Web Design Magic News

SharePoint 2010 - Redland City Council are ready..

daren@webdesignmagic.com.au (Daren Hawes) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:51:58 GMT

For some time now our friends at Microsoft have been working on the next version of SharePoint. This version has been under development for close to three years and in November 2009 they released the BETA version for developers to review. Web Design Magic have been anticipating this release for many years and boy are we impressed! The new version promises many enhancements and brand new features that we have been testing in the BETA version.

Web Design Magic have been lucky enough to work closely with Redland City Council to begin their SharePoint 2010 implementation. Tracey Gee explains: “Redland City Council is a council that is on the cutting edge. SharePoint 2010 is a natural progression for us as we currently deliver our public facing Internet and manage our Intranet on SharePoint 2007. We have teamed with Web Design Magic to produce our next website on this new SharePoint 2010 platform. We have found the BETA version to be stable and most definitely a suitable development platform to prepare for the upcoming final release version later this year.”

Web Design Magic has also begun engaging with hosting providers like WebCentral, a key brand of the Melbourne IT Group.
WebCentral has been working closely with Microsoft for some time, to allow its SMB customers to experience all the benefits of the SharePoint platform, without the expense and the challenges associated with the customers acquiring their own server infrastructure and licensing. WebCentral offers a Managed SharePoint service where WebCentral look after the technological, operational and security aspects of deployment and on-going running of the service, for a small monthly payment.

For more information on Microsoft’s new SharePoint 2010 offering please visit http://www.webdesignmagic.com.au/SharePoint-Customizations/SharePoint-2010.aspx or call us on 1300 308 210.

About Redland City Council - www.redland.qld.gov.au
Redland City is a Local Government Area of South East Queensland, spread along the southern coast of Moreton Bay covering 537 square kilometres. Between the cities of Brisbane to the north, Logan to the west, and the Gold Coast to the south, it is part of the fastest growing area in Queensland and one of the fastest growing in Australia.

The City had an estimated population of 127,627 in 2006, four times the number of residents it had as a rural community 25 years earlier. An increasing proportion of these new residents are retirees from the southern states of Australia.

We got Kentico Gold!

daren@webdesignmagic.com.au (Daren Hawes) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:04:47 GMT

Wow, what a month! This month Web Design Magic has reached Gold Partner status at Kentico. This means we are now part of a group of elite resellers for this amazing CMS system.

Kentico CMS is a content management system (CMS) for building web sites, on-line stores, intranets and Web 2.0 community sites. Kentico is being used by more than 2000 Web sites in 74 countries. Kentico CMS utilizes the ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server. In 2008, it was named the fastest growing young technology company in the Deloitte FAST 50 Rising Stars contest with a three-year growth of 553%

“We are proud of our achievements. It is not easy to become a gold partner. You need to demonstrate commitment to the product and this is what we have done. We eat and breathe this CMS, so it is important that not only the company receives recognition, but also our team.” explains Daren Hawes, CEO of Web Design Magic.

“A few years ago we researched CMS systems like Drupal, DotNetNuke and Joomla, but we just did not see the same potential as what we saw in Kentico. We found these other tools to be targeted to more smaller organisations with simple needs and little to no budget considerations. This simply was not our target market. We are able to deliver our CMS solution for way under $10k so this is very competitive and inviting to SME and corporate customers who require a commercial product with commercial support. We also have our big brother CMS – Sitecore, so we can really cater for any size business or organisation.”, explained Daren.

Web Design Magic is now preparing for CTO certification, so this means we will also be a Kentico Certified Training Organisation.

Helping TAFE work together

daren@webdesignmagic.com.au (Daren Hawes) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:31:52 GMT

Web Design Magic has successfully completed the Central Queensland Institute of TAFE's SharePoint Intranet project.

Central Queensland Institute of TAFE's sole purpose is to skill the people of Central Queensland and in these changing times, the Institute must be dynamic, responsive and innovative in its delivery of training. The Institute will lead the way in its use of technologies to deliver its education and training in the classroom, to workplaces and businesses across the state and around the world.

CQ TAFE will embrace opportunities for collaboration with other regional campuses across the state to remain flexible, cost effective and autonomous. Their competitiveness and responsiveness will also be strengthened by their partnerships with other training providers, individuals and organisations like Web Design Magic. To achieve their vision CQ TAFE is backed by a professional workforce and a strong, positive organisational culture where staff development and a commitment to a work-life balance is paramount.

Web Design Magic was asked to design and deploy a SharePoint solution that will be deployed across the Institutes internal Intranet and provide collaboration and document sharing tools for over 1500 employees. Web Design Magic worked closely with the ITS department, who recently advised the project is officially completed.

“Now the SharePoint solution is completed and deployed we hope all at T.A.F.E. benefit from a streamlined system. The staff seemed to pick up the technology quite well at our training days and I am sure the new technology will be adopted throughout T.A.F.E. on a national scale.” said Daren Hawes, CEO of Web Design Magic.

If you would like someone to contact you to discuss how we may be able to help you like we helped CQIT, then give us a call on 1300 308 210 and we'll be happy to explain your options in detail.