the application has immediately proved to be an extremely beneficial tool, has drastically reduced the "Paper chain" and facilitated better and more timely communication between the various departments in this international concern.

Development is currently under way on phase 2.

WhichSpamFilter.com

WhichSpamFilter.com is a web site that provides tips and advice on fighting spam.
It regularly reviews currently available spam filters and provides an area where users can rate spam filters according to their own experience with them.

The site owners expressed a wish for a site with a simple and "to the point" interface that would "allow them to concentrate on filling it with useful content rather than pretty pictures".

Time was of the essence as they were nearing their planned launch date and so requested that the site be made available at the very earliest opportunity.

The site was created, hosting arranged and launched in 10 days.

MuchForYourMoney.com

MuchForYourMoney.com is a web site that sells various goods online at greatly reduced prices.

It was of paramount importance for the site administrators to keep their daily maintenance chores to an absolute minimum so that they could concentrate on sourcing their products rather than continually making changes to their web site.

This project was addressed in two phases: firstly, a reliable and easy to use database application was produced that would run under the Windows operating system and allow them to very quickly add and edit products and manage the product images that would eventually appear on the web site.

All product information is entered into this application and the web site dynamically changes to reflect the new data. Even the product categories and sub-categories are created dynamically. This means that as far as the web site goes, this is truly "hands free".

The web site was then designed and Active Server Page technology (ASP) was implemented to enable the entire site to react "dynamically" to the content of the underlying database.

In this manner, the seemingly limitless number of pages that can be served by this site are actually achieved with a total of only 13 different pages.

Coastal Empire History Hunters Association

The Coastal Empire History Hunters Association is a friendly club of treasure hunting and metal detecting enthusiasts based in the Savannah area.

The main objectives for this web site were to convey information about the club, it's members and it's activities to interested members of the public and to to serve as a "meeting place" for club members where they could share views, information and news with each other.

The site was designed with an eye to the historical nature of the clubs activities and the theme was maintained from the historical photographs on the home page, to the navigation and form elements on weathered paper to the backdrop of interesting artifacts that have been recovered whilst treasure hunting.

In contrast to this is the functionality of the site which, in addition to the usual information and reference pages, provides:

• Public guest book facility.
• Swap and sell area where items relating to treasure hunting can be bartered, bought and sold.
• A fully functional public newsgroup.
• A members only area (password protected) where members can: view other members profiles, edit their own profile, review the membership list and contact information, and post messages that only other members can view.
• Administration section to allow the site administrator to review, edit, add or delete any of the data stored on the site.

This web site is database driven and requires no maintenance except for the administration of the club membership logons and news items.

Since the launch of this site there has been a marked increase in communication between club members online and all of it's desired objectives have been surpassed.

Telstar Lead Management System

Telstar Capital Resources trade in "leads" for companies offering mortgage and other loan services.

They have an extremely intensive data load and their business process are very complex and further complicated by the fact that they receive their lead information from many disparate sources in widely differing formats.

Abacus Computer Services was hired to create a system to manage the entire workflow which included:

• Importing the leads into their database.
• Performing comprehensive "data sanitation".
• Matching available leads to current work orders,
• Issuing leads in various formats and automatically e-mailing the customer with the leads.
• Managing lead returns and refunds.
• Accounting and reporting.

This was a large project which necessitated a close working relationship between Telstar and Abacus Computer Services for almost two years.

Flexibility was an important requirement as their business changes very rapidly and Abacus Computer Services had to respond quickly and efficiently change requests to ensure the continued smooth running of their business.

The application was written in Microsoft Access with Client/Server architecture. Various custom objects for the import routines were written as ActiveX/COM objects in Microsoft Visual Basic.

Currently, the database contains more than 1,000,000 leads and is still being used daily as the "workhorse" of their daily operations.

Celebration Database and Rewards Program

The Lowrey Group of South Carolina run a customer rewards program for regular diners at their various restaurants.

Customers that enroll in their program receive various benefits ranging from gift certificates, monthly prize drawings, complimentary birthday and anniversary celebrations and discounts on goods and services in the region.

Their members number into the thousands and the Lowrey group needed a stable and useable database to track not only their members personal information, but the amounts they spent at each of their restaurants so that the application can automatically assign them the benefits of their accrued "Frequent Fare" balance.

Many of the monthly prizes and discounts are donated by local business so the proposed application needed to be aware of which prizes were available for any given month and the businesses that donated them.

Once a month the application needed to perform a complex algorithm to match the available awards with some of the members, automatically create the gift certificates and envelopes, generate reports on all activities and adjust the members balances accordingly.

It was decided to develop the application in Microsoft Access with a client-server architecture as there would be a number of staff members accessing the database at one time. Some custom components were written in Visual Basic to supplement the functionality provided by Microsoft Access.

Despite rapidly changing requirements during the course of development, the application was completed in a timely manner, their existing data was ported into the new database and the application now acts as the focal point of their daily business.

Currency Services Customer Database and ID Card Printer

Currency Services, Inc. of Savannah provides check cashing services and makes Photo ID cards for their customers.

Abacus Computer Services was commissioned to produce a customer database application to store quite extensive customer information and descriptions; to take digital photographs and create a Photo ID card on the spot.

Their existing customer data was "trapped" in an old system but it was important for them to not lose the 12,000 records that they had created over the years.

Despite the odds we managed to extract the existing customer information in ASCII format, convert it, validate it and load it into a Microsoft Access database. Not one customer record was lost.

Then, a Windows application was designed and built that would interface to the database and investigations were made into capturing live images from a video camera. The necessary hardware was then secured through HIQ Networking which would allow this functionality, and a speciality printer was obtained.

Core Windows functions were then called which would enable us to capture the video image, rotate it 90°, resize it and store it in .jpg format.

An ID card was then designed and the printing functionality created. All parts of the system were exhaustively tested.

The whole system was designed, created, tested and delivered on time in a little over 3 weeks.

The Main Ingredient

The Main Ingredient is a suite of software solutions for the food and restaurant industry.

Food service and storage facilities have to follow strict guidelines with regard to food safety, part of which is to ensure that critical control points are checked with regard to the temperature of both prepared food and ingredients.

This suite of software, which is a subscription service, facilitates the safe and convenient adherence to the HACCP (Health and Critical Control Point) guidelines. It also helps to ensure sanitation is being correctly performed, track staff, track work allocation and ease menu selection and generation for the food service provider.

The HACCP guidelines are stored within the system and the user will be alerted whenever an entered measurement falls outside of the recommended bounds, enabling the user to take corrective actions or discard the food. All time and temperature measurements entered into the system are stored and available as reports.

The system is based on a SQL Server database and uses the Active Server Page (ASP) technology to perform the extremely sophisticated functionality of the system. There are extensive security functions built into the systems to ensure that any measurements recorded cannot be altered past a certain cut-off point and that the user has access only to the data relating to their own facility or chain of facilities.