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CEI Architecture
Keystone Entertainment
M&R Environmental
Pharmaceutical Outcomes Programme
Rethink Advertising
Workspace
 

Our Clients: Workspace

It’s never too early to bring in Oak Bay Softrends. Entrepreneur Bill MacEwen came to us when his business was still just ideas and pieces of paper. He was planning to open a shared work environment in downtown Vancouver. It’s called WorkSpace.

“When you’re an entrepreneur, you have a vision for everything. You have a vision for how you want the floor to look, how you want the doorknobs to be. The process of working with designers and software developers is very much a process of taking the ideas in your mind and communicating that to someone and guiding them to create an original vision,” MacEwen said.

On the day his doors opened, Oak Bay’s solution was ready to log his first customer.

“We did have a pretty tight timeline; we wanted to be open 8-9 weeks after the time we had our first meeting. They did a good job working within our timeline,” said MacEwen.

Getting from the vision to the finished product: That’s what we do. We helped Workspace go from feature list to functional solution.

“The development of the actual software started with us listing the functions we actually need. We were looking for a system that would track members and how they’re using our space. Our business is really a new type of business, so off the shelf software was not going to be adequate for our needs,” said MacEwen.

“I tinkered with Filemaker myself a little bit. I tried to make my own solution. I took it to the point where I realized that Filemaker is a program that is capable of doing what I needed it to do, but I’m not the guy who’s capable of making that happen. Steven and his team at Oak Bay Softrends were clearly the ones who were going to be able to make that happen for us.

“Steven showed me how, in software, functionality isn’t just linear. There’s a complex mix of interactions, so on my end there was work to do considering how different functions were going to be related. Steven was very good at preparing me for that process and figuring out what I was going to need.

“I had the What, and he had the How.”