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A new intranet for The Lighthouse Group - web development in action

6th October 2011

We've been beavering away all summer on a great project for The Lighthouse Group (TLG) and are really excited to announce that we've recently delivered a significant new intranet for the Bradford-based education charity.

Developed from the ground-up using Symfony and JQuery UI web development frameworks, the new Lighthouse intranet covers many aspects of TLG's internal business processes. We've spent the past 6 months working with TLG to understand how they currently work and identifying the good, the bad and the ugly. We've modelled the good, analysed and fixed the bad and replaced the ugly. The result is a clean and easy-to-use interface which gives everyone within TLG access to the information they need to get their jobs done.

The features available within the Lighthouse web-based system are too numerous to describe in-depth, but the intranet briefly includes:

• A holiday booking and tracking system, allowing staff and line managers to control annual leave and see holiday entitlement at a glance.
• An overtime logging and approval system suppporting TOIL and paid overtime.
• A wide range of staff-related functionality and records, controlled by line managers and visible to HR and individual staff.
• A tracker system to allow IT/building/finance problems to be raised, tracked and resolved.
• A detailed financial system, providing TLG's finance team with the information required to manage expense claims, raise invoices and pay staff.
• The ability to create, distribute and analyse satisfaction surveys to monitor internal performance across the organisation.
• A range of features to support TLG's ground-breaking Early Intervention project.
• A suite of functionality for use by TLG students, giving them the opportunity to record and track their performance and how they're feeling during their time at TLG.
• A workflow system for the HR job application process which allows jobs to be listed on the TLG website and enables job applications to be submitted online. The whole interview/decision-making process is handled within the Lighthouse system, with email notifications at key stages to complement the web-based process.
• A range of reports to ensure OFSTED-compliance across the organisation
• A simple social network which allows staff to keep up-to-date with what other staff are up to.

We could go on, but we won't... and there's more functionality to come (did we ever mention that our web development is very extensible and maintainable?). Needless to say, all functionality can be accessed using only a web browser, with secure password-protected access and a sophisticated permissions model to ensure that people can only access parts of the system that TLG want them to.

We're really proud of the Lighthouse system and excited at the changes that this web development will bring to TLG. If you believe that your company/organisation is unique enough to need and deserve its own bespoke intranet, please get in touch. We promise to work hard to understand your needs and help you identify opportunities for automation and innovation.

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