Unspace on MSDN

posted by hampton on October 25th, 2007

Our old pal Ryan McMinn gave Unspace a nice mention on the Access MSDN blog. I think this might be the first time that Rails has ever been mentioned on an Microsoft blog. The post is about a collaboration that Unspace did with M7 Databases to built a RoR/Access combo to solve an online application system problem for a Canadian music funding agency called FACTOR (which was covered on this blog before). I can say that we are very proud of the work we’ve done with FACTOR and think we’ve built one of the best online application systems in the world. We were able to take very confusing paper applications and make an online system that helps guide you through the process of building your request to the organization.

The only downside to the project is that non-profits don’t tend to be super-flexible with their budgets. Every year they have to come up with a set amount for each internal need. So, it can be a bit hard to try and squeeze in all of the awesome features we want to do within their annual budget while also doing some user support and maintenance on the side. Even with those constraints, I’m happy to say that the final product is something we can truly be proud of.

Here are some of the “fun stats” from that project: 1,407 applications and 223,727 unique pieces of information collected. And its only been running for 7 months. Their application rate has doubled since we launched.

CanRock 4 evar!