Our real speciality, and our labour of love, at Offside Solutions is creating custom solutions to meet our customers' specific requirements. These can range from small but powerful macro solutions for Excel and Outlook which automate the processes our customers previously wasted time carrying out repeatedly, to fully-fledged database applications and database-driven web solutions.

TRY OUR DEVELOPMENT SERVICE FOR (ALMOST) NOTHING
We are so confident in our ability to provide a custom desktop application, content-managed or database-driven website, or Outlook/Excel automation solution that you will love, that we offer our development services on a £5/hour trial basis.

Following an initial consultation of your requirements we will assess the estimated time to complete the solution. As long as this is a maximum of 10 hours' development time, we will provide your solution at a 2-week trial cost of £5/hour. If you then decide to keep our product, the full price (charged at £30/hour) will then be payable. Note that all trial solutions will be coded such that they will not function beyond the trial period and will require live activation, which is provided on receipt of the full solution price.

HOW CAN WE BE SO CHEAP?
If you have a development requirement, in a lot of cases there will be other companies looking for something similar. Where we will feel there is a market, Offside creates a packaged solution and takes it to market. With this model we can keep our Custom Development costs extremely low.

MICROSOFT OFFICE AUTOMATION
Over the years Offside Solutions have developed a host of macro-driven solutions to automate tasks in Outlook, Excel and Word. Examples of some of the solutions we have provided include:

• Consolidation Reporting. Offside worked with a global footwear company to provide their Group Finance Department with a Consolidation Reporting Module. Each month our customer receives a set of budgets (Excel workbooks) from 26 locations internationally. Consolidating these into group budgets and management reports previously consumed 5 days of man-hours for our customer - now it takes a matter of hours.
• Automatic Email Filing. Several Offside customers use our Automatic Email Filing solution for Microsoft Outlook. Customised for each customer's need, emails sent and received can beautomatically filed in Outlook folders based on your needs - for example a reference number or customer code included within the email subject.

DESKTOP APPLICATIONS
Offside develops custom desktop applications using Visual Studio and Microsoft SQL Server (or SQL Server Express). If you can't find the software application that will do the job you need, let us create it for you. Our development time is charged at £30/hour.

Some of our desktop application creations include:

• Total Task Management. One of our customers is a technology services provider with an extensive range of products and services that they provide to their customers. Our task management solution manages their entire business process from end to end, and integrates seamlessly with their Billing and Accounts software packages, as well as Outlook, to ensure no data is duplicated within their business. Extensive automation within the system includes functions such as: notification when a user is allocated a task; automatic task creation and allocation based on events; automatic customer emails.
• Bureau Print services. Another of our customers provides bureau services for an insurance firm. Large amounts of data are received daily from the insurance firm. Our database solution validates the data to ensure there are not errors, processes data file distribution to a selection of printers, and provides extensive management reporting.

WEB SITES
The days of static HTML web sites are numbered. While we have the capability and experience to develop high-impact, search optimised static web sites, most of our web design work these days is centred around content-managed sites which empower our customers with the ability to manage site content themselves.

For more complex web sites which require a higher level of power and interactivity, Offside develops database-driven sites from the ground up using Visual Studio and MySQL.

NightmareSoccer is Offside's own product and web site at www.nightmaresoccer.com. While this is a hobby for us and has admittedly not been given the attention it deserves, the site is entirely driven by a desktop application integrating with a database. We are currently developing www.nightmaresoccer.com to bring it right up to date and utilise all the latest web/database integration technologies.