Employees Credit Unidev with Best Company Culture in St. Louis Post Dispatch Contest

During the month of February, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com invited employees of St. Louis area businesses to vote for their company to make the St. Louis Top Employer’s list. Readers were given the opportunity to vote their employer in one of the five categories: Best company culture, best commitment to diversity, best perks, best co-workers/team, and best benefits.

Out of 94,000 businesses in the St. Louis area, 72 companies were given the honor by its employees. Unidev was nominated for “Best Company Culture”, and was acknowledged in the Sunday February 28, issue of the St. Louis Post Dispatch on the front page of the ‘Jobs’ section. In addition, Unidev was in the top five vote getters in the contest.

Here is what some of the employees had to say about the company culture at Unidev:

“Unidev is truly a great place to work. The work environment promotes open communication, creativity and leadership among employees. Everyone is encouraged to contribute and new ideas are welcomed. Management and employees are treated the same, and everyone is part of the bigger picture.”

“The company culture at Unidev may be part of the reason a person joins the company, but it is a big part of the reason people stay with the company. The culture at Unidev is the perfect balance between a down-to-earth, family-oriented atmosphere and a strong, results-driven work environment. Due to Unidev’s commitment to corporate social responsibility and good, transparent governance, great customer service, a strong, long-term brand, and passionate employees and customers seems to naturally happen on its own. Especially in these tough times, it is amazing to be a part of a company who is constantly growing, adding new members from different expertise and really listens to and cares about the happiness and well-being of each individual employee and customer. I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.”

“Unidev is a great place to work! It is a very laid back atmosphere to work in yet everyone has a very strong work ethic and works together to complete project and make the customers happy.”

　Thanks to all of the employees at Unidev and The Net Impact for making Unified Development Inc. a great company to work for!

Unidevannounces its search for Microsoft Partners in North America, Asia and Europe to implement their global web content management (CMS) system, Auctori™. As a 16 year Certified Microsoft Partner, we are looking to leverage the Microsoft Partner Channel Builder to deepen our services and solutions to more complex business opportunities, to provide a broader range of client services and to create business relationships with other partners whose skills complement our own.

“The Microsoft Partner Channel Builder is one of the key sales enablement benefits of our Microsoft relationship, and is an excellent way to combine our expertise and resources. We are looking forward to connecting with industry partners to form new alliances and deliver the end-to-end solutions that address customers’ business needs,” said Greg Alexander, CEO, Unidev. “This tool, with its two-way model, is making Microsoft Partner communications much easier.”

Auctori, a .Net SaaS CMS Platform, was developed by Unidev for multi-national companies, and currently supports a number of European, North American and Asian sites. This system supports multi-lingual site management and site deployment. Auctori was built from the ground up in conjunction with a team of search engine optimization (SEO) specialist to implement best SEO practices. The next release of Auctori is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, and will feature European and Asian hosting in addition to its current North American hosting, with all sites and platforms managed from a single console.

For further information on Unidev or Auctori, contact Steve Thomas at 636-532-4424 or steve.thomas@unidev.com.

Read the full press release

Blog.unidev.com - This blog which contains company information as well as Java and C++ technical help

www.unidev.com - The main unidev web site. It describes the various services, has job posts and technical help

www.thenetimpact.com - The main site for The Net Impact. This describes our web design and web marketing offereings. This is our oldest site and is due to be replaced by a much improved version in the next 2 months.

www.auctori.com – The main site for the Auctori content management system. It describes the features and benefits of that product

www.auctorilaw.com – The Law firm specific version of Auctori that was built with specific functions and capabilites for law firms.

www.unidevtech.com – A technical blog about .NET web development.

blog.thenetimpact.com – The main company blog for The Net Impact. It covers an array of web design and web marketing topics as well as company announcements.

www.bestnetcms.com – This is our Auctori blog and covers various CMS related topics.

www.searchengineoptimizationstlouis.com – A blog covering search engine optimization and web marketing topics

Plus an array of Facebook pages, linkedin accounts, Youtube channels, flickr channels and Twitter accounts.

Greg Alexander

Auctori:law Provides Turn-Key Web Solution for the Legal Industry

Unidev® is proud to announce Auctori:law™, a Microsoft Certified Web Content Management System (WCMS), designed specifically for law firms, will launch on October 15, 2009. Unidev designed the WCMS in association with several law firms to give attorneys and legal professionals an easy to use, but powerful system to update and maintain their professionally designed website.
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Web-based Auctori:law gives attorneys the power to dynamically update their site from anywhere in the world, at anytime.  With Auctori:law, it is simple to build and edit website content without the help of a professional or having had previous experience or knowledge in HTML. By simply logging into a site through a secure, password-protected portal, site administrators can update content, change images, add keywords and make other instantaneous changes to their websites.

Auctori:law is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution providing all of the benefits of cloud computing. Unidev’s solution provides firms with the opportunity to strengthen their Internet presence and their overall brand reputation by giving lawyers a professionally designed site and the power to maintain their content in real time. In addition to standard content management features, Auctori:law is equipped with an attorney biographies module, news and articles module, and an images module. Auctori:law adheres to all Search Engine Optimization best practices in order to maximize website traffic and usability.

“While I have worked in database driven content management programs in the past, I continue to be impressed by the level of sophistication and ease of use of the WCMS as built by Unidev for our law firm. Through Unidev’s WCMS I am not only able to freely edit content throughout our site, I am now in charge of navigation items and graphics, previously outside the realm of my editing parameters,” said Kelly Annis, Client Relations Manager for The Stolar Partnership, LLP.
 

A Few Unique features of Auctori:Law  include:
• Attorney and professional biography builder with profile photos, dynamic V-card generation, customizable fields, and professional PDF printing functionality
• Flexible content pages and navigation structure for creating practice areas and industry sections
• News and articles module to create and archive publications, resources and events.
• Multi-lingual
• Print-ready PDF documents
• Secured document libraries

-To see two excellent examples of Auctori:law in action, please visit The Stolar Partnership, LLP at http://www.stolarlaw.com and Paul J. Passanante, PC & Associates at http://www.passanantelaw.com.

“We are very excited about the launch of Auctori:law,” said Greg Alexander, CEO of Unidev. “Our team is very experienced in developing customized legal websites.  We developed this WCMS designed specifically for the legal industry based upon this experience.  Auctori:law presented itself as an excellent opportunity for our clients to really take control of their websites with an application that truly answers the needs of a legal firm.  I am confident that Auctori:law is a complete solution for any law firm’s online needs.”

Put the Power into Your Hands Today …

Contact Auctori:Law  for further information and for a free Auctori:Law™ demonstration!  Call us at: 888.629.4672 or email us at: demo@Auctori.com.

Kiosk Software application development is relatively straightforward. Many kiosk applications now use an ordinary PC attached to various more specialized interface equipment such as touchscreens, card readers, special keyboards, and trackballs. Equipment and kiosks can be purchased for either indoor or outdoor usage, outdoor equipment is noticably more expensive.  Outdoor kiosks have special needs due to weather, water and sunlight.  

Usually either .NET or Java is used as an application language. The operating system is either Linux or Windows XP. Kiosk applications can be a specialized web site program or more traditional client application.  There are special security programs for controlling access and monitoring the kiosks (such as Kioware). These programs prevent access to the computer or any application other than those specifically permitted.

Touchscreen applications are much like any other except the interface elements typically have to be much larger. This can be especially challenging when working with spreadsheet like programs or interfaces. Most interface hardware available today has a well defined software API and can usually interact seamlessly with the programming.

Unidev recently completed two separate kiosk applications. One was an application which allowed visitors to search a large database of products and images to obtain detailed information about the products and pricing. By automatically providing this information on a round the clock basis, the vendor is able to interact with all potential customers even when salespeople are not available.

 The other application provides an automated method for filling out and validating data entry forms by customers. This application saves a considerable amount of labor as well as ensures the data is correctly filled out and validated while the customer is on site saving considerable rework.

Both of these applications communicate with a central server for obtaining updates of both code and data, sending report information to the server and monitoring. The server applications provide a central data collection point for management reports.

Self-service kiosks have proven themselves to be a cost effective tool for both labor savings and improving service levels to customers.

The results of this policy are manyfold. The primary benefit of this goes to our customers as it ensures that we are using the very best available methods and tools for developing their software and websites. Recently a large customer with SQL Server and DB2 databases needed several dynamic data driven web pages quickly. We were able to deploy an Ajax tool we had created as an experiment for one of our internal web sites that worked very well and we were able to get the site developed very quickly.

Today we are continuing to experiment in the Windows .Net, Java/J2EE and Linux PHP areas. We continue working with new Ajax tools as well as Ruby on Rails, Microsoft Silverlight and databases, BLOGS, social networking, Hibernate, XML data messaging, RSS feeds and RSS feed readers (used to display news on the unidev home page).

Good Stuff

Unidev has three major service lines, custom software development, consulting and staffing. Over the years the relative size of each area as varied as the market has evolved. In the early 1990’s staffing was the main component and that area grew consistently throughout the 90’s peaking with the dotcom era and Y2k. After those bubbles burst, the staffing area became much more challenging and difficult, at least for us.

With the advent and rapid growth of the Internet, the software development area, especially web development, became a much stronger growth area. The initial web sites for companies tended to be pretty simple affairs, primarily just brouchures. At the time, we didn’t have a lot of creative types so we didn’t get too much into this. As companies learned more of the capabilities of the Internet, they started developing their second generation sites which required much more programming and often real time interfaces with their internal systems.

 These new requirements fit much better into our background as application developers and this became a strong growth area for us.

More to come….