The Intranet was originally designed to distribute information around the office and field based staff.

Through the early years of the business, new contract and business information was passed around the business using paper memos. These details were noted and held by individual staff, and used within the Field Engineering System.

As the business expanded, with new customers and different contract types, the information required day to day became harder to distribute and retrieve. As the member of staff responsible for distributing elements of that data, I discussed the problems being encountered with the IT Director. From those conversations grew the idea of creating an Intranet system.

We setup a Linux server running a MySQL database, which the intranet would use to store and retrieve data. The intranet itself was built using ASP and VBScript, running on IIS on a Windows 2000 server.

Office staff accessed the intranet on their desktop computers, while field-based sales and engineering employees used O2 XDA phones. To deliver a useable service to the different user types, at the top of each page a quick check was made to see what browser was being used. PC users received the standard Intranet, while XDA users received a version of the intranet tailored to the 240×320 touch screen display. With this process dating back to at least 2002, and though primitive, it must have been one of the earliest forms of responsive site design.

The Intranet began as a side project alongside my regular responsibilities, but quickly grew as a way to rebuild paper and spreadsheet based processed in a centralised hub, used by the whole business. I remained as the sole developer of the Intranet for over eight years. Despite leaving the business in 2009,  ten years later, the Intranet was still being used with practically no development or changes in that time.