It’s now 9 weeks since we transitioned to remote working. We introduced more flexible hours to help our employees better plan their day around childcare and other responsibilities. Our teams are busy with ongoing and new projects and we recently expanded the workforce, adding a UX designer and project manager. Company inductions under lockdown are a little bit different!

The digital environment gives businesses the opportunity to share data and content. By delivering the right information across a range of needs, it allows individuals and groups to work smarter and upskill for the benefit of increased productivity and personal achievement.

OCC has donated 8 computers to Oxford’s Rose Hill Community Centre. The computers are being used in the Community Centre’s new beginners’ ICT courses, in a joint project between the Centre and City of Oxford College, with Rose Hill Community Association donating equipment as well as OCC. OCC Project Manager Lois Muddiman said, “We are delighted to be supporting community education by donating these computers. We hope they will be used widely by many different groups.” To find out more,[...]

The OCC Innovation Delivery teams – Fusion, Trilobites, Puffin and the OCC UX Design Studio – hold regular Technical Chapter meetings to help advance cross-team knowledge sharing. The meetings cover a wide range of topics, usually around technologies used in on-going project work, but also on tools and techniques that benefit the development process. Docker Compose [Fusion]​​ Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. Operando has lots of modules, each one being a Docker container and[...]

OCC Innovation Delivery hold fortnightly Technical Chapter meetings to help advance cross-team knowledge sharing. The meetings cover a wide range of topics, usually around technologies used in on-going project work, but also on tools and techniques that benefit the development process. IIS ​ARR (Application Request Routing)​​ Greg told us about his experience with ARR. This IIS component is required when you want to forward requests to another machine on a port that isn’t port 80. One of the settings is[...]

OCC are pleased to have been selected as a supplier to the Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2 services on the Government’s Digital Marketplace. This new accreditation complements OCC’s existing registration as a G-Cloud supplier. As a Digital Outcomes supplier to the Government: OCC project teams can work on technical architecture and develop prototype systems for Government agencies and the NHS, provide specialists on digital applications and supply user research studios to facilitate end user usability testing of existing and new[...]

We exhibited at the Low Carbon Network Innovation conference (LCNI) again this year. LCNI brings together distribution network operators, National Grid and energy industry suppliers to network and present the innovative ways they are responding to current challenges in the energy industry. As the industry reduces its reliance on carbon-based energy sources – which are concentrated, predictable and controllable – in favour of more distributed and variable green alternatives, the challenge is to maintain electricity and gas supplies and respond[...]

OCC’s Ami is one of the latest ‘tech for good’ projects to receive funding from Nominet Trust, the UK’s leading social tech funder. There were 298 applications in the recent round of Nominet Trust’s Social Tech Seed programme, of which 9, including Ami, were successful. “Too often older people in our communities can feel isolated and lonely,” said Vicki Hearn, Director of Nominet Trust. “This isn’t just a social problem – it’s damaging to their health too. We’re very excited[...]

In sports like running, athletes strive to complete the fastest lap in the hope that they can win Olympic gold. At Oxford Computer Consultants, high performance is just as important. In computing, as in running, high performance is about using the available resources to achieve a specific goal. Computing performance is often measured by the time it takes to make complex calculations or process large amounts of data. Software performance can be improved by scaling up and scaling out. Scaling[...]

How quickly do you need to find out what the legacy of the London Olympics is? Answer: very quickly. Sport England is a non-departmental public body answerable to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and funded by central government and the National Lottery. Each year, it surveys the population to collect data on attitudes to sport, including what sports are played, who plays them, where and how often. In 2010, Sport England refreshed its questionnaire and ended up with[...]

Performance may seem like an abstract concept until it involves the care of some of society’s most vulnerable people. ContrOCC is OCC’s finance management software. It is used by about 50 local councils, has more than 1,000,000 lines of code and took over 10 years to build. The software is used by local council social care finance teams to manage contracts and budgets, make payments to suppliers and collect contributions from service users. ContrOCC payment calculations are complex. As the[...]

Imagine the scene: two people are seated at a table in the conference room of a council office or hospital. One wears a microphone and faces a camera. The camera records everything that is said or done as a script leads the way through an app on a tablet. You are not on the set of Mission Impossible. You are a user experience (UX) designer at OCC, exploring how users interact with a prototype application or their existing system. The[...]

Warwickshire Counter Fraud Partnership select Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC) and Infoshare Limited to provide Data Matching Software for Fraud Prevention Warwick January 2016:  Following a competitive tender, Warwickshire Counter Fraud Partnership WCFP are delighted to announce the award of the contract for Data Matching Software for Fraud Prevention jointly to Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC) and Infoshare as part of the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) counter fraud initiative. By bringing together and matching a number of key datasets[...]