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Clients

Redforts Software — Oscar web application Oscar Hotel Management Solution Redforts Software is a Spanish company providing software solutions with innovative technologies. It offers high-quality software solution services to SMEs in the Europe and The Americas. Its most well-known service is Oscar, a web-based Hotel Management Solution. Qoben was responsible for the development and deployment of the Oscar web service. Oscar is used by many users and Redforts requires that it works so smoothly that the users have the impression that they work with a program installed on their computer. Therefore Oscar has been developed with the following characteristics: Very fast: The application is kept in the web server's memory at all times, which avoids any delay that would otherwise be introduced by interpreting or compiling with every request to the web server. It uses threads to reduce the amount of memory and every thread keeps its connections with the databases open to avoid the delay of opening and closing the connections with every request. This setup is developed completely by Qoben and can handle many times more requests per second than an interpreted application, such as ASP, CGI or PHP, without these advantages. Enormous savings in the operations cost for the client. By handling so many more requests and therefore also users, Redforts needs many less servers, which translates directly in savings in the rent or purchase of computer equipment and in the operations cost. Elegant and simple: The users can simply draw the reservations on the timetable. Changing dates or rooms/houses is done by directly moving the blocks on the timetable with the mouse. The latest web technologies have been applied for this innovative interface. Redforts Software Web portal Apart from the Oscar web application, Qoben also created the web portal for Redforts Software. Redforts' clients are hotel, B&B and holiday house businesses. This means that the visitors are from a specific sector. The web portal must explain the Oscar service and its advantages over a program that must be installed on a computer. Therefore the web design is professional and modern, yet original, such as the buttons and the summary boxes that partly go beyond the "paper". The design and the logo were created in together with the visual artist María Vogels and in close operation with the client. The "paper" design adapts itself elegantly to different screen sizes and works perfectly with different browser configurations. IFTech International IFTech International (Arnhem, The Netherlands) works in cooperation with their international sister organisations in Belgium, Spain and the UK. When Qoben published the complete make-over of the Spanish IFTec website, this client wanted to modernise its website in a similar fashion. A nice example of how quality sells itself! World map: The client wanted the website to emphasise the international nature of IFTech. Therefore, Qoben developped a world map that automatically zooms in on Europe to make it possible to see and select countries with small surfaces. A fun detail: check to what countries the following islands belong: Corsica, The Channel Islands, The Balearic Islands, The Canary Islands and the Azores. Simply move your mouse over them! Joint project administration: The various IFTech companies show eachother's reference projects on their websites. Qoben developped a single administration that uses a single database for both websites. With it, one company can add a reference project to its website and the other company can choose to show it on its own as well, without copying anything. IFTec GeoEnergía IFTec GeoEnergía (Madrid, Spain) works in cooperation with their international sister organisations in The Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. The Spanish web site had to resemble the corporate web site to transmit the relation to the public. Parting from that design and the IFTech UK logo Qoben built a complete new quality site with a number of strong points: Homogeneous colours: Qoben elected a limited set of colours to transmit consistency, professionalism and calmness. The elected colours are vivid and balanced. Page mechanics: The new web site is designed to work with small and large screens, for all navigators and all user settings. Quality logo: Qoben redid the logo from scratch and created a perfect version without artifacts for IFTec's web and for high-quality offset printing. Dynamic content: The site features sections for news and articles that are easily maintained by IFTec themselves. All content is stored in a database. BioComp España and BioComp Nederland Connect offices in different countries BioComp Industries is a manufacturer of dental implantations with offices in The Netherlands, Poland and Spain. It uses central computer servers in its office in The Netherlands for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and for storing documents. Its employees in Spain work remotely with the applications on the central server and therefore need a broadband connection with high bandwidth in both directions (up and down). An ADSL connection is assymetric, which means that the download speed is higher than the upload speed; in Spain this can be upto 10 times higher. For that reason it needs a special connection with better upload bandwidth. Qoben investigated the available options and installed and configured the network equipment and the computers. Since there are two modem/routers, they had to be configured to take advantage of both Internet connections and send the traffic for the central server throught the most appropriate line. To make the connection between the two offices secure and to make sharing documents easier, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) was installed. Furthermore, Qoben gave advice to the IT team in The Netherlands to improve the performance of the installation. Dazzleware Centralise and unify data Dazzleware is a Dutch computer services company. For one of its projects it needed to collect data from many sources and store them in a central database. Qoben developed the application that reads the new data from each source, converts it to a unified format and stores it into the Microsoft SQL Server database. Since the sources are different, the application has a module for each one. The program is very easy to install and to use. The client can configure it according to its needs by means of an XML file. This project is a good example of Qoben's expertise in integrating proprietary and open technologies. In this case the application is implemented in Python and it connects to a MS SQL Server database using ODBC. La Tienda de Domótica La Tienda de Domótica is an online shop in Spain for domotics products, also called home automation. The online shop has two types of customers: consumers and electrical installers. The latter enjoy discounts that the shop owners want to manage per manufacturer, instead of per product. The development of this web shop was taken over by Qoben when it became clear that the previous company was unable to implement the client's specific requirements and make the necessary changes to the database structure. The website is based on the osCommerce package. Some characteristics: Advanced price management for two user groups: The electrical installers enjoy discounts that the shop owners can set as a percentage per manufacturer. The reason for this is that the owners negociate prices per provider and hence per manufacturer. The shop has about 300 products of 10 manufacturers, so this functionality saves a lot of work and avoids mistakes. Completely rewritten price module: the price depends on many things: tax rate, whether VAT applies, user group, etc. There were five copies of the program code that computes the price and all five were different. This is of course completely unacceptable. Therefore Qoben centralised this functionality and rewrote the code to correct errors and for easier maintenance. Design: There were many errors in the layout of the pages, that are all corrected by Qoben. Apart from that many improvements were made, such as legibility and consistency of the graphics. Ease of use: Qoben added a number of improvements that helps the shop visitor, such as the automatic completion of the address based on the postal code.	Orclix Nederland Search Engine Optimisation Orclix Nederland offers its clients a service to make their websites easier to be found with search engines, such as Bing, Google, Yahoo!, etc. Qoben has developed an advanced web portal for Orclix Nederland that allows its clients to manage their campaigns and accounts and that allows Orclix personnel to manage its clients. Notable aspects of this web portal are: Client accounts: The web portal has clear and well-organised pages that allow the client to manage their own campaigns, pay the service, view and download invoices, etc. PayPal Adaptive Payments: The web portal makes use of the advanced PayPal Adaptive Payments. The integration is built by Qoben and is tested and certified by PayPal. Automatic domains: Each compaign uses its own subdomain. Qoben developed special programme code that automatically creates (and deleted) subdomains as appropriate. The design is provided by the client and Qoben adapted it to valid HTML5 code. HIP Europe Expert network HIP Europe (The Netherlands and Germany) has a network of very experienced Research and Development experts. The client needs an advanced web site to manage all experts and provide integrated services to clients and experts. Rick Wielens, co-owner of HIP Europe, wrote in October 2008: When we launched HIP Europe back in 2006 we contracted all on-line activities to Qoben: web, email and central server. The web site is our presence on the Internet and a tool to do our daily work. It is used by many people every day: staff, experts and clients. Qoben provides efficient maintenance and updates are implemented quickly, which is crucial when doing business. Since Qoben offers integrated services, it always provides effective solutions to all our requests, combining various technologies when necessary. As we were learning what the required specifications of the web site should be, we needed a partner who could not only cover technology but also help us to actively work together towards the best solutions. Qoben’s support was essential for us to interactively develop our ideas and translate them into an integral solution. The main characteristics of HIP Europe's web: Profiles: Qoben designed easy forms that each expert uses to manage its own profile information, such as contact information and skills. Secure projects: Experts can work on various projects. Using the same login account, experts can access and update the project-related documents with other project members in a secure way. Company administration: Qoben developed advanced web tools to administer the experts and projects. For instance, setting up an email address for an expert is as simple as filling out the address on his/her profile form. Integrated accounts: Experts, project members and the company staff can access all functions from their own accounts, logging in only once. Very secure: Qoben created the most-secure login session mechanics in the industry, using all known mechanisms to counter session hijacking. Usability: All forms provide ample help on many fields with clear messages if something is not correctly filled out. The design is created in close cooperation and following clear indications from the customer. Hotel Rural Casa de la Marquesa Hotel Rural Casa de la Marquesa (Chinchón, Spain) is a small luxurious hotel aimed at a modern and adventurous public. This client needs a web site that describes the rooms and the services accurately and allows for easy reservation requests. Jankees Korstanje, co-owner, wrote in September 2008: An attractive, well-organised, informative and functional web site is one of the most important ingredients for success of a small independent hotel. The design and functionality of a web site are of uttermost importance not only for client acquisition, but especially to streamline the business process. Its success can only be guaranteed by continuous maintenance and the possibility to quickly implement updates. Over the course of the last two years, Qoben showed that it is capable of providing the services that make a small business succeed. Therefore, the solid design, the thorough maintenance and the short implementation cycles are for me the main reasons to recommend Qoben. A couple of highlights: Design: Qoben based the web design on the existing letter head with the flowers. All pages are balanced and breathe serenity; there are no moving images. Multi-language: Since the hotel receives many international clients, the site is available in five languages: English, Spanish, French, German and Dutch. Navigation: The site provides simple navigation. From the menu at the left-hand side, one can reach quickly all main pages. Qoben created an interactive floor plan that shows the location of all rooms, the patio and the breakfast room. María Vogels — visual artist María Vogels is a visual artist whose work stands out because of its connection with the Earth. She needs a web site where customers, galleries and others that are interested can view her work and learn about its background. In close cooperation with the artist, Qoben created a web site that expresses the natural characteristics of María's work, but includes the latest advances in web technology: Great adaption for all screen sizes: from the very small screen sizes of 800×600 pixels upto the huge screens of 2560×2048 pixels, the content is always nicely centred on the screen, but allowing for simple scrolling when necessary. To avoid confusion, the web site uses only the window's scrollbar and no secondary scrollbars inside the window. Extreme browser compatibility: tested in all modern browsers: Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, Chrome, and Safari. It uses modern capabilities of modern browsers, such as the tear offs that are fixed at the top and bottom, but has a top-class graceful fallback for older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6, that lack many of those features. This mechanism is developed entirely by Qoben. Viewing art without distractions: Pages to view art photos are stripped of all secondary information to allow for undistracted viewing. Even the primary information retreats to the background when the user moves the mouse away. Latest web technologies: Qoben used the most modern web technologies to give the user the smoothest experience that is currently possible. For example: it uses smooth transitions without the need for plugins and there are no delays when hovering over buttons or links. Turismo Chinchón Turismo Chinchón (Chinchón, Spain) is the web portal of the Asociación de Hostelería y la Industría Turística de Chinchón, the Association of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Industry. The portal is dedicated to provide complete tourist information about Chinchón and its surroundings to broad public. At the moment the site contains information about interesting places, news and tourist activities from the association members: typical shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, etcetera. The association has plans to add more services shortly. Qoben developed a complete solution in close cooperation with the association. Some interesting points: Permanent control: All members can update their own activities any time they want. Each activity has its own page all elements can be changed, such as the title, the text, photos, contact information. This way all information can easily be kept up-to-date for the visitors. Languages: The site is available in two languages —English and Spanish— and is designed to add more in the future. Email: Every member has its own email address and can change it anytime he wants. He can choose between forwarding to another email account or storing the messages on the server. Very secure: Qoben created the most-secure login session mechanics in the industry, using all known mechanisms to counter session hijacking. Usability and training: It has been made very easy to manage all this information: news, activities, email. Furthermore, Qoben wrote an illustrative guide and held a training session for all members.

Redforts Software — Oscar web application

Oscar Hotel Management Solution

Redforts Software is a Spanish company providing software solutions with innovative technologies. It offers high-quality software solution services to SMEs in the Europe and The Americas. Its most well-known service is Oscar, a web-based Hotel Management Solution.

Qoben was responsible for the development and deployment of the Oscar web service. Oscar is used by many users and Redforts requires that it works so smoothly that the users have the impression that they work with a program installed on their computer. Therefore Oscar has been developed with the following characteristics:

Very fast: The application is kept in the web server's memory at all times, which avoids any delay that would otherwise be introduced by interpreting or compiling with every request to the web server. It uses threads to reduce the amount of memory and every thread keeps its connections with the databases open to avoid the delay of opening and closing the connections with every request. This setup is developed completely by Qoben and can handle many times more requests per second than an interpreted application, such as ASP, CGI or PHP, without these advantages.
Enormous savings in the operations cost for the client. By handling so many more requests and therefore also users, Redforts needs many less servers, which translates directly in savings in the rent or purchase of computer equipment and in the operations cost.
Elegant and simple: The users can simply draw the reservations on the timetable. Changing dates or rooms/houses is done by directly moving the blocks on the timetable with the mouse. The latest web technologies have been applied for this innovative interface.

Redforts Software

Web portal

Apart from the Oscar web application, Qoben also created the web portal for Redforts Software.

Redforts' clients are hotel, B&B and holiday house businesses. This means that the visitors are from a specific sector. The web portal must explain the Oscar service and its advantages over a program that must be installed on a computer. Therefore the web design is professional and modern, yet original, such as the buttons and the summary boxes that partly go beyond the "paper".

The design and the logo were created in together with the visual artist María Vogels and in close operation with the client. The "paper" design adapts itself elegantly to different screen sizes and works perfectly with different browser configurations.

IFTech International

IFTech International (Arnhem, The Netherlands) works in cooperation with their international sister organisations in Belgium, Spain and the UK. When Qoben published the complete make-over of the Spanish IFTec website, this client wanted to modernise its website in a similar fashion. A nice example of how quality sells itself!

World map: The client wanted the website to emphasise the international nature of IFTech. Therefore, Qoben developped a world map that automatically zooms in on Europe to make it possible to see and select countries with small surfaces. A fun detail: check to what countries the following islands belong: Corsica, The Channel Islands, The Balearic Islands, The Canary Islands and the Azores. Simply move your mouse over them!

Joint project administration: The various IFTech companies show eachother's reference projects on their websites. Qoben developped a single administration that uses a single database for both websites. With it, one company can add a reference project to its website and the other company can choose to show it on its own as well, without copying anything.

IFTec GeoEnergía

IFTec GeoEnergía (Madrid, Spain) works in cooperation with their international sister organisations in The Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. The Spanish web site had to resemble the corporate web site to transmit the relation to the public. Parting from that design and the IFTech UK logo Qoben built a complete new quality site with a number of strong points:

Homogeneous colours: Qoben elected a limited set of colours to transmit consistency, professionalism and calmness. The elected colours are vivid and balanced.
Page mechanics: The new web site is designed to work with small and large screens, for all navigators and all user settings.
Quality logo: Qoben redid the logo from scratch and created a perfect version without artifacts for IFTec's web and for high-quality offset printing.
Dynamic content: The site features sections for news and articles that are easily maintained by IFTec themselves. All content is stored in a database.

BioComp España and BioComp Nederland

Connect offices in different countries

Qoben analysed, engineered and improved the network for BioComp Industries in Spain BioComp Industries is a manufacturer of dental implantations with offices in The Netherlands, Poland and Spain. It uses central computer servers in its office in The Netherlands for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and for storing documents. Its employees in Spain work remotely with the applications on the central server and therefore need a broadband connection with high bandwidth in both directions (up and down). An ADSL connection is assymetric, which means that the download speed is higher than the upload speed; in Spain this can be upto 10 times higher. For that reason it needs a special connection with better upload bandwidth.

Qoben investigated the available options and installed and configured the network equipment and the computers. Since there are two modem/routers, they had to be configured to take advantage of both Internet connections and send the traffic for the central server throught the most appropriate line. To make the connection between the two offices secure and to make sharing documents easier, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) was installed. Furthermore, Qoben gave advice to the IT team in The Netherlands to improve the performance of the installation.

Dazzleware

Centralise and unify data

Qoben develops and maintains various data processing projects for Dazzleware Dazzleware is a Dutch computer services company. For one of its projects it needed to collect data from many sources and store them in a central database. Qoben developed the application that reads the new data from each source, converts it to a unified format and stores it into the Microsoft SQL Server database. Since the sources are different, the application has a module for each one.

The program is very easy to install and to use. The client can configure it according to its needs by means of an XML file.

This project is a good example of Qoben's expertise in integrating proprietary and open technologies. In this case the application is implemented in Python and it connects to a MS SQL Server database using ODBC.

La Tienda de Domótica

La Tienda de Domótica is an online shop in Spain for domotics products, also called home automation. The online shop has two types of customers: consumers and electrical installers. The latter enjoy discounts that the shop owners want to manage per manufacturer, instead of per product.

The development of this web shop was taken over by Qoben when it became clear that the previous company was unable to implement the client's specific requirements and make the necessary changes to the database structure. The website is based on the osCommerce package.

Some characteristics:

Advanced price management for two user groups: The electrical installers enjoy discounts that the shop owners can set as a percentage per manufacturer. The reason for this is that the owners negociate prices per provider and hence per manufacturer. The shop has about 300 products of 10 manufacturers, so this functionality saves a lot of work and avoids mistakes.
Completely rewritten price module: the price depends on many things: tax rate, whether VAT applies, user group, etc. There were five copies of the program code that computes the price and all five were different. This is of course completely unacceptable. Therefore Qoben centralised this functionality and rewrote the code to correct errors and for easier maintenance.
Design: There were many errors in the layout of the pages, that are all corrected by Qoben. Apart from that many improvements were made, such as legibility and consistency of the graphics.
Ease of use: Qoben added a number of improvements that helps the shop visitor, such as the automatic completion of the address based on the postal code.

Orclix Nederland

Search Engine Optimisation

Orclix Nederland offers its clients a service to make their websites easier to be found with search engines, such as Bing, Google, Yahoo!, etc. Qoben has developed an advanced web portal for Orclix Nederland that allows its clients to manage their campaigns and accounts and that allows Orclix personnel to manage its clients.

Notable aspects of this web portal are:

Client accounts: The web portal has clear and well-organised pages that allow the client to manage their own campaigns, pay the service, view and download invoices, etc.
PayPal Adaptive Payments: The web portal makes use of the advanced PayPal Adaptive Payments. The integration is built by Qoben and is tested and certified by PayPal.
Automatic domains: Each compaign uses its own subdomain. Qoben developed special programme code that automatically creates (and deleted) subdomains as appropriate.

The design is provided by the client and Qoben adapted it to valid HTML5 code.

HIP Europe

Expert network

HIP Europe (The Netherlands and Germany) has a network of very experienced Research and Development experts. The client needs an advanced web site to manage all experts and provide integrated services to clients and experts.

Rick Wielens, co-owner of HIP Europe, wrote in October 2008:

When we launched HIP Europe back in 2006 we contracted all on-line activities to Qoben: web, email and central server. The web site is our presence on the Internet and a tool to do our daily work. It is used by many people every day: staff, experts and clients. Qoben provides efficient maintenance and updates are implemented quickly, which is crucial when doing business.

Since Qoben offers integrated services, it always provides effective solutions to all our requests, combining various technologies when necessary. As we were learning what the required specifications of the web site should be, we needed a partner who could not only cover technology but also help us to actively work together towards the best solutions. Qoben’s support was essential for us to interactively develop our ideas and translate them into an integral solution.

The main characteristics of HIP Europe's web:

Profiles: Qoben designed easy forms that each expert uses to manage its own profile information, such as contact information and skills.
Secure projects: Experts can work on various projects. Using the same login account, experts can access and update the project-related documents with other project members in a secure way.
Company administration: Qoben developed advanced web tools to administer the experts and projects. For instance, setting up an email address for an expert is as simple as filling out the address on his/her profile form.
Integrated accounts: Experts, project members and the company staff can access all functions from their own accounts, logging in only once.
Very secure: Qoben created the most-secure login session mechanics in the industry, using all known mechanisms to counter session hijacking.
Usability: All forms provide ample help on many fields with clear messages if something is not correctly filled out.

The design is created in close cooperation and following clear indications from the customer.

Hotel Rural Casa de la Marquesa

Hotel Rural Casa de la Marquesa (Chinchón, Spain) is a small luxurious hotel aimed at a modern and adventurous public. This client needs a web site that describes the rooms and the services accurately and allows for easy reservation requests.

Jankees Korstanje, co-owner, wrote in September 2008:

An attractive, well-organised, informative and functional web site is one of the most important ingredients for success of a small independent hotel. The design and functionality of a web site are of uttermost importance not only for client acquisition, but especially to streamline the business process. Its success can only be guaranteed by continuous maintenance and the possibility to quickly implement updates.

Over the course of the last two years, Qoben showed that it is capable of providing the services that make a small business succeed. Therefore, the solid design, the thorough maintenance and the short implementation cycles are for me the main reasons to recommend Qoben.

A couple of highlights:

Design: Qoben based the web design on the existing letter head with the flowers. All pages are balanced and breathe serenity; there are no moving images.
Multi-language: Since the hotel receives many international clients, the site is available in five languages: English, Spanish, French, German and Dutch.
Navigation: The site provides simple navigation. From the menu at the left-hand side, one can reach quickly all main pages. Qoben created an interactive floor plan that shows the location of all rooms, the patio and the breakfast room.

María Vogels — visual artist

María Vogels is a visual artist whose work stands out because of its connection with the Earth. She needs a web site where customers, galleries and others that are interested can view her work and learn about its background. In close cooperation with the artist, Qoben created a web site that expresses the natural characteristics of María's work, but includes the latest advances in web technology:

Great adaption for all screen sizes: from the very small screen sizes of 800×600 pixels upto the huge screens of 2560×2048 pixels, the content is always nicely centred on the screen, but allowing for simple scrolling when necessary. To avoid confusion, the web site uses only the window's scrollbar and no secondary scrollbars inside the window.
Extreme browser compatibility: tested in all modern browsers: Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, Chrome, and Safari. It uses modern capabilities of modern browsers, such as the tear offs that are fixed at the top and bottom, but has a top-class graceful fallback for older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6, that lack many of those features. This mechanism is developed entirely by Qoben.
Viewing art without distractions: Pages to view art photos are stripped of all secondary information to allow for undistracted viewing. Even the primary information retreats to the background when the user moves the mouse away.
Latest web technologies: Qoben used the most modern web technologies to give the user the smoothest experience that is currently possible. For example: it uses smooth transitions without the need for plugins and there are no delays when hovering over buttons or links.

Turismo Chinchón

Turismo Chinchón (Chinchón, Spain) is the web portal of the Asociación de Hostelería y la Industría Turística de Chinchón, the Association of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Industry. The portal is dedicated to provide complete tourist information about Chinchón and its surroundings to broad public.

At the moment the site contains information about interesting places, news and tourist activities from the association members: typical shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, etcetera. The association has plans to add more services shortly.

Qoben developed a complete solution in close cooperation with the association. Some interesting points:

Permanent control: All members can update their own activities any time they want. Each activity has its own page all elements can be changed, such as the title, the text, photos, contact information. This way all information can easily be kept up-to-date for the visitors.
Languages: The site is available in two languages —English and Spanish— and is designed to add more in the future.
Email: Every member has its own email address and can change it anytime he wants. He can choose between forwarding to another email account or storing the messages on the server.
Very secure: Qoben created the most-secure login session mechanics in the industry, using all known mechanisms to counter session hijacking.
Usability and training: It has been made very easy to manage all this information: news, activities, email. Furthermore, Qoben wrote an illustrative guide and held a training session for all members.