We are delighted to say that Dovetail has been nominated for another award, this time for the Realex Fire Web Awards categories "SME/Small Business Website" and "Agency of the Year".
The awards are on in the Four Seasons on November 6 and it's a great night out, so we're all looking forward to that one.
Back in the office, you may remember mention of our new crayfish, Pinchy. Well when we first introduced him to the tank a couple of weeks ago, he got very busy very quickly, burrowing passages into the pebbles along the bed -we were all very impressed at his work ethic. He was completely out of sight for a couple of days, the only evidence that he was still there was the rearrangement of the architecture of the gravel. Then he re-emerged - a much bigger specimen. He evidently buried himself to shed his shell, and the new Pinchy is a far more confident creature. He's great fun to watch, marauding around the tank, trying to grab at the fish but always missing, clambering around the wood and stone ornaments. He's a very entertaining addition to the tank, it's like a David Attenborough documentary - thanks Ollie!
Work this week progressed on several projects for several clients. Tomas and Mossy worked on CIS Ireland - and it's looking very well:
I did some more work on the Luas Leap Card Taxsaver project, enabling monthly Taxsaver tickets. Annual tickets went live last month, so monthlies are in testing now with the project team. The project team is a large consortium consisting of a several organisations: Hewlett Packard runs the helpdesk; IBM provides the backend technology; the National Transport Authority co-ordinates the project across all transport operators; the Rail Procurement Agency provides operator-specific management, such as ensuring the validators and payment network works; Transdev (Veolia) provides customer-facing operations for ordering and fulfilling; and Dovetail provides the Taxsaver tickets ordering and management and interfacing with the Irish Integrated Ticketing System.
Trevor worked on an interesting little piece of development - he added telephone integration to an existing system for one of our oldest customers, Highlife Adventures. This used TAPI to comunicate between the desktop application and Highlife's Alcatel Pimphony phone system. Highlife staff can now dial their customers with a single tap of their touchscreen monitors. An unexpected benefit is that the phone starts to ring immediately. They report that the new system not only saves time, it also reduces the mental load on staff as they no longer have to dial the phone. That may not sound like a big deal for many office workers, but the Highlife team are very busy, make a lot of calls as they provide their renowned customer service.