Well House Consultants is a diverse company with a small team - operating a hotel and training centre and presenting courses there too - and a such we have a need for efficient communications between us.
"Thank goodness for email" is a cry often heard, with messages being passed back and forth between our two offices that way, and everyone checking their inbox each morning. But email can be over-used; there's a temptation to stop what you're doing to read an incoming email that may be no more that a note of something that needs attention in due course or should be added to a database. And emails to "all" can end up with us virtually spamming ourselves at times.
So as from 1st January, we're going to be using a new online
Incident Book. Available to all staff members, entries can be made from any of our systems through a browser, with a note of which member of staff is asked to take actions. Records can be sorted in various ways, updated, selected, and outstanding emails emailed through to each of us on a regular basis.
I really liked Chris's idea of a book like this when he joined us - but a physical book that was located close to some staff members but half a mile from the other's didn't work out! Now I can log equipment issues when I'm on site if I need to!
The main display (as seen by staff) of the incident book
The Incident book software is based on my four layer model template that I talked about a few days ago
(link) and has a facility for public records - so you can see a demonstration of the facilities via
the front page even if you're not a staff member. Help pages are available too -
here for the help on the main navigation and data entry page and
here for an overview and login details.
The public view of the incident book (written 2007-12-31, updated 2008-01-05)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
M300 - Well House Manor - Behind the scenes [203] Holes in on line information - (2005-02-05)
[677] Sympathetic development - (2006-04-09)
[742] A visit from the solicitor - (2006-06-03)
[769] King Edward VII - days of empire - (2006-06-20)
[813] Monday Morning at Well House Consultants Melksham - (2006-07-24)
[868] Smoking, or no - (2006-09-16)
[897] Too much for the National Trust - (2006-10-18)
[927] Hotel door furniture - (2006-11-15)
[931] Before and After - Well House Manor - (2006-11-18)
[939] Swipe cards for hotel rooms - Security issues - (2006-11-23)
[951] What happened at Geekmas - (2006-11-28)
[1000] One Thousand Posts and still going strong - (2006-12-18)
[1083] Behind the scenes - (2007-02-17)
[1105] A week is a long time in the life of a conference centre - (2007-03-10)
[1159] It can take more that one plus one to get two. - (2007-04-22)
[1179] Sizing sheets and other domestic issues - (2007-05-07)
[1189] Meet, greet and welcome - (2007-05-16)
[1285] In the army, or in civvie street? - (2007-07-31)
[1311] What do people look for on a hotel web site? - (2007-08-20)
[1319] Customer feedback - lifeblood of a business - (2007-08-25)
[1369] One business, four different angles! - (2007-09-28)
[1371] Hotel in Melksham at Christmas - (2007-09-29)
[1441] On cancellations, rebooking, and pricing schemes - (2007-11-22)
[1515] Keeping staff up to date on hotel room status - (2008-01-22)
[1520] Terms and Conditions - Hotel, England - plain English - (2008-01-26)
[1571] Await guests in the early hours - (2008-03-12)
[1637] Providing exceptional service - and carrying on doing so. - (2008-05-09)
[1854] Three Seasonal Pictures - (2008-10-25)
[1900] Table Topics - (2008-11-22)
[1904] Ruby, Perl, Linux, MySQL - some training notes - (2008-11-23)
[1948] Blame Culture - (2008-12-17)
[1957] Why are cooks bad tempered? - (2008-12-22)
[1973] Required Request - (2009-01-03)
[1991] Rules for a King - (2009-01-13)
[2125] We have lost a regular business guest - (2009-04-10)
[2247] A day in the life of a hotelier - (2009-06-18)
[2396] Easing off in our 50s? - (2009-09-06)
[2910] Robust - testing the system - (2010-08-09)
[2916] Testing the robustness of our hotel and training systems - holiday and sickness times - (2010-08-11)
[2960] The Well House team - September 2010 - (2010-09-19)
[2961] Initial handling of phone calls and walk in visitors - (2010-09-19)
[3093] How many toilet rolls - hotel inventory and useage - (2010-12-18)
[3743] Sunday - no longer a day of rest - (2012-05-28)
[3844] Rooms ready for guests - each time, every time, thanks to good system design - (2012-08-20)
[3961] Well House Staff Party - (2012-12-22)
[4302] Sunday is never quiet at Well House Manor - (2014-09-21)
[4365] The changing face of Christmas - (2014-12-26)
H115 - Designing PHP-Based Solutions: Best Practice [123] Short underground journeys and a PHP book - (2004-11-19)
[237] Crossfertilisation, PHP to Python - (2005-03-06)
[261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
[340] Code and code maintainance efficiency - (2005-06-08)
[394] A year on - should we offer certified PHP courses - (2005-07-28)
[426] Robust checking of data entered by users - (2005-08-27)
[563] Merging pictures using PHP and GD - (2006-01-13)
[572] Giving the researcher power over database analysis - (2006-01-22)
[839] Reporting on the 10 largest files or 10 top scores - (2006-08-20)
[896] PHP - good coding practise and sticky radio buttons - (2006-10-17)
[936] Global, Superglobal, Session variables - scope and persistance in PHP - (2006-11-21)
[945] Code quality counts - (2006-11-26)
[1047] Maintainable code - some positive advice - (2007-01-21)
[1052] Learning to write secure, maintainable PHP - (2007-01-25)
[1166] Back button - ensuring order are not submitted twice (PHP) - (2007-04-28)
[1181] Good Programming practise - where to initialise variables - (2007-05-09)
[1182] Painting a masterpiece in PHP - (2007-05-10)
[1194] Drawing hands on a clock face - PHP - (2007-05-19)
[1321] Resetting session based tests in PHP - (2007-08-26)
[1323] Easy handling of errors in PHP - (2007-08-27)
[1381] Using a MySQL database to control mod_rewrite via PHP - (2007-10-06)
[1389] Controlling and labelling Google maps via PHP - (2007-10-13)
[1390] Converting from postal address to latitude / longitude - (2007-10-13)
[1391] Ordnance Survey Grid Reference to Latitude / Longitude - (2007-10-14)
[1482] A story about benchmarking PHP - (2007-12-23)
[1487] Efficient PHP applications - framework and example - (2007-12-28)
[1533] Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input - (2008-02-06)
[1623] PHP Techniques - a workshop - (2008-04-26)
[1694] Defensive coding techniques in PHP? - (2008-07-02)
[1794] Refactoring - a PHP demo becomes a production page - (2008-09-12)
[2199] Improving the structure of your early PHP programs - (2009-05-25)
[2221] Adding a newsfeed for your users to a multipage PHP application - (2009-06-06)
[2430] Not just a PHP program - a good web application - (2009-09-29)
[2679] How to build a test harness into your PHP - (2010-03-16)
[3539] Separating program and artwork in PHP - easier maintainance, and better for the user - (2011-12-05)
[3813] Injection Attacks - PHP, SQL, HTML, Javascript - and how to neutralise them - (2012-07-22)
[3820] PHP sessions - a best practice teaching example - (2012-07-27)
[3926] Filtering PHP form inputs - three ways, but which should you use? - (2012-11-18)
[4069] Even early on, separate out your program from your HTML! - (2013-04-25)
[4118] We not only teach PHP and Python - we teach good PHP and Python Practice! - (2013-06-18)
[4326] Learning to program - comments, documentation and test code - (2014-11-22)
[4641] Using an MVC structure - even without a formal framework - (2016-02-07)
[4691] Real life PHP application using our course training MVC example - (2016-06-05)
Some other Articles
A time to update picturesComparison - cellpadding versus cellspacingWell House Consultants Training and Hotel - 2008 newsApple Mac Operating System OS X - code names and version numbersSoftware to record day to day events and keep an action listPictures of DecemberNew trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source coursesDoes anyone understand Lithuanian?Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members.