Interesting Projects

Client	Project Description
Worcester Art Museum	The wonderful Worcester Art Museum ran a major fundraising event. This was a formal dinner-and-dancing party held within the museum itself. While some money was raised by entry fees, the excitement of the night was the raffle of a dozen vacations. Destinations included Aruba, Greece, and London. The museum had two needs. One was to track sales of the raffle tickets (which had limited entries). The second was to promote the raffle via some multimedia system. I installed two computers for the event, and wrote two custom applications to run the show. The first was on the second floor, where raffle tickets were being sold. This ran a custom-written program to track sales for each raffle drawing. When a winner was chosen, the winner's name was entered here. The second system drove two large-screen monitors on the first floor, where most activity took place. Another custom application ran an animated "slide show" of all destinations. Superimposed over the animation was text, with the destination name and number of tickets remaining. This system was completely automated. The computers were networked together, and software was written to update the display system with live data from the sales system. When a winner was drawn, the winner's name appeared instantly on the large monitors for all to see.
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care	HPHC is the largest HMO in Massachusetts. Their Public Affairs department generates thousands of documents per year, everything from press releases to posters to member handbooks. A computerized system was needed to manage the progress of all projects. The system had to work on Macintosh and Windows PCs, be easy to use, and provide various custom reports. After evaluating several off-the-shelf project management systems, HPHC decided on a custom solution. I created a project management system based on the powerful 4th Dimension database, a cross-platform, multiuser, client-server system. New features are being added on a regular basis.
American Express	American Express salespeople were being given laptop computers to help track client information. These are the folks who convince retailers to accept the American Express card, and their clients are major merchants. They developed an in-house application which linked all laptops to their corporate computer system for daily updates on leads and sales. These salespeople were mostly new to computers, and needed high quality, consistant training. I was selected to travel to four regional sales meetings to provide training on this custom sales tool, along with Microsoft Office and CCMail, to over 200 salespeople. Over a period of six weeks, I delivered training in Orlando, Palm Springs, Austin, and Atlantic City.