The Textilenetwork.co.uk site was launched in November 2000 by the UK government ecommerce Minister, Patricia Hewitt. The site was developed using Portalroom.com version one and is a community portal for the textile industry within the UK; a market which has suffered because of the combined effects of low cost Far East imports and the strength of sterling over the past few years. Inovica were initially contacted to provide ideas on how a web presence could promote the NE of England's textile industry, and we focussed our ideas on providing a community framework for the industry, so that collaboration, peer to peer mentoring and a central information source was available. This concept of a community portal site was attractive to the management of the textilenetwork.co.uk site as they could see an immediate benefit to their members and prospective members.

Both the textilenetwork.co.uk and directmail.co.uk sites were used as a platform to test out the speed of implementation for the new Portalroom.com system and the clients were impressed with the speed that the site was developed as well as the discount which they received for being test sites!

Portalroom provides a rapid deployment framework, making it easy to integrate leading edge functionality into a website. Once the graphical design of the site was complete, we were able to both integrate and test all of the sections within two months - a saving of over eight months on the standard development time for a similar site.

Since completing the textilenetwork.co.uk site, we have refined our system which has speeded up the roll out to within six weeks as well as providing a more comprehensive, flexible, feature-packed system. Portalroom is currently at version 2.0.

Inovica were contracted in December 2001 to provide a new interface for the Textilenetwork.co.uk site. This interface was integrated within four days and is currently running on a test site before a site re-launch in January.