Kenneth Blane CV

WEB APPLICATION

ContactOn was depricated in October 2022.

I was the sole frontend developer for ContactOn Web from 2010 - 2022. During the first few years of developing the interface we strived to keep the interface looking as close to Gmail as possible to allow users to feel at ease in the product. Everytime Gmail released a change to their look, we would update the system as quickly as possible to resemble the new change.

After several discussions over the years I was eventually allowed to start customising the look to allow ContactOn to have it's own look and feel. This brought about the implementation of Material Design.

At the time of deprecation, ContactOn had 150+ registered businesses with 10000+ active user accounts.

ContactOn was a contact management system with several features and loads of functionality:

Contact management: (including syncing from your Google Contacts across the organisation) allowing all staff to always have the latest contact information.
Duplicate Merging for contact cleanups
Organisation management
Groups
Bulk communications: Both SMS & Email (includes scheduling mails and SMS's)
Deal Pipeline
Product management
Global Calendar: (including syncing with your Google Calendar). This feature also captured and created new contacts based on those present in any meetings
Click to Call: Calling clients directly from within ContactOn. Calls were recorded and saved in Google Drive.
Custom Forms: Capture user information for newsletters subscription, events diatery requirements etc
Link Manager
Template Management: For bulk emails, SMS, event invitations
Email Signature Management: management email signatures for your entire organisation

Company Address Book

ContactOn syncs with Gmail contacts to create a company wide database of contact details.

Duplicate Merging

Identify, clean and manage duplicate contacts as your database grows.

Signatures

Transform Gmail signatures into a dynamic marketing tool with consistent control over corporate identity.

Challenges and Learning

Challenges

For several years input/suggestion from my side was ignored.
Due to old legacy code from a backend side, there were several limitations on how the frontend could handle certain functionality. The biggest obstacle was frames.
Trying to find joy in the mundane.

Learnings

Implementing material design.
Communication skills with old school type backend developer.
Rather develop micro products instead of a massive bohemoth.
Don't over engineer a feature to the point where it becomes unsaleable.
Don't engineer a feature just for internal company use, a feature needs to work for all customers using the product.
Never stop learning: There are alot of new technologies out there which are incredible and I was blind and never looked beyond what I was told to do.

Tools Used

IDE used for development.

< HTML />

HTML was used as the main frontend language.

{ .CSS }

CSS was used to style the frontend.

Javascript was the main method of communicating with the backend and manipulating the data for frontend display.

When Google released material design we started implementing right away and bringing our interface back to life with a new refreshed look.

Chrome Extension (Deprecated with ContactOn Web)

View in Chrome Webstore

I developed a Chrome Extension which, when installed, would add ContactOn button into your Google Workspace interface, allowing you to sign-in to ContactOn without having to create bookmarks or remembering the URL.