the hotgroup

I helped to start the hotgroup in April 2000.
I designed and implemented the first systems and architecture. most of which are still running, enabling 7 people in a small room to grow
into a large PLC bought for £50,000,000 by the Daily Mirror Group.
I worked as a shareholder and consultant from April 2000 to December 2005, the longest serving member of the company after the managing director.
At the last count (01/10/2007) the Billing / CRM system is still fully operational and in constant use.


My roles included:

Senior systems architect

Web Application Development Manager/Architect/Coder:  IIS/SQL Server/LAMP
-Customer facing requirements, analysis and spec designer from Marketing to Sales to Credit Control to IT.
-I have hired and managed:
--3 Perl Programmers/ Linux Sysadmins.
--1 graphic designer.
--1 ASP programmer
-Search Engine Optimisation Implementation Analyst/Programmer

Projects included Development of Rhumba: A complete bespoke Sales, CRM and billing solution which is in use as you read this page.
Integrated with the Customer Production systems (LAMP) and secondary accounting systems (Sage), Rhumba is the heart beat of the hotgroup.

Technical legal negotiator.
- I Worked closely with a team of solicitors from Denton Wilde Sapte to negotiate Service Level Agreements on outsourced web services.

Mergers and Acquistions data analyst and migration designer/coder.
-5 major financial integrations/migrations as a result of takeovers
--ledger migrations from Sage, Great Plains and Quickbooks to Sage and Rhumba Ledger Systems
--crm and sales tasking data migration from Goldmine and pivotal to rhumba

Support Manager
-I have hired and managed 3 Windows sysadmin/desktop support staff

Network infrastructure design and implementation architect and manager
-I designed and implemented the entire LAN/WAN/Telephony infrastructure at 5 different sites
-I coordinated and managed IT and logistics aspects of 4 physical relocations into green field sites as the business expanded.

NT Sysadmin, Mail Admin, SQL Server 7 DBA.
Desktop Support Technician

The role was right across the scope: From pulling up floor boards and terminating CAT5 to managing an outsourced UNIX
programming team to troubleshooting Transaction Deadlocks in SQL Server stored procedures to building an Integrated NT Domain infrastructure
to designing billing procedures.

IT Skills

Commercial IT Experience:  12 years 

PHP5 (4): 5 years commercial experience
T-SQL programming ,MS SQL Server DBA, distributed transaction programming 10 years
Flex3: 3 years experience.

Javascript: 9 years commercial experience
html: 10 years commercial experience
CSS: 7 years commercial experience

Perl: 5 years experience
ASP (classic) / VBScript 15 years commercial experience

Debian/Ubuntu Sysadmin
	MySQL5: 8 years Experience
	Apache2: 8 years Experience 
	Zimbra ZCS: 3 years Experience 
	Samba: 3 years Experience 
	BIND: 3 years Experience 


NT sysadmin, IIS,DNS,SMTP,DHCP,FTP,NETBIOS, File and Print, Services For Macintosh 15 years 

LAN/WAN design, implementation and maintenance 15 years 
Telephony design and implementation: 10 years

15 years Intel based hardware maintenance and diagnostics including SCSI,RAID,CMOS,IRQ diagnostics
5 Years Netware 3.12 and 3.2 Server Experience of Installation, Configuration, Maintenance and Administration

PHP Web Application Development

-object oriented code architecture
-stack trace type procedural architecture
-activex
-finance and ledger programming
-heterogeneous database access:SQL Server, MySQL, JET, Sage, ODBC


The Rhumba Project

-bespoke billing and CRM solution called rhumba used by 100 users all day every day
Written in Microsoft ASP/T-SQL
-multi business ledger support
-sales order generation and transmission
-invoice generation and transmission
-credit control tasking
-sales tasking and lead sourcing
-integrated windows authentication
-granular user and department  based application security
-direct debit system over xml http
-direct smtp mail system
-custom soap server with extendable api designed for use with an online purchase system
-ledger exports to sage accounts
-direct integration between billing and customer product delivery on customer facing sites
-integration with avaia call logging system
-realtime reporting