Our achievements
The Trovo team has ten years of web development and twenty years of project management experience to call on. Here are some of our team’s achievements.
Click on the links below to find out more:
Our team created the
search engine for Leicester City Council using a
Google Mini search appliance, configuring it to ignore duplicated content generated by their CMS. We
analysed use of their previous search engine to
map popular searches onto the best content, sub-divided the index to
allow filtered searches and
customised the results page to fit with their site and make it web-standards compliant.
Our team designed the interface for a Lottery-funded online archive using paper prototypes to test design ideas quickly. They also created the interface to be web-standards compliant and accessible to disabled users. The site won the education category at the National Library for the Blind Visionary Design Awards 2004.
We have experience of planning, writing and publishing web content using a variety of Content Management Systems. Our team helped the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (East Midlands) pilot the use of digitised content from Local Authority archives in teaching and learning, helped them select a CMS to continue the project and helped train archivists how to use it.
Our team developed a sophisticated tool for an American publishing company to search content stored in XML. We imported the XML content into a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database and combined information about the structure of the documents with free-text searching to weight the relevancy of the returned results. (For instance, documents with the search term in their headings were prioritised over those with the term in their body text).
We not only helped Knowledge Media Design (KMD) at De Montfort University tidy up
their web servers' configuration, we also wrote a comprehensive
set of documentation about their setup, the processes for migrating development websites to live and how to set up
Media Wiki instances.
This documentation has reduced risks related to server problems at KMD dramatically.
We practice
Agile project management and development techniques such as
Test-Driven Development and automated
User Acceptance Testing. When our team worked together on the
Leicester City Council website search engine, we created a SharePoint-based application for managing User Stories, development tasks and UAT which
tracked progress and measured the team’s productivity. This allowed our project manager to run the project from a different location, with only one day’s worth of contact with the developers per week, and still
bring the project in on time, on budget and to the customer’s continued satisfaction.
We run our business using an
Online Office to collaborate together from different locations. To this end, we have
mapped our processes onto a series of Office Live lists and document libraries. In particular, we have built upon the
Office Live Contact Manager to enhance the process of managing information about
contacts,
business opportunities and
related projects.
We have
twenty years' experience of capturing knowledge about and requirements for information systems from customers. We feed this information into our
Agile project management process, then
develop and
test accordingly. We also monitor our development output and
feed the information gained
back to the customer so they can make informed decisions about the direction the project is heading and
reprioritise their requirements if needed.