LAMDA Examinations (London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art) LAMDA administer over 50,000 examinations each year in 150 subjects related to the dramatic arts, from their offices in Earls Court (London, UK). Around 100 examiners are contracted to travel to over 1,200 examination centres worldwide (involving multi-currency handling).

When I was approached via my web site, LAMDA were using a DOS based system developed in DataEase. Scheduling and processing the results for this number of exams requires several users to be updating non-stop at peak times, so performance and robustness are key, and the old system was simply not keeping up. The internal IT resource is one part-time support technician, so LAMDA also needed a supplier able to take the project from requirements analysis through to live implementation.

The developer needed to work closely with the users to ensure every feature exactly matched their working practices.

As a registered charity, the budget was limited and predetermined. As an educational establishment, the implementation timeframe specified was within the summer holiday season, requiring strict deadlines.

Together we selected Access 97 for the client side front-end because of the Rapid Application Design (RAD) features and ease of maintenance. We chose SQL Server 6.5 for the server database engine back-end to ensure scalability, excellent high transaction volume performance, and good security.

The system was delivered and implemented within budget, and on time.

The Access 97 run-time system is installed to avoid having to install Access 97 on all workstations, and to make the interface user-friendlier. Improvement in performance over the old DOS based system has allowed the department to be more pro-active, having more time for data analysis, faster billing and efficient marketing.