The Telegraph Media Group produces the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers, and maintains a significant online presence. Softwire provide support and development for a suite of bespoke applications that are used to manage the editorial and publishing processes for both newspapers.
The application suite is built with VB.NET and utilises the Caché object database alongside Microsoft SQL Server. It also uses the ComponentArt UI framework to provide a highly functional and flexible interface in a web browser. The suite interacts with several other Telegraph systems in order to extract data about the very latest edition of the newspaper, and to push newspaper metadata to the printing presses.
Softwire were the original developers for part of the suite, and were able to quickly assume support responsibility for the entire suite upon the departure of the senior Telegraph developer previously responsible. We ensured that an intensive two week on-site period took place to facilitate knowledge transfer about the applications and the newspaper production process to the support team. We have subsequently provided a consistently high level of support for this specialised system from day one.
The fast moving newspaper publishing industry means that rapid responses are required to ensure effective support, and we have consistently met or exceeded the challenging SLAs agreed for response times to support requests.
Our support team uses the Telegraph’s own JIRA system for bug tracking to allow the Telegraph to easily assign and prioritise work, and provide the necessary details to support incidents. This process allows us to closely follow the Telegraph’s development, testing and release process, integrating us more tightly with their team.
In addition to the ongoing support work, significant enhancements and additions to the suite are planned, to further integrate the functionality of other existing Telegraph applications into the suite. Softwire’s extensive knowledge of the application suite has allowed us to actively propose improvements and to take a lead in raising quality and adding value to the supported systems.
Customer testimonial
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