OXFORD, UK — 7th January 2021 — Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC)—a supplier of tailored social care, healthcare, and education software solutions to local authorities—today announced the availability of ContrOCC in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store that provides applications and services for use on Microsoft Azure. OCC customers can now take advantage of the scalability, high availability, and security of Azure, with streamlined deployment and management.

Social care chatbots will change the way people find the care they need, explains John Boyle.

A recent survey of social care directories found OCC’s MarketPlace offers one of the best user experiences for those seeking information and advice about care. Socitm, the society for IT practitioners in the public sector, carried out the survey in December 2017. It reviewed 152 council sites on a range of user experience criteria, including: how easy it was for a user to find the site content and presentation of information, including the clarity of headings and the relevance, continuity[...]

At OCC we are always looking at ways to improve our social care products to meet our customers’ and users’ needs. As part of the design process, we run a series of sessions with stakeholders* and users**. Each type of session has different objectives which are described below. Stakeholders interviews The aim of stakeholder interviews is to understand the business and features requirements. We aim to get a complete perspective on the requirements, so we talk to representative stakeholders. These are one-to-one[...]

Performance may seem like an abstract concept until it involves the care of some of society’s most vulnerable people. ContrOCC is OCC’s finance management software. It is used by about 50 local councils, has more than 1,000,000 lines of code and took over 10 years to build. The software is used by local council social care finance teams to manage contracts and budgets, make payments to suppliers and collect contributions from service users. ContrOCC payment calculations are complex. As the[...]

If you’re more than 20 years old you will remember the annual delivery of your local telephone directory; the thud as it lands heavily in your hallway, often with a crumpled cover, a testament to the efforts of the delivery boy to fit the tightly published pages through your letter box. For me, this directory was my first exposure to search engine rankings, with its wonderfully named 001 Aardvark Taxis vying angrily with 001 Ace taxis for first place in[...]

This picture was generated based on the most common words in the user guide for the upcoming ContrOCC version 8 roadmap release. Client, Service, Care and Package are seen to be important as are Financial, Payment, and Charging. More prosaic common words are dictionary, date, default, report, see, and used. Our thanks to the entertaining wordle.net which made this fun and easy to do.

Imagine you’ve been asked to think up a really difficult technical challenge. Well how about delivering health and social care on line, using self-service portals, to frail and elderly citizens? For good measure, imagine that those people need your services to be as simple and familiar as Amazon or Google and that the people funding you are Local Authorities, facing budget cuts in the order of 60%. Oh and you have to ensure accessibility – from PCs, tablets, mobile phones,[...]

After the success of our first ContrOCC hackday, we’ve decided to hold one every four months, to give the team a day to work on things that they think would make ContrOCC a little nicer in some way, for users or developers. The day’s projects Alan upgraded as many of our Visual Studio solutions as possible to VS 2012.   2012 improvements include better support for working with JavaScript, out-of-the-box support for the NuGet package manager, the long-awaited “collapse all” feature[...]

Our 1st quarter of 2013 has been a resounding success. We’ve had 9 new sales of our products, thanks to our dedicated team of directors, implementation managers and help desk all pulling together. With every new sale comes a new implementation, which we undertake in partnership with our client; migrating data, installing software and training our new users. We’ve also recently won a major contract to deploy PSOCC, our provider system, to manage Day Centre services. For this contract, we’ve[...]

We recently held the first ContrOCC Developer’s Hackday, which was all about giving the team some time to work on things that would make the product a little nicer for them in some way. For example: A development task or bug that’s getting on their nerves but which isn’t getting scheduled Improving developer tools Experimental development which might or might not work A prototype solution or toy program to demonstrate an interesting idea A spec or mockup for something more[...]

OCC has been extremely busy during the conference season promoting our contract management and financial assessment management product, ContrOCC. Nick Warner and Damian Payne were at the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) Information Management Conference held at the Hotel Russell, Bloomsbury, in October. Later the same month, Damian Payne, Chris Smith and Keith Musson represented OCC at the National Association of Financial Assessment Officers (NAFAO) meeting at the Macdonald Burlington Hotel, Birmingham, where Damian demonstrated the new[...]

We were delighted to welcome representatives from some 25 Local Authorities to Oxford this May for two more successful and enjoyable User Groups for ContrOCC , our complete contract management and financial assessment solution for social services. The meetings, one for the Children’s system and one for the Adults’, took place just down the road from our offices at Trinity College. Trinity has some of the most beautiful gardens and buildings in Oxford, and it provided us with a stunning backdrop[...]

PSOCC V2.2  is now rolling out to OCC’s PSOCC users. The new look PSOCC improves the way support providers can securely share information and workloads. New reports let users more clearly see the support that’s needed and the outcomes achieved. The improved screen layouts provide the adaptability needed by new commissioners whilst retaining the integrated SP reporting still required by some LAs. PSOCC is one product in OCC’s range of software solutions designed for the Support Providers, enabling them to[...]