CRM Later - Viruses, Bacteria and Fungi Available Now
September 23, 2008
The New Culture Collections Web site from the Health Protection Agency has gone live on www.hpacultures.org.uk. The new e-commerce site, according to agency officials, "brings together four, previously separate, culture collections into one domain and has been developed by specialist public sector Web services company, System Associates."
System Associates has provided design, content management, digital asset management, data integration, search, hosting, training and 24-hour support for the site.
The project involved the integration of four separate databases, as well as the integration of a customer database for online ordering. "More than 40,000 cell lines, bacteria, viruses or fungi can now be accessed via the site," company officials say, and are -- typically -- purchased by hospitals, universities and laboratories to further medical research.
Registered users of the system can order cultures directly from the site and at present, the order is then passed to operations for dispatch. Phase II of the site will see the CRM, logistics and financial systems also integrated.
Users of the site are able to browse by several different search criteria, including A-Z browsing, via reference number, name, type of culture, or culture associated with a specific part of the body, or ailment. A search will retrieve the most relevant information about a culture, as well as useful papers and resources associated with that culture.
David Macken, managing director of System Associates, says "by far" the most sophisticated aspect of this project was to provide "a meaningful retrieval on a complex subject-matter. There are 11 different search criteria, each of which relates to the indexing of more than 40,000 items."
The Health Protection Agency Culture Collections is a not-for-profit business unit within the Health Protection Agency, UK.
"Our role is to preserve and distribute authenticated cell lines and microbial strains of known provenance for use in medical science and laboratory healthcare," the agency's officials say. "By so doing the HPA Culture Collections helps to assure the quality and validity of these activities and underpins the healthcare science infrastructure in a manner commensurate with our position within the Health Protection Agency."
INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2008 — the biggest and most comprehensive IP communications event of the year — concluded Thursday in Los Angeles, California. Thousands of attendees flocked to the event for three valuable days of exhibits, conferences and networking opportunities. Mark your calendar now for ITEXPO East 2009, February 2-4, 2009, in sunny Miami, Florida.
Read archived editions of Show Daily eNewsletters from ITEXPO West 2008 here. See you in February! David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for ContactCenterSolutions here.Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
