A few months ago, Ted Friend, Superintendent of Sutton Public Schools, in collaboration with other staff and teachers, developed the idea of the Lit Fit Challenge as a way to encourage both literacy and activity within the community.  The goal of the project is to log 25 million minutes of exercise and 25 million minutes of reading within a 12 month period.  Students, residents, and employees of Sutton, MA are encouraged to head to the website and create an account, then start logging data.

Info et Cetera Consulting was glad to answer the call for help developing a custom website which would allow project participants to create a secure account and then log activity on a regular basis.  The site also has a secondary interface, which can only be accessed from within the schools, to allow students to log activity using their ID number, avoiding the need to collect personally-identifiable information from children under 13 while still allowing them to directly contribute data.  The site features a variety of live charts and statistics which have proven fascinating to the children, and classes enjoy entering their data and immediately seeing the difference they make in the project.

As of today, the project has already surpassed 1.5 million minutes of activity, and will continue into next fall.

In today’s economic climate, we recognize that budgets do not necessarily allow for completely “from scratch” or “hand coded” software solutions. Over the past year, we have focused our research and development into leveraging application frameworks, letting computer-generated code do the “heavy lifting” so we can keep client expenses low while keeping our focus on the business and operational issues.

At the heart of our new push is eXpressApp Framework (XAF), a software development product from Developer Express. XAF allows us to quickly model business objects and develop core web- and Windows-based solutions to manager information. We then extend this basic framework to create custom form layouts, custom reports, data interoperability components, and any other custom features that your business may require. The result is a quick and efficient development process that can be tailored to meet most business budgets. As opposed to most other application development platforms, XAF lets us replace “out of the box” features with custom-developed solutions, as well as easily integrating completely custom pieces of functionality.

Info et Cetera’s focus is on businesses with unique operations which can’t be solved by “off the shelf” software, or businesses that are much smaller than the competitors in their market space and need to use technology to obtain a competitive edge. If you feel that custom software may give your business the edge it needs, contact us to learn more!

Info et Cetera Consulting

http://www.infoetc.com

Phone: (508) 635-9511

To watch the Dream Server Launch event, go to:
http://infoetc.com/dreamserver

At Info et Cetera, we are committed to keeping our clients well informed on the latest technologies so we can work together to create Innovative Solutions for Innovative Businesses.

We’re pleased to release our new company website! In addition to sporting a fresh new look, our new website is based on a cutting-edge Content Management System, so we can quickly and easily update content and pull in data.

Previously, we had two public websites: a Flash-based site and a Sharepoint-based site (for accessibility purposes). With our new site, we were able to go back to maintaining a single site that looks great while also being accessible. We also were able to integrate features such as RSS Feeds.

Another big shift on our new site is moving to a Case Study format rather than a client listing. We’ve worked on a lot of really neat projects, so we decided that the case study format, with more depth about business problems, solutions, and value, would be more interesting and allow visitors to get a better feel for the type of work we do.