Experience

Invenica are contracted to ensure the current service offerings within BCG meet the standards required to be used within the Windows 10 desktop environment. BCG have a large project for upgrading all their current equipment from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and that cannot be started until it is confirmed that all business critical applications will work in the Windows 10 desktop.

Recently undertook several projects to create new applications to be used company wide. I conducted the requirements gathering, design and led the implementation of these projects using TDD and Agile best practices.

Also designed the architecture of the end system using many Azure components.

Key responsibilities:

Perform an analysis on the existing service offerings and decide if any require uplifting to work in the Windows 10 environment, and particularly using the Edge browser. The applications are a mixture of desktop and web apps.

• Discovery of the applications and how they work

• Code level analysis to determine any obvious dependencies that are not supported under Windows 10

• Managed the functional testing of all critical paths within each application with the nearshore team.

• Planning and management of the Agile sprints for the remediation work to be implemented by the nearshore development team.

• Implemented a cross platform utility for easing Tableau activation through an encrypted license key using .NET Core.

• Analysis and technical appraisal of new projects within BCG.

• Implemented a replacement bespoke survey system hosted on Azure using Functions, App Services, Service Bus, CosmosDb (Mongo)

T-Systems gained the contract to provide a modern IT infrastructure to ThyssenKrupp. Part of that undertaking was to provide an SMTP relay between the corporate email addresses and the remote email accounts.

This project was completed 2 months ahead of schedule and saved £200,000 by doing so.

Key responsibilities:

Perform a GAP analysis to ensure that the existing software and any future software will meet the requirements of the customer. Then to design the custom components that will be required to bridge the identified gaps and develop them.

• GAP Analysis to determine what needs to be done to meet the requirements

• Design the custom components using best practices and patterns.

• Implement the low latency, high throughput custom components (C++ & C#).

Worked on the DocGenie project, a solution to automate the production of financial documentation for clients based on data within the company. It was a greenfield project to provide a wrapper around the Qorus 3rd party product, and make it simple for the users to create data rich presentations and documents based on templates created by technical template authors.

Key responsibilities:

Design the best way of achieving the automation of the tasks involved whilst maintaining performance and resilience, with an eye to using the same solution after the SharePoint farms have been upgraded from 2010 to 2013 and move to Office 365 in the future.

• Develop an event driven Windows Service to Orchestrate the end to end process.

  • The listeners within the service dealt with their own concern and raised subsequent events to move everything along the process.

  • Whole design is asynchronous by nature to allow multiple jobs to be running.

• Create an event store hosting service as a wrapper around the 3rd party EventStore product

  • The event driven nature allowed a separation of each part of the process into smaller testable chunks of functionality (listeners).

• Develop a data service to broker the interaction between the templates and the data sources within the business. This interacted with the on premise instance of NServicebus.

• Develop a solution to allow the conversion of the generated documents to other office formats including PDF.

  • Not something that is available using the OpenXML SDK, so implemented using Office Interop services

T-Systems gained the contract to provide BP with their Active Directory and Exchange solutions hosted on TSystems infrastructure. Part of the contract was to provide a UAT testing environment so that the live accounts could be migrated and obfuscated to test that the migration process will be successful.

My role was to create PowerShell scripts that would take a full extract of the live active directory and create and obfuscated version of the same accounts, groups, email accounts on a UAT test environment for the purposes of performance testing.

Key responsibilities:

Scripting of obfuscation and migration process; Documentation of the design of the process; Innovation and Research into the best methods of achieving the goal.

Outcome:

Worked closely with the technical lead from the client and turned a failing project into a successful one

Shell is one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world and has an employee base of more than one million users. T-Systems were given the contract to provide both on premise and Office 365 for all the users and to give access outside of the Shell domain.

Project – Application Hosting Platform

Overview:

This project was for the provision of a application hosting platform for Shell's custom SharePoint applications using the new app model. As applications within Shell are under export restrictions and have strict security guidelines, these had to be hosted on premise and not in the Azure cloud platform.

Technologies:

SharePoint 2013; SharePoint 2016; SQL Server 2012; IIS; Web Farm Framework, Web Deploy, O365 vNext DMT.

Project – External Access

Overview:

This project will enable users outside of the Shell domain (such as project partners) the ability to collaborate on the same SharePoint site collections as internal users without exposing the whole of the SharePoint estate to externals. This included a HttpModule, which was the only one ever permitted to be deployed to SharePoint online by Microsoft.

Technologies:

2 factor authentications provided by and managed by Covisint; UAG, HttpModule; Trusted authentication providers; Custom claim provider; WCF services.

Project – SharePoint 2013 uplift

Overview:

As part of the general client uplift from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, I was given the role of Lead Architect and had to devise the plan to uplift 2 satellite SharePoint Farms with a total of 4.5TB content database whilst also moving the farms to new datacentres.

Technologies:

SharePoint 2010; SharePoint 2013; SharePoint 2016; SQL Server 2008 R2; SQL Server 2012.

Project - eDiscovery

Overview:

When the SharePoint estate was still running using SharePoint 2010, there was a requirement to implement eDiscovery across the entire estate and include Exchange as an asset that could be subjected to legal hold.

Technologies:

SharePoint 2010, Exchange

The BBC News team required a 'journalism portal' to gather news information and for programme planning. The team produced a templated site definition so that the portal could be rolled out to create new site collections for the regional news teams.

My role along with providing general support for the SharePoint deployment was to develop some features for the sites such as:

• News aggregator - Incorporating RSS, Twitter, and News Wires feeds into a single aggregation web part.

• Audit trimming - Although strictly against Microsoft recommendations this process trimmed historical data from the audit log data base at pre-set intervals during off peak hours.

Technologies:

Web parts, Timer Jobs, MS C#.Net, PowerShell, JavaScript, XML, SQL 2008R2, SharePoint Server 2010 and JQuery

Atlas consortium was given the contract to provide a technology refresh to the Ministry of Defence in the UK. One part of this was the introduction of SharePoint on premise while adhering to security and a role based way of working. This part of my engagement involved research into using SharePoint 2010 in the future, including such features as blog sites.

Technologies:

SharePoint Server 2010, MS C#.Net, MS VB.Net, ASP.NET, Meridio, MOSS 2007.

Role was to design and implement an automated workflow for processing evidence brought from theatre so that it can be analysed to prevent further incidents using a combination of SharePoint, InfoPath and Workflow.

Technologies:

SharePoint Server 2010, MS C#.NET; SQL Server 2005.

Atlas consortium was given the contract to provide a technology refresh to the Ministry of Defence in the UK. One part of this was the introduction of SharePoint on premise while adhering to security and a role based way of working.

My role as Senior Developer in the team was to implement some of the more difficult features that were required by the MoD such as:

• RSS feed reader

• Custom role based access control (before claims existed)

• Site metrics

• Integration with a 3rd party external search engine.

Another part of my role was to provide support to the live systems and to also conduct performance testing at Dell labs in Ireland.

Technologies:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, MS C#.Net, MS VB.Net, ASP.NET, SharePoint 2003, MS Visual C++, SQL Server 2005.

Titan Systems (becoming L3 communications later) had the contract to provide a Case Management system for NCIS and later SOCA. I was one of two senior developers on the project which involved developign within a framework for Hummmingbird and also the integration with Arcview GIS.

I additionally developed an automated system that intercepted emails and extracted information for import into the Case Management system, but also to automatically forward to Interpol if necessary.

Technologies:

MS C#.NET, MS VB 6.0, MS VC++ 6.0, Hummingbird, Oracle 9i, ArcView GIS.

Project – NBC BISA

Overview:

The NBC BISA project was a collaboration between Fujitsu and SciSys to model the behaviour of chemicals and biological agents when effected by natural conditions. The project was classified and therefore some details are omitted.

Technologies:

MS C++ 6.0 & .NET 2003, MS VB 6.0 & .NET 2003, MS C#.NET, UML, MS Exchange 5.5 server, Systematic IRIS for

Outlook, ArcView 8.3 GIS.

Project – Accelerator

Overview:

Accelerator was a project to bring together many elements in order to provide a solution for the government's FOI site, hosted using SharePoint 2002.

Technologies:

MS VB.NET 2003, SharePoint Portal Server.

ICL (became Fujitsu) gained the contract to digitise the Post Office counter's way of working to help combat fraud and to make the entire operation financially efficient.

Test automation

I started as an automated tester creating acceptance tests for the counter platform using QA Run and some custom components written in C++.

Technologies:

QARun, MS VC++.

Developer | Senior Developer

After 12 months there was a call for developers to help with the development of the counter software due to mounting pressures of delivery and backlog of defects which ended up in me joining the development team.

I stayed in the development team becoming the lead developer during my time and had notable successes with a few parts of the overall product.

These were notably:

Banking framework

I designed and implemented a data driven framework for the Post Office to accept bank cards as payment for the products being sold. The desing was such that new banks could be onboarded using just data rather than by releasing new versions of code.

Automated Scales

I developed the software that managed the interaction between the counters and the electronic scales used for weighing parcels. These scales were shared between two counters so it was important to handle all scenarios. The process ended up by displaying the cost to the customer on the scale's display for sending their parcel.

Mails Labels

This component allowed the printing of a mailing label (similar to franking), instead of applying multiple stamps to the parcel being sent. This allowed the post office to carry less stock of stamps in the branch and saved approximately £700,000 per year.

Talexus Keybox

I implemented a system that allowed customers to recharge their gas tokens at the Post Office.

Technologies:

MS VB 5.0 & 6.0, MS VC++ 5.0 & 6.0, Riposte 32, EFTPoS, Unix Shell scripting (Dynix).

This was my first contract role.

EDS were tasked with providing technical support services for the British Army Quartermaster General. My primary reposnsibilites were to respond to user incidents and maintenance of the many unix servers hosted on site.

During my time I developed automated backup scripts and implemented a grandfather / father / son backup rotation with a monthly master backup.