Portals and online services

A portal is the part of a system that faces outwards: the website or extranet where the public, companies or members apply, submit, report, book, pay or look something up, and where your staff deal with what comes in.

Portals are judged by the people who use them, most of whom use them rarely and get no training. They have to be clear, secure and reliable on any device, and they have to hand what they collect straight into your back-office systems.

What we build

• Submission and application portals: regulated companies submitting applications, reports or returns to a regulator, with secure accounts, drafts, validation and acknowledgements.
• Public reporting and disclosure sites: information that must be published, kept accurate and searchable by the public.
• Extranets for clients and members: a secure area where your clients manage their own information, track progress and correspond with you.
• Marketplaces and e-commerce: online shops integrated with stock, order and loyalty systems, and two-sided marketplaces with bidding, messaging and payments, taking payment through established payment gateways.
• Self-service: online forms, bookings and registrations that replace paper and phone calls.

How we approach it

We design the public side around the tasks people come to do, and prototype it before building. Security and data protection are designed in from the start: accounts, roles, encryption, audit and the handling of personal data. The administration side gets the same attention, because that is where your staff spend their day.

Where a portal replaces paper, we plan the transition with you, including the data to be migrated and the support users will need in the first weeks.

Technologies

Microsoft .NET and ASP.NET, SQL Server, web services and APIs for integration, payment gateways such as Global Payments and PayPal, hosted on Microsoft Azure.