Archive for the ‘Compliance’ Tag

Company Net Website on Top SharePoint

Posted September 16, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, Company News, SharePoint, sharepoint internet | Tags: , , , , ,
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We are very pleased that our new website was accepted onto the Top SharePoint list today.

Top SharePoint for Company Net Website

Top SharePoint for Company Net Website

We have extended our approach to ensure AA accessibility and ensure a high degree of xHTML compliance whilst making sure that site performance is maximised. We are practicing what we preach and showcasing what is very achievable for SharePoint Internet sites. We have received great design input from our partners Red Dress Creative and Shaw Marketing and Design and combined their initiatives into our own final design for the site.

We are actively looking for many more SharePoint Website projects and believe that if you currently use SharePoint for your internal portal that there are significant benefits to be achieved by also puting your website on this platform.

These benefits include:

  • Simplified content management requiring no coding experience
  • Business users own and manage their content from end to end
  • Single interface for managing intranet and extranet, reducing training requirement for staff
  • Familiar Microsoft Office interface
  • No reliance on third party suppliers to maintain company website
  • Improved customer interaction through SharePoint discussion forum and blog capabilities

If you are a Microsoft Gold Partner then we are offering knowledge and skills transfer whilst building or migrating your own site to SharePoint. You can see more details here on the Partner Channel Builder Portal  

Galliford Try chooses Company Net for Website Build

Posted September 9, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, Company News, Partners, WPC 2009 | Tags: , , , ,
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gt_logoBuilding on Company Net’s experience in the construction industry, Company Net has been appointed by Galliford Try to redevelop its Galliford Try Homes web site. We are delighted to be involved in this prestigious project.

Developing around 3,000 homes per year, in the South of England Galliford Try Homes is best known to consumers for homebuilding brands including Linden Homes, Stamford Homes and Midas Homes. In Scotland they also own Morrison Construction.

With numerous acquisitions, the company is keen to consolidate it’s brand position and ensure the websites of group companies are reflective of its leading market position and more able to connect with prospective customers.

The new site will be built on Sitecore’s .NET CMS platform, and will benefit from the rich variety of Content Management capabilities which this brings.

Sitecore OMS

Sitecore News

Sitecore have just announced the launch of the new Online Marketing Suite on the 1st of October. This is a very exciting addition to the CMS product and allows for extremely good website analytics with categorisation and connectivity of visitor leads through to internal systems such as Dynamics CRM. We had the privilege of a demo of the new system at Microsoft World Partner Conference from none other than UK MD, Simon Bartolo and were very impressed indeed. We have been invited to the launch in London and will report back on the new features in more detail soon.

Company Net is an accredited Sitecore partner and proud to be building first class websites on this excellent .net CMS platform

SharePoint – Affordable AA Compliance for your Internet Site

Posted August 26, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, SharePoint 2007 | Tags: , , , ,
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Here are a few insights from Steven Gardner our Senior Technical Architect on the solution for achieving AA Compliance when using SharePoint for your website.

To start with a little bit about compliance:

Standards compliance is the adherence of a websites HTML and CSS markup to W3C standards.  Over the past couple of years making websites standards compliant has become a major driver in the development of public facing websites, why? In the not too distant past, few websites were developed to any form of standard but instead targeted a particular browser as their preferred display medium.  Targeting a particular browser had the effect that when a user viewed a website with a different browser, then at best the user suffered a less than optimal browsing experience but in the worst cases were completely unable to view the website.  As browser market share has become more distributed, from a business perspective, denying potential customer’s access to your website just because of the browser they use is simply throwing sales away!

The Problem

For web standards compliance, there are a number of fundamental issues which have to be addressed:

  •  Lack of DOCTYPE
  • Invalid HTML markup
  • Table based layouts
  • HTML containing custom attributes
  • Over reliance on JavaScript for basic functions
  • Use of inline CSS styles

The Solution

In partnership with Microsoft, HiSoftware developed the Accessibility Toolkit for SharePoint 2.0 (AKS).  The toolkit offers a number of new features to help meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints (WCAG 1.0 AA) and the newest WCAG 2.0 AA Candidate Recommendation while significantly reducing the time, knowledge and effort required to implement such a website.

Along with developing the AKS, HiSoftware have also developed a direct replacement for the default text editor within SharePoint called Accessible Rich Text Editor(aRTE).  aRTE allows a user to edit content in a Word like editor but crucially ensuring that the output is XHTML compliant and accessible.

Steven’s White Paper on the full topic is available for download below:

Compliance White Paper 

Project Scotland was the Top SharePoint Internet Site in the UK (for a while)

Posted August 16, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, SharePoint, SharePoint 2007 | Tags: , , , , , , ,
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We were happy that our site built for Project Scotland rose up to top spot for a couple of weeks.

In the meantime we have been finalising our own site on MOSS 2007

Here is a quick preview:

Company Net Website

Company Net Website

Other than good design our focus has also been on AA  accessibility and xHTML compliance using HiSoftware tools and achieving excellent optimisation resulting in a nice reduction in overall footprint.

Answering the question that SharePoint has a large footprint

Answering the question that SharePoint has a large footprint

We will shortly be issuing a White paper to share the approach to Accessibility and Optimisation which we believe are fundamental to seeing SharePoint websites continue to flourish.

 

 

 

Sitecore Launch for HMIe

Posted August 10, 2009
Filed under: Company News | Tags: , , , ,
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Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMIe) has just launched a new mini-site, HMIe Performs.  The site provides HMIe with a vehicle to share more widely and frequently its performance against its objectives and targets.

Developed by Company Net on the Sitecore web content management platform, the project demonstrated how effective Sitecore is for producing Accessible web sites which are W3C compliant in xHTML and CSS.

Top SharePoint Site Admission for Project Scotland

Posted August 8, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, Company News, SharePoint 2007, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , ,
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We were very pleased to have our site for Project Scotland accepted into the Top Internet Sites website today. See what you think and place your vote.

 

With creative design supplied by The Union and Dynamics CRM functionality surfacing through SharePoint and InfoPath by Company Net the end result has been very effective in driving this magnificent Scottish Charity’s goal of providing volunteering opportunities to 16-25 year olds in Scotland.

Accessibility

We will shortly be addressing the issue of accessibility in SharePoint websites and sharing our experience of overcoming the challenges facing developers when needing to produce xHTML compliant websites using SharePoint. The recently launched Hisoft Rich Text Editor, provides an advanced toolkit to allow the delivery of xHTML compliance with new found ease, including for example compliant Flash Movies. We are currently testing an AA compliant version of the Project Scotland website with excellent results and performance improvements which we will re-launch shortly. What’s important here is that we have been able to retro design the exiting site in a very short period of time. Along with great creative design capability, the accessibility issue is essential to overcome and we have taken the decision to showcase this in our own new website which has had design input from one of our Creative Partners Digital Face and Shaw  and is shortly due for release.

 

We believe there is a huge opportunity for Creative Design Agencies to work with partners to devise and design top value websites for clients. Build upon your client’s existing investment in SharePoint without compromising any creativity and providing the client with a perfect combination of SharePoint’s impressive functionality for ECM, Internal Portals, Document Management, Search and Collaboration with public facing sites that are visually stunning, compliant and functional, with the essential ability to be administered with familiar experience internally.

 

The ball is rolling……time to get on board