The brief

Creativity comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s artistic or linguistic, yet increasingly in our sector it’s also technical – developing efficient, ingenious digital solutions for B2B clients.

MPC Data are a successful software development company with offices in the UK and US with growing partner and support requirements. MPC needed a simple, fast and robust digital support portal solution (within a 3 month time scale) that met the needs of their US partner  Texas Instruments (TI), where embedded board support packages (BSPs) could be downloaded and supported. There was also the wider consideration that our solution had to be scalable and able to integrate with their future online development.

My MPC

First of all, it was clear that we had to develop a solid foundation for users of the site which meant the design and development of a global user account system called 'My MPC'. It meant all downloads, registrations, support, correspondence and transactions would be consistent through all MPC sites. It meant new and existing users* could use one login throughout all of MPC's websites and full audit trails could be created for developing the partner's customer's user experiences.

As Garry Clarkson, Product Marketing Manager at MPC Data explains, there wasn’t such a solution, “MPC Data needed a new web gateway for our worldwide customers to download evaluation and paid-for versions of our embedded software products.  The way in which we provide support to our community board support packages (BSPs) meant that we needed something bespoke and not readily available off-the-shelf.”

In addition to this we designed and developed a custom support ticketing system that allows users to raise online support tickets and have them responded to by the support team in the form of threads. The admin functionality caters for multiple support logins and ticket management so support personnel can answer enquires quickly and effectively. The system also allows for a full and comprehensive audit of both users and administrators activity.

Phase two

Following that initial project, we have recently completed the second phase of the project which has seen their online support site develop into multi-channel support channel that services their growing partner base. With the new release comes an opportunity for MPC's technology partners to take ownership of their own channel to deliver software downloads (both free and paid for), technical data sheets and real-time support.

* Our first project for MPC Data was designing and building the Little Blue Linux website and current users of this solution would automatically have 'My MPC' accounts created.