QTECH completes its review of the IBM Websphere Partner Gateway Release 6.1

IBM Partners with QTECH to prepare their newest version of Websphere Partner Gateway for Launch

QTECH awarded Professional Services Contract with the Department of National Defense

QTECH awarded Professional Services Contract to assist Passport Canada with the National Routing System

QTECH wins contract with the Treasury Board of Canada

QTECH attends the HL7 Fall Conference in Victoria

QTECH attends the OHA Health Achieve Conference in Toronto

QTECH CEO speaks at the Ottawa Java Users Group

QTECH joins the IHE Canada ITI committee

QTECH joins the e-Health Collaboratory

QTECH extends its contract with DND

QTECH Attends JavaOne 2005

QTECH Appoints New Vice President

QTECH Extends Professional Services Agreement for the development of the National Routing System (NRS) Pilot project

QTECH CEO speaks at SOMOS Knowledge Exchange

QTECH Extends Consulting Services Contract with the Department of National Defense

QTECH Appoints Business Relationships Manager

QTECH secures Development Contract with the Canadian Passport Office, and British Columbia Vital Statistics

QTECH Awarded Professional Services Contract with the Department of National Defense

QTECH Awarded Contract with PWGSC for the Optimization of the NSCC & NMMS Applications

QTECH wins Professional Services Engagement with NewSys Solutions and Allied Domecq Spirits USA

QTECH Awarded Contract for the Development of the eOrder System for Canada Post

QTECH Secures Development Project for Worldcom eBilling System

QTECH Awarded GOL Supply Arrangement by Canadian Federal Government

QTECH Becomes Member of Sun Developer Connection

Richard Brousseau Appointed Partner

QTECH applies its RAD methodologies to Telesat's Satellite Facilities Scheduling Application

QTECH's Expertise Chosen to Facilitate the Development of Telegrocer

CANARIE Funds the Remote Community Services Telecentre Project

QTECH Presents at thed Federation of Canadian Municipalities 61st Annual Conference

QTECH Hybrid Systems becomes a supporting member of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities

QTECH's Interactive Services Division gets mention in The Financial Post

Kiosk Pilot Report Summary is Released by the Social Services Department, RMOC

QTECH's Interactive Services Division gets mention in in Silicon Valley North

QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc., the Ottawa Carleton Research Institute (OCRI) and The Social Services Department, RMOC announce partnership to develop multimedia kiosks

QTECH completes its review of the Websphere Partner Gateway Release 6.1
May 2007

QTECH is pleased to announce that it has completed its review of the ebXML capabilities of WPG6.1, and has found that the new capabilities build on the proven foundation of the Websphere ND application server and on existing messaging capabilities using standards-based transport protocols such as EDIINT AS1, AS2 and AS3, RosettaNet RNIF 1.1 and 2.0, cXML, and CIDX Chem eStandards 4.0).

Along with the myriad new features added to this new release, are the ebXML messaging protocols and support for CPA upload. The ebXML support conforms to the Drummond certification and provides the functionality to transact business over the Internet.

QTECH is pleased to add this product to its repertoire of messaging products that enable business transactions to be transacted securely over the internet. 

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IBM Partners with QTECH to prepare their newest version of Websphere Partner Gateway for Launch
February 2007

QTECH provides professional software development services for the IBM Websphere and Rational lines of products and has developed in depth expertise in the ebXML set of standards for business collaboration on the Internet using XML.  QTECH has been an IBM Business Technology Partner since 2001, and is fully trained on the Websphere Partner Gateway product.

As IBM was preparing to add ebXML messaging capabilities to the  its highly successful Websphere Partner Gateway product, IBM turned to QTECH to assist in preparing its latest release 6.1 product for launch.  QTECH's role in the launch was to thoroughly examine the new functionality added to the product for ebXML and to provide its expert opinion on the capabilities and usability of the product in a real world scenario.

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QTECH Awarded Professional Services Contract with the Department of National Defense
December 2006

The Department of National Defense has been a long time client of QTECH through a variety of engagements for development, integration and technical architecture requirements. The Company recently completed several projects with DND and is pleased to announce the engagement of the firm on new application development initiatives.

The new contract is for information modelling services to assist in the re-architecting and migration of a 15 year old mission critical application to modern application server and VLDB technology.  QTECH is providing its considerable expertise in business requirements analysis and information modelling to this critical business system.

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QTECH Awarded Professional Services Contract to assist Passport Canada with the National Routing System 
November 2006

Passport Canada has been a long time client of QTECH through a variety of engagements for integration, development, operation and management of the National Routing System (NRS). The Company is pleased to announce the engagement of the firm to provide project management and technical consulting professional services as the project moves from the proof of concept phase to an operational phase.

The new contract is for the services of a senior resource to liaise between the various technical teams in each of the participating federal departments and provincial ministries and to guide the implementation of the system in all provinces, territories and to various federal government departments.

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QTECH wins contract with the Treasury Board of Canada
January 2006

QTECH is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a new Professional Services contract with the Treasury Board of Canada. The project will involve the development of a custom software application to allow for the management and tracking of audit plans, submissions and reporting documents from the department's clients. The project includes business requirements analysis, system architecture, software construction, testing, deployment and training.

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QTECH attends the HL7 Fall Conference in Victoria
November 2005

QTECH participated in discussions pertaining to the use of Health Level Seven (HL7) in a number of EHR-related activities in the Canadian healthcare industry, activities of the HL7 Canada  Working Committees (Realm Localization, Communications and Financial Management Domain Committees), as well recent initiatives at HL7 Inc. and other HL7 International Affiliates.

HL7 Canada is the forum for Canadian health information stakeholders to decide how HL7 is adopted and adapted for use in Canada, and is responsible for distributing and regulating HL7 copyrighted material in Canada. HL7 Canada is a recognized international affiliate and a voting member of the HL7 international Committee. HL7 Canada addresses the current lack of standardization across the country for the electronic exchange of health information, while at the same time enabling Canadian input in the ongoing development of the international HL7 standard.

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QTECH attends the OHA Health Achieve Conference in Toronto
November 2005

The Ontario Health Achieve (OHA) Conference is Canada’s most important healthcare trade show event. QTECH participated in the activities of the show promoting its eHealthcare related products and services built around desktop application development, systems integration and HL7/ebXML messaging.

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QTECH CEO speaks at the Ottawa Java Users Group
November 2005

QTECH President and Chief Architect, Bill Pezoulas spoke to the Java Users Group in Ottawa today. The focus of the talk revolved around the use of application development frameworks for rich client desktop projects. The discussion included design considerations, project methodologies, and cost/time efficiencies that could be gained through the utilization of robust development frameworks such as QBeans (www.qbeans.com).

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QTECH joins the IHE Canada ITI committee
October 2005

QTECH became a contributing member of the Information Technology Infrastructure committee within IHE. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is a multi-year initiative that creates the framework for passing vital health information seamlessly-from application to application, system to system, and setting to setting — across the entire healthcare enterprise.

The domain specific committees will be responsible for developing and reviewing Integration Profiles – defining Canadian national extensions, represent the Canadian synergies on international committees, identifying new development priorities, communication and coordination of activities both within Canada and the international IHE community.

IHE Canada is an open, not for profit organization that promotes and facilitates the adoption of IT standards among Canada’s healthcare community. It is being created based on the same guiding principles and values used by other existing IHE initiatives around the world, in particular the original organization sponsored by HIMSS and RSNA in the United States. IHE Canada is made up of professionals interested improving the quality of patient care in Canada.

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QTECH joins the e-Health Collaboratory
October 2005

"The eHealth collaboratory is a simulator of the future, where vendors, clinicians, technology experts, policy makers and the public work together to find innovative ways to improve people's health through information and communication technologies (Dr. Alex Jadad, Director of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation)”.

With access to the state-of-the-art labs and sophisticated telecommunications and communications infrastructure, the collaboratory provides physical and virtual "environments" that recreate real-life settings. Complete with furnishings, lighting, appropriate noise and space limitations and staffed by trained actors and health-care professionals, the environments recreate clinical workflow, including interruptions and unforeseen events.

QTECH joined the collaboratory during its inaugural recruitment for technology innovators within the e-health domain. The Company intends to utilize the expertise of the collaboratory to perform trials and compliance testing for its e-Health system offerings. QTECH will also participate in the development of prototype solutions for the ‘Physicians Office of the Future’ – a collaboratory proof of concept initiative.

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QTECH extends its contract with DND
September 2005

The Department of National Defense has been a long time client of QTECH through a variety of engagements for development, integration and technical architecture requirements. The Company is pleased to announce the extension of their current engagements in support of ongoing application development initiatives.

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QTECH Attends JavaOne 2005
June 2005

President and CEO, Bill Pezoulas and newly appointed Vice President of Business Development, Jan-Peter De Souza, attended the JavaOne 2005 conference in San Francisco to promote QTECHs expertise in Rich Client Desktop development for Java Environments.

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QTECH Appoints New Vice President
June 2005

QTECH is pleased to announce the appointment of Jan-Peter De Souza to the role of Vice President, Business Development. Mr. De Souza brings more than 15 years of proven experience in business development, strategic thinking and project management in the IT professional services and digital content creation industries.

In this role, Mr. De Souza will be responsible for building development partnerships, fostering strategic relationships and growing the Professional Services Practice of the company. A specific focus will be to leverage QTECHs expertise in ebXML and n-tier Java based Rich Client Development.

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QTECH Extends Professional Services Agreement for the development of the National Routing System (NRS) Pilot project
March 2005

The National Routing System (NRS) Pilot Project is a Treasury Board funded project involving the following Federal Government Departments: Statistics Canada, Passport Canada, Canada Revenue Agency and Secure Channel.

The mandate of the NRS Pilot Project is to allow Federal Government Departments to electronically communicate (in a secure and reliable fashion) with two Provincial Vital Statistics Organizations (British Columbia and Alberta) through Secure Channel. Information to be exchanged between the Federal Departments and the Provincial Vital Statistics Organizations will be carried out in a uniform technical manner (to the extent possible). The two types of information exchanges are: 1) Birth / Death Notifications from the Provinces to Federal Departments and 2) Birth Certificate information query requests and query responses between Passport Canada and the Provinces.

The ultimate objective of NRS is to facilitate faster, cheaper and more efficient on-line communications between Federal and Provincial Government Organizations.

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QTECH CEO speaks at SOMOS Knowledge Exchange
March 2005

On Thursday, March 24, Bill Pezoulas, Chief Architect for QBeans, spoke at the March 24th, 2005 SOMOS Knowledge Exchange Luncheon. The topic of the presentation was the "Development of Rich Client Business Applications Using Java"

The presentation focused on the design considerations involved in creating Rich Client business applications in Java, and the benefits of using a well thought-out component framework to ease this development.

Mr. Pezoulas was asked to discuss the basics of a Rich Client Application Framework, what considerations would favor Rich Client Applications, and how QBeans could be used to accelerate and enhance the development process for these types of applications.

About Bill Pezoulas
Bill A.V. Pezoulas the President & CEO of QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc., a consulting firm, founded in 1989, that focuses on software development for Java/J2EE based systems.

Mr. Pezoulas graduated from the Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty at the University of Waterloo.

About SOMOS Consulting Group
SOMOS is a dynamic project management and consulting and training company in Silicon Valley North. SOMOS provides solutions that address the needs of technology based and business organizations.

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QTECH Appoints Business Relationships Manager
January 2005

QTECH is please to announce the appointment of Geneva Collier to the position of Business Relationships Manager. Ms. Collier brings more than 8 years of high technology related administrative and management experience to the team.

In her new role she will assume responsibility for the relationship management of QTECHs portfolio of clients, consultants and business partnerships.

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QTECH Extends Consulting Services Contract with the Department of National Defense
May 2004


The Department of National Defense extends contracts to engage QTECH expert resources to continue to provide support to ongoing projects and expands role of QTECH resources in a major new application development project. In addition to the ongoing roles and contributions, the QTECH consulting team:

· Guided users through Business and System Use Case development
· Reviewed business requirements and derived functional, non-functional and system requirements.
· Recommended changes to the architecture to accommodate future requirements
· Developed data structures and algorithms to overcome significant processing limitations
· Examined feasibility of various approaches, and recommended those that merited further investigation.

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QTECH secures Development Contract with the Canadian Passport Office, and British Columbia Vital Statistics
February 2003

The Passport Office requires a system to be built and integrated such that it could reliably and confidentially confirm and validate identity documents such as Birth Certificates and Citizenship documents with various provincial vital statistics organizations and other federal government departments. The system must use existing communications networks to connect to these third parties and guarantee delivery of their requests and the response. The solution will also to be based on open standards in order to facilitate integration with the disparate systems of the provincial ministries and assure their support for the project.

Acting in the role as prime contractor, QTECH will develop an Information Broker Development & Integration system to meet the requirements of the client specification. QTECH will undertake the coding, and testing of the Information Broker, integration with the British Columbia Vital Statistics webMethods platform, testing of the integration and management of the Pilot trials.

The technology environment will include ebXML, JAXRPC, JAXM, webMethods Integration Platform, Sybase Web Services Integrator, Sybase EAServer, JAVA, J2EE, servlets.

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QTECH Awarded Professional Services Contract with the Department of National Defense
October 2002

QTECH has been engaged to provide expert Technical Application Architecture and Senior Developement resources to assist the Department of National Defense to re-architect and redevelop critical J2EE applications infrastructure components, and to develop new mission critical applications. The QTECH Consulting Team will:

· Analyse current architecture, research best practices, common design patterns and current technology trends
· Examine security requirements, protocols and standards and identify appropriate solutions
· Model system components and their interactions using UML in Rational Rose
· Prototype key components to investigate important integration points (transport, persistence and security) and illustrate the desired function of the recommended solution
· Work with the project team to develop and document the final solution

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QTECH Awarded Contract with PWGSC for the Optimization of the NSCC & NMMS Applications
April 2002

QTECH Hybrid Systems Incorporated has been awarded a contract with the Government of Canada Public Works, to provide technology expertise for the optimization and ongoing maintenance of two existing software systems - the NSCC & NMMS Applications.

The technology environment will include Visual Basic, Access, MS SQL Server, Windows 2000 Server, and MS Iis.

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QTECH wins Professional Services Engagement with NewSys Solutions and Allied Domecq Spirits USA
June 2001

Allied Domecq Spirits USA (ADSUSA) operates in a federally mandated three-tier distribution environment. Manufacturers of Distilled Spirits are not allowed to sell directly to retailers or retail consumers. ADSUSA relationships are with independent distributors who in turn service retail accounts.

QTECH has been engaged as a subcontractor through NewSys Solutions to develop and application that delivers a new user interface for supplying Price Filing information to the ADUSA existing data environment and integrates with the company's ERP package. Prior to the implementation, QTECH will also research application environment and technologies available, recommend and supervise infrastructure development, and decisions, flush out relevant factors to make technology decisions and set up the technical infrastructure.

The technology environment will be based on the use of Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP) , IPlanet Web Server on Solaris machine, IBM AS/400, KAWA, Macromedia Dreamweaver (UltraDev), JDBC, APACHE and NT.

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QTECH Awarded Contract for the Development of the eOrder System for Canada Post
August 2000

The eOrder System is the second generation of Canada Post's Business to Business application, created to encompass the functionality of their two previous offerings and to integrate with the newly acquired SAP installation. This project is part of a larger initiative, the Business Transformation Project, whose intent is to migrate legacy systems over to SAP and expand Canada Post's online service offerings.

Acting as a subcontractor through DMR, QTECH role will be to architect the solution and provide technical guidance through the development phases. Specifically, QTECH will analyse and document the user and technical requirements, prototype any difficult integration points and design the functional and technical architecture for the system. After the completion of these requirements, QTECH will continue in the role of a technical advisor to support the development team regarding architectural and OOD decisions.

The technology environment will include SAP R/3, SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator (IPC), SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Bea WebLogic, IBM Visual Age for Java, Java 2, JDBC, Orbix, MS SQL Server 7.0, Oracle Lite, Cloudscape, Rational Rose, TogetherSoft, ERWin, webMethods, EAI.

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QTECH Secures Development Project for Worldcom eBilling System
December 2001

Engaged as a subcontractor through EDS, QTECH has been selected to create an online billing application for Worldcom's retail telecommunications customers. This will involve the design, coding and testing of batch processing components for the web application. The project is an extension of a previous engagement in which QTECH implemented the design, code and testing requirements for the eBilling web application, GUI and server application.

The technology environment will be based on JAVA, servlets, JSP, C++, HTML, Windows '98 and UNIX.

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QTECH Awarded GOL Supply Arrangement by Canadian Federal Government

Ottawa, ON June 13, 2001 -- QTECH Hybrid Systems qualifies for and is awarded a Supply Arrangement for Informatics Professional Services to assist the Canadian Federal Government with its Government Online initiative.

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QTECH Becomes Member of Sun Developer Connection

Ottawa, ON - May 22, 2001 -- QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc. has enrolled in the Canadian Sun Developer Connection(SM) (SDC) Program and the Commercial Sun Canada Developer Essentials Hardware(SM).

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Richard Brousseau Appointed Partner

OTTAWA - November 15, 2000 -- QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc. an eBusiness tools, components and services company announced today that Richard Brousseau has been appointed partner. Mr. Brousseau brings with him over 17 years of IT experience.

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QTECH Develops Telesat's Satellite Facilities Scheduling Application

Ottawa, ON - June, 2000 -- "The Satellite Facilities Scheduling Application developed by QTECH is an elegant and highly functional solution to our scheduling requirements for remote telecentres."Abdul Lakhani - Senior Telecommunications Specialist, Telesat Canada.

Telesat is a world leader in satellite communications and systems management. Created in 1969, the Company made history with the launch of Anik A1 in 1972-the world's first commercial domestic communications satellite placed in geostationary orbit.

Based in Ottawa, Canada, the company operates a fleet of satellites for the provision of broadcast distribution and telecommunications services, and is a highly respected consultant and partner in satellite ventures around the world. Telesat has offices throughout Canada, in the United States and in Brazil.

Telesat leads a consortium funded by the European Space Agency and Canadian provincial and federal government agencies that created and operates the The Remote Community Services Telecentre (RCST).

The RCST is a shared-use facility (telecentre) that was designed to provide telelearning, telehealth, communications, and information access services to remote communities. The RCST concept adapts to the telecommunications environment of a community or region, and is capable of functioning in either a traditional network (telephone) or wireless (satellite) environment. The RCST represents a flexible facility and service model in which a variety of technologies, applications, and services are integrated to meet the specific needs of the community. It is particularly effective in regions that lack high bandwidth terrestrial telecommunications infrastructure, such as in the Canadian North and developing countries. The Satellite Facilities Scheduling Application is a master scheduling system that coordinates the use of facilities located in a collection of remote telecentres as well as a variety of diverse activities that may involve the use of facilities in one or more sites. The system is an invaluable component to the design of multi-purpose telecentres, and would facilitate the efficient use of the shared facilities by the various distributed users of the telecentre.

The system tracks data related to activities, schedules, facilities, sites, and persons, and permits controlled access to this data by four distinct user groups:

1. Local Administrators (non-technical administrators focused on the business)
2. Service Providers (non-technical such as doctors, educators, etc.)
3. Public (registrants for courses, seminars, clinics, etc.)
4. System Administrators (technical personnel working for the network provider)-these users would be the primary users of the tools.

Further it integrates with satellite bandwidth on demand systems in order to coordinate the setup and teardown of the required satellite facilities with the scheduled activities.

QTECH, the consulting company using QBeans CS, lead all phases of the project: concept development, research into basic core technologies, development of architectural prototypes, requirements definition, architectural design, and several iterations of: detailed design, development, and testing.

The Satellite Facilities Scheduling Application consists of a distributed facilities and activities database, remote reservation and synchronization agents, a central reservation manager, an administrative application, and a third party satellite bandwidth on demand network control system. The components of the system are designed to use the low bandwidth satellite control channel to communicate with each other to transact scheduling operations.

The administrative component is a desktop Java application that assists the Telecentre coordinators to manage their local facilities, allowing them to define the facilities that are available, and their hours of operation (or availability to the public for booking purposes), and process reservations.

All components of the system were developed using Java and related technologies. The administrative application was developed using QBeans CS.

The development tasks for the administrative application were divided into database modeling, window layout, and the development of business logic, integration and testing. Several iterations of these tasks were performed for each subsystem of the application. QBeans CS provided the overall framework for the application, as well as the majority of the components required for the application. Additional Swing (JFC) components were used as and when needed, and worked within the QBeans framework.

QBeans CS allowed the development team to prototype the various functions of the application and to quickly drill down into the requirements for the system. Its use shifted the focus from the technical aspects of development to the business requirements and user interface design. The challenging portions of this application were:

1. Complex business rules for the processing of reservations: A variable number of steps were required to create a reservation request and configure all the parameters of the facilities required in the request. This functionality was encapsulated into a QBeans Wizard Controller that performed all the presentation and sequencing of the various steps. The developers had only to work out the business logic and some panel layouts.
2. Interactions between client, agent and server components for submitting and processing reservation requests: Remote Method Invocation calls to the Agent were encapsulated in a QBeans Function object and the majority of development effort was devoted to the creation of the agent and server logic.
3. Interactions between server components for maintaining synchronization between central database and the remote site databases: Aside from administrative control of these processes, there were no GUI components involved. The development team focused much of their efforts on this portion of the application

QBeans minimized the effort expended on the GUI components and allowed the experienced developers to spend their time on the server processes and the interprocess communication. In fact, the majority of the GUI development was done by ONE resource, while developing the requirements of the user interface over a period of 6 weeks. A more typical development environment (e.g. Microsoft Visual Basic) would have required an estimated 8-10 weeks of work, and a JAVA development (without QBeans) would have taken an estimated 12-14 weeks with highly skilled resources

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QTECH's Expertise Chosen to Facilitate the Development of Telegrocer

Ottawa, ON - March, 1999 -- "The TeleGrocer applications created with QBeans CS established the very foundation of our online business. Garfield Coore - President and CEO, Net Transactional Services.

TeleGrocer required a quick prototype to validate the customer-facing user interface for the account creation, ordering and delivery scheduling business processes as well as an administrative system to accept orders and manage the fulfillment, delivery and payment processes.

QBeans was used to create a downloadable client for the customer facing functions. A pilot trial was conducted using this software, and based on the feedback additional features were added and piloted to a test group of users. At the successful conclusion of the pilot trial, the customer facing application was redeveloped using a browser based technology.

All components of the customer facing QBeans application were incorporated into the administrative application, along with new QBeans components for the administrative functions. This application continues to be an essential component of the TeleGrocer business model as it continues to evolve into a franchise operation.

The team developing this application was diverse and included some junior resources that had limited Java experience. These developers were quickly able to express the vast majority of the business requirements for the TeleGrocer application, leaving the more experienced team members to design code and test the complicated business logic that was required in a few isolated places in the application.

The development process used in this project produced a series of evolutionary prototypes, which were initially used to develop a highly usable customer-facing user interface and a set of reusable business objects. These business objects were later reused with little or no modification to create an administrative application.

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CANARIE Funds the Remote Community Services Telecentre Project

Vancouver - June 26, 1998 - CANARIE Announced funding of the Remote Community Services Telecentre

The Remote Community Services Telecentre (RCST) is an innovative approach of delivering networked-based services (tele-education, tele-health, information access, and the Internet) to rural and remote communities.   The RCST concept is based on a flexible shared-use facilities model that can be customized to fit to the needs of a community or region from technology, service and social perspective.   The RCST product integrates this flexible technology model with a range of support services covering design, implementation and support for a centre or network of centres.

The RCST will work in a conventional 'wired' environment or with satellite-based network facilities.   With on-demand satellite based broadband communications facility, the RCST can provide a cost-effective and sustainable approach to network-based service delivery, providing levels of service that might not otherwise be possible.   This wireless approach will be directly applicable to many communities within Northern Canada as well as to many developing nations that are looking to information technology as a catalyst for economic and social advancement.

The RCST project team includes Futureworks Inc., QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc., Collaborative Network Technologies Inc., the Telemedicine and Educational Resource Agency of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Telesat, and the Communications Research Centre.

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QTECH Presents at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities 61st Annual Conference

Regina, Saskatchewan – June 5, 1998 - QTECH Interactive Systems Division held a clinic at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities 61st Annual Conference, entitled "Burdened by Downloading,…"

The clinic provided an opportunity to showcase our partnership with the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton and the Social Services Support Link (SSSL). Bob Donnelly, illustrated how this product can lessen financial and human resource constraints imposed by the downloading of responsibilities from the Federal government to the Provincial and Municipal social services departments. The clinic also highlighted a new partnering mechanism that allows multiple levels of government to partner to offer 24hrs access to government information and services via touchscreen kiosks.

Participants at the clinic felt that the SSSL product would be beneficial to their social services department and expressed interest in obtaining more information. Several of the participants followed up by visiting the booth after the clinic and held discussions with Bill Pezoulas, President and Bob Donnelly, VP Sales and Marketing.

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QTECH Hybrid Systems becomes a supporting member of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities

OTTAWA - January 1998 - QTECH Hybrid Systems joins the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to better serve its Provincial and Municipal government sector clients. For more information on FCM please visit http://www.fcm.ca

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QTECH's Interactive Services Division gets mention in The Financial Post

November 1997, Published in The Financial Post "Pennies from heaven", By Susan Yellin

The following is an excerpt of the article

Bill Pezoulas wants a match made in heaven but if it’s a little closer to home, that’s Okay too.His goal as President of Ottawa-based QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc. is to match the attention of enough "angel" investors to raise $1.5 million so his computer consulting firm can spin off a promising interactive software business.

While Pezoulas has already nailed down financial commitment from one of these wealthy risk investors, he would like to have another three or four angels in the wings to round out the deal.

But the task of finding these elusive and publicity-shy earthly bodies can be frustrating and difficult at the best of times.

"Perseverance is the No.1 thing", say Pezoulas. "It’s really a question of networking and contacts and working your networks.".

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Kiosk Pilot Report Summary is Released by the Social Services Department, RMOC

OTTAWA - January 1997- Kiosk Pilot ReportSummary,  Social Services Department, RMOC

The purpose of the kiosk pilot project was to evaluate the effectiveness of interactive multimedia kiosk technologies as a service delivery mechanism, and allow Social Services Department staff to focus more on the individual needs of their clients.

Conclusions from the report indicated that the pilot project was successful in accomplishing its objectives - "Given its usage, the kiosk project clearly demonstrated that there is a demand for SST [self service technologies] and Community Information and that the [Social Services Support Link] Kiosk has the capacity ... to fill this gap". 

Surveyed respondents had a positive impression with the overall design of the kiosk and majority of them felt that the kiosk was well designed, user friendly with clear instructions to enable them to access its services comfortably. Some of the respondents pointed out that the kiosk's interactive multi-media design made it easy for them with marginal computer experience to access its services.

Majority of the front-line staff in the Community Centres (80%) expressed a need for kiosk in their service sites.  They indicated that a Kiosk could be beneficial to their clients, provided that the information is relevant, accurate and updated regularly.

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QTECH's Interactive Services Division gets mention in in Silicon Valley North

October 1996 - Published in Silicon Valley North, "Some people go krazy over kiosks" by Donald Dawson

The following is an excerpt of the article:
What started, as a handy way to get some cash after banking hours has become a way of life. It is estimated that by the end of 1997 there will be over 550,000 kiosks in operation in North America.

This is just the latest in a rush to provide everything from welfare applications to movie tickets by kiosks. It seems that everyone who's in the service industry is installing them.

Bill Pezoulas is the president of Silicon Valley North's QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc., a company with kiosks operating in the region. He says the reason for the growing popularity of kiosks is simple: connectivity ‘In a lot of senses a connected kiosk can do a more effective job at gathering and disseminating information than a human can, because a human is not connected', he explains.

Craig McKie, a professor of Sociology at Carleton University and author of a book on the Internet, agrees. He says that the current kiosk craze is just another part of the centuries-old move to replace labor with machines. 'The objective is to reduce costs,' says McKie.

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QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc., the Ottawa Carleton Research Institute (OCRI) and The Social Services Department, RMOC announce partnership to develop multimedia kiosks

OTTAWA - May 1995 - QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc., the Ottawa Carleton Research Institute, and the Social Services Department of the RMOC announce a partnership.

QTECH Hybrid Systems Inc., Ottawa Carleton Research Institute and Social Services Department of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton announce a partnership to create and deploy a series of leading edge interactive multimedia information kiosks for the purpose of evaluating the potential of such technology to improve the efficiency of the delivery of social assistance for those in need.

This important pilot project is to investigate the effectiveness of using interactive multimedia devices and software to provide, in a culture- and language-neutral manner, information and services to a computer non-literate population using internet technologies.

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