Charlotte's Chamber of Commerce has an annual event honoring local companies for their achievements in Information Technology. The Blue Diamond Awards are divided into large (“Corporate Level“) and smaller (“Traditional“) businesses and several categories. The awards are held in February but this year were postponed to until last Tuesday night due to snow.
This year's Blue Diamond for “Best Use of Information Technology for Customer Service” went to Preferred Parking Service, Inc for their site, PreferredParking.com. The site was originally developed by Blue Sky Technologies, Inc a few years ago and was functional but still undergoing development when I first started doing contract and consulting work for Blue Sky in 2002. The site was (and is) ASP based and represented a huge step forward in the operations of PPS. They had taken their operations out of their office and into the office of every banker, accountant, programmer, waiter, secretary, or other worker in uptown Charlotte. Instead of having to find parking via driving around, calling or finding the PPS office, the customer can now go online, find a parking spot on the map and sign up online. This may seem obvious now, but doesn't everything seem obvious 3 years later?
The site has continued to evolve and now includes the ability to pay parking fines online and to buy parking for Panthers games. I was doing ASP.NET development before I started working on the Preferred site, so it was a double-whammy for me: assuming development of a project and having to work with “ASP Classic” doing things that are so much easier in ASP.NET. For instance, the editable grid used for Events parking would have been about a day less work for me in .NET. And finding bugs in the logic of someone else's VBScript is never fun. Each time a new feature or fix is needed, I find that I like and remember VBscript a little less and less, but that my ASP.NET work has led to improvements in how I treat ASP. I am not even going to start on how much I prefer ASP.NET to the ASP + VB6 .dll combination.
This is rambling now, so I'll stop...