Helping educational establishments succeed using HCL Domino apps

Surfacing More Functionality

Ambleglow is an education marketing agency, based in the UK. It helps schools and businesses, selling into education channels, market themselves in the best possible light. They are a full-service marketing agency, serving predominantly education clients with:

• Social media campaigns

• Media buying (buying space in newspapers, magazines, and online inventory)

• Creative and print

• Digital marketing

• Marketing consultation

The agency’s in-depth knowledge, understanding, and experience of working in this industry has helped them manage successful campaigns for commercial clients, as well as primary schools, sixth-form colleges and some of the top private schools in the country.

With many live projects active at any one time, it is vital to be able to load the initial details of a request, quickly facilitate changes and maintain visibility throughout the job’s lifespan — and do this for lots of clients simultaneously.

The Domino application Ambleglow was using had been built 20 years ago, but due to changes in working practices only about 20% of it was still being used.

Unlike other marketing agencies that work on projects for longer periods of time and bill by the hour, Ambleglow processes a high volume of media bookings in a very short span of time — sometimes as many as 50 per day in peak season.

Faced with the challenges to modernize the application and with interest in moving to the cloud, the company decided to issue a briefing and specification document for a new cloud-based off-the-shelf system to meet their needs. They thought that in order to modernize, it may mean moving away from Domino. ​​​​​​

Building upon the Proven Domino Platform

Helena Bryant, Finance & Administration Director at Ambleglow, said, “We looked at a number of off-the-shelf systems and many of them had the problem that sales and purchases have to be done separately in two different areas of the system, which would mean double the work for our team. With our current process flow the sales and purchases are all done in one place as you progress through a client job.” Helena was introduced to HCL Business Partner Intec Systems Limited and was impressed to see how HCL had invested in the future of the Domino platform.

Helena added, “Having spoken to Intec and seen examples of their work we decided it would be sensible to partner with a company that can take the parts we use (and like) of our existing system and rebuild a streamlined and modernized version that is fit for how we work now and for the future.”

Some of the requirements for a new cloud based application solution included:

• System that takes the best parts of the current system (but removes all the excess areas that aren’t needed) and streamlines it

• Cloud-based so everyone can access from home or office

• Clear, intuitive, and easy to use

• Different role-based access for each employee — e.g., end user versus admin

• Clear archive procedure for previous year’s jobs to ensure storage is managed efficiently, but so that old jobs can still be accessed if needed

• Ability to set up an additional database quickly and easily for a future business area

• Future-proofed where possible

Tim Malone, Director at Intec, also commented, “As part of the future planning process we agreed with Ambleglow that moving the application to the cloud would help to meet their operational needs, reduce costs, and provide a more secure and a future-proof way of accessing the system.”

Moving Forward

The working relationship between Ambleglow and Intec developed quickly and effectively with Intec providing a managed application hosting solution which is delivering the key benefits that Ambleglow set out to achieve.