In my role as Business Systems Consultant at Telent Technology Ltd I was expected to cover a lot of ground in my role as Business Systems Consultant. The business of Telent Technology Ltd is the installation and maintenance of telecommunications equipment for a customer list that includes the emergency services, rail operators and some of the London Underground line operators. The systems I worked on were back office systems in support of the business operation. These bespoke applications were all running on SQL Server and were a combination of VB.NET, VB6, and XHTML/Classic ASP and Access front-ends.

Initially I was hired by Telent Technology Ltd to provide Technical Authoring expertise by documenting their existing bespoke applications in order to deliver training and support documentation. My first task was to provide a User Guide for their mainstay maintenance support application which had a user base of about 300-400 people with a high turn-over of staff in some particular areas. As the entire format of the documentation was left to me I felt that the best way of providing a User Guide that could be referred to as required rather than just leafed through to be discarded was to make this an interactive online document. Consequently I devised a DHTML document that had the look and feel of the application that the users were working on but none of the functionality. The document itself was accessible directly from the application, contained release notes and fast access to key sections

As this document was well received I next produced Compiled HTML help pages for a second application that had a requirement that it could be used off-line by field service engineers.

By now our business users were beginning to properly appreciate the benefit of such online documentation but we were hampered from developing the idea further. As my team was developing and supporting database applications, one of which I had built an XHTML/ASP Classic thin client for, I realised that we had the potential for building our CMS. The resultant product managed to speed up our document production many times over and, more importantly, meant that other team members could also create these documents without any HTML knowledge.

Having extensive experience of such in the mainframe environment I brought the concept of change control to my team. As a consequence of this I was charged with the design and delivery of a bespoke change control package. This consisted of an SQL Server database, VB6 front-end for core users and an XHTML/ASP Classic thin client for the 400+ basic users. I was the developer for the thin client work.