Silver-Owl

Keeping an informed eye
on your business

Our values

Be straightforward
Avoid buzzwords

Silver-Owl was originally designed as one product to meet the challenge of helping managers, team leaders or supervisors quickly and easily produce consistent management information across a range of projects in a way that was so easy that they would not have an excuse to avoid doing it.

Everything was designed to be done in a few simple steps and because team members can enter and track their own personal involvement in each project themselves, the burden on the manager is further reduced.

As the product was developed to add wider functionality we found that some users only required some functions. Consequently we split it into separate tools to reduce user's costs.

The "ease of use" message remained paramount; care was taken to learn from the practical experiences of using some of the existing tools on the market, and in particular those things that the less experienced users didn’t like. The over-riding feeling was that most tools are either too cumbersome, too complex, too clever or all three!

Silver-Owl tools are designed to be used by everyone, whether or not they are familiar with IT systems. They should be just as easy to use whether you are a manager, the MD, a salesman or a receptionist. All staff may need to enter timesheets or have actions to do and it is important that everything can be controlled within Silver-Owl.

Any steps that might make the software user-friendly were considered. One interesting bit of feedback was about colour, so we've let each user choose their own from a set of structured colour schemes. Another was that having a lot of options hidden away under drop-down lists was not helpful. Silver-Owl has an almost retro-feel with everything on screen with big, clearly labelled buttons.

Silver-Owl tools are made easy by concentrating on the key things that can give a clear benefit without too much effort. They are very deliberately not designed to do everything. They will not be all things to all people, indeed if you have complex, detailed requirements then we would suggest using one of the other tools on the market.

However if you want to get a fairly accurate picture quickly and simply, and do not want to have to invest a lot of time and money in training, Silver-Owl tools will help. Their aim is to provide most of the functionality most people really need in a simple and predictable way. They will not start trying to guess what you really meant.

Ease of access is also vital if data is to maintained properly. Silver-Owl tools can be operated over the internet or within your company local area network.

They will run in most companies without the need for new infrastructure as they can use either MS-SQL Server (including the free edition), and the free run-time version of MS-Access, limiting investment costs to Silver-Owl licences with no need for any additional software.