About the company

Focusplus Developments Ltd. was started by director Martin Milner in August 1995 and it's first contract was at Sandwell MBC, when it was asked to look at the way VME technical support was being done there and to produce recommendations on ways in which it could be made easier, automated and improved. The company worked closely with management and other staff at the council on a number of large projects including new filestore management procedures, performance monitoring and tuning, producing disaster recovery documentation and testing of it at Guardian and implementing a corporate print server utilising VME-X and TCP/IP.

Next the company was involved in migrating the majority of the Councils filestore to new T300 Smart Array disks, the implementation of a new Trimetra SY Server intended initially at least for Year 2000 testing, porting of Formfill from an aging DRS3000 to the Trimetra and development of Y2K matching procedures and 'Send-live' procedures to aid change control. The company then went on to implement an Intranet incorporating all the Technical Support documentation, the latest (html) version of OptICL and various other documentation. Apache was set up on the Trimetra Unixware node to provide the web server capability and Perl was added to process feedback forms. The contract with Sandwell MBC eventually ended in early 2000, mainly due to concerns over IR35.

In early 2000 the company moved into Web services and programming starting to add Java, JavaScript, DHTML and other skills to it's portfolio. In mid 2000, the company started developing Linux skills and setting up complete Linux systems for clients. By late 2000 the company was setting up e-commerce systems with Shop@ssistant, and developing web sites for UK Technical Resources Ltd. and Lottolines Ltd.

The director has since written several technical articles for 'Linux Magazine' (launched in September 2000) on performance monitoring and tuning, emergency boot disks and other topics.

Between December 2000 and July 2003, the director worked full-time at Actis Limited, a derbyshire company who specialised in developing educational resources for the national curriculum. They also produced web sites for various museums and similar organisations. Experience was gained in a large variety of web related technologies, especially those related to the education sector. A lot of experience was also gained in metatagging, mostly for Curriculum Online (COL), with exposure to standards like IMS, SCORM, e-GIF, etc. In July 2003, he and several other members of staff were made redundant making him available for freelance and contract work once again.

Since July 2003 he has done consultancy and development work for a number of clients across the country and beyond. (See home page.) Development has been done in HTML, XHTML, CSS, Perl, PHP, ASP, XML, WAP and Flash MX 2004. PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server and Access databases have all been used on various projects.

During 2004 and 2005, a lot of work was done integrating multimedia front-end applications written in Flash MX 2004 with server-side databases (MySQL) and scripts. (PHP and Perl.) Much use has been made of Flash's XML support during this work. A lot of projects were also developed using customised versions of the open-source Mambo CMS (now Joomla) and several with osCommerce.

The company specialises in finding the most cost-effective solutions for it's clients. To this end it will recommend using existing open-source applications where appropriate and customising them to fit the clients needs exactly. Where a suitable open-source application is not appropriate or even available, then it will produce bespoke applications for the client as necessary.