POD Activity

Under the hammer

POD SOLUTIONS begins work on enhancements and extensions to a major auction site.

POD SOLUTIONS concludes a successful 3 month contract for the Government.

Security Clearance

POD gains SC security clearance.

Engaged on the overhaul of a popular jobs website.

POD has recently begun work on a well known auction site to introduce significant enhanced functionality. This will include using Silverlight to provide a seamless, real-time user experience.

Government Contract

POD has recently successfully concluded a Government contract, on time and to specification. Due to security considerations, nothing can be said about the context of this work but technically, it involves a Microsoft web based application which was being extended. This involved some refactoring work along the way and although POD was not involved in the initial scoping of this work, it has had significant input into the architecturing of the codebase. It is a .NET, C# based application, with some AJAX providing enhanced interfaces in certain areas. The work passed UAT and handover took place at the end of March.

Prior to this, POD was involved in a complete makeover of the Dunfermline Building Society website, as lead consultancy and developer. This work was sub-contracted out by Equator, the winners of the initial tender. The website is a Content Managed site, involvoing the powerful CM System Ektron at its core. All content is stored in a SQL Server 2005 database and the system is hosted on a load-balanced cluster. The site is a .NET, C# application, with extensive use of custom made AJAX callbacks, along with a custom built mortgage calculator. All content is rendered out by the use of XSL stylesheets, extensive Xpath queries and XML manipulation to provide a fast user experience, together with the powerful content management facilities for the client, the Dunfermline Building Society. Google Maps is used to provide ehanced user functionality. MbUnit and WatIn were used to provide unit testing.

In the early part of 2008, POD was brought in to provide expertise and assist Northgate in the completion of the NHS Scotland ePharmacy batch prescription processing system, which is a part of the Scottish Government ePay initiative. This handles upwards of 1,000,000 prescriptions per week. The system is a C# process, involving FTP file transfer, XML parsing and Oracle. Extensive use was made of Altova's MapForce to provide XSL mappings and transforms against the data. Distributed transactional activity was logged and audited. All testing was done with NUnit against Test Director.