Terminology

Bespoke Software Development

Application
Programs that run on your computer such as the separate components of Microsoft Office or items such as the Calculator, Paint, Freecell or Wordpad.

Bespoke Application Applications that are designed specifially to meet the needs of your business.  Crafted to the exacting requirements of your business and its process's.

DatDatabases
Industry standard way of storing any kind of data or information that is prevalent to your business.  These are programs that are specially designed to store, update, manipulate and process data in the most efficient manner.

Software Development
This is the process of writing bespoke applications.  The process usually begins with a requirements specification that outlines very clearly what you require from  the software solution.  When this has been agreed, the process of software design begins, followed quicky by coding and unit testing.  Deployment and end user support are the final stages in this process.

Interfaces
Applications on computers have to communicate with each other in various ways.  The mechanisms vary, but can broadly be defined as the interfaces between different systems.  Examples of interfaces you may commonly already use are the way yo can insert an Excel spreadsheet into a Microsoft Word document or the way that your email system communicates with the email server that would reside on another system.
Small Business

Software Solutions

There are many companys out there offering what we call generic software solutions. These are Applications or software systems that they have written with the intention of being able to fit into as many different business's as possible. These products may be very good, but they are generic and not designed to fit into your business and its process's. They expect your business to fit into the way their software works. This is not the ideal solution. Talk-PC's offering are bespoke software solutions. This means that we gain an understanding of your business and then provide a solution that meets the needs of your business, without asking you to compromise on the way you do business.
 

Capability

A few years ago, you could have bought a bespoke piece of software to support your business, chances are that it would be based on the Microsoft Access product and would have cost you many thousands of pounds to buy.   Today, there are tools available that can develop the highly complex software solutions demanded by modern business's for a fraction of the cost of previous software development technologys.  The modern toolsets used for software development can provide easy capabilitys to interface your software solutions with Web Service offerings, emails, databases, other systems etc. etc.
 
 

Technologies

We use the very latest technology for our development toolsets.  The primary development system is a product from Microsoft called Visual Studio 2008 .  This is the primary software development system from Microsoft.  It is without doubt the industry standard for software development on the Windows platform and provides the software developer with numerous tools and capabilitys to solve any problems they face.  To provide persistant storage for your business data, we utilise the Database product SQL Server 2005  presently, but will be moving to SQL Server 2008  when it ships in March 2008.  SQL Server is the most used database product in the world.  When this is combined with Visual Studio, the most used software development system in the world, you can feel safe in the knowledge that your bespoke software solution is being designed using the worlds most used and best development systems.

Costs

The costs associated with a bespoke software solution can be broken down as follows;
  • Quick prototype to provide a "look and feel" for you - Free of charge
  • Software Design, authoring, coding, Testing etc. - Usually Fixed Price
    • Like website design, it is not easy to give prices for bespoke software application development due to the different requirements in each business case.  However, I do not usually quote an hourly charge rate, preferring a fixed price for the job, based upon a very good understanding of your requirements gained in the initial consultations/meetings.  An approximate price range being between £200 for a small simple application and upto £4000 for a more integrated system that would integrate  with web services, emails, databases, other systems, Microsoft office etc. and require more complex business rules and requirements.

    Dependant upon the size and scope of the software solution, it may be required to procure SQL Database licences.  The free license for SQL Server is for upto a certain database size and transaction limit.  There are not very many small business's that would exceed these limits, but if they did, additional costs would be incurred.

    Process

    The process that we would follow to provide your software solution would be as follows;
    • Initial consultation exercise, where I gain an understanding of your business and the needs that you wish met by the software solution
    • I write up my understanding of your needs in a document and through a process of review between us, this gets agreed as a baseline requirements specfication
    • Once the baseline requirements specification is formally agreed, I provide a detailed quotation.
    • Once the quotation is agreed, I request 33% upfront payment.
    • We remain in constant liaison during the application development phase.
    • Once you have accepted the application in meeting the requirements specification, I will invoice the final 67%.
    It would be expected that during the development phase of the product, you would be able to provide some user testing to ensure that it is still meeting your requirements.
    For further details or an informal chat, please contact Mike Read on (01985) 216351 or email Mike@Talk-pc.co.uk.