Lancashire Welfare Rights Service is a service within Lancashire County Council that helps people who are unemployed, sick, disabled, pensioners, carers, on low wages, or finding it difficult to manage with claims for the whole range of social security and local council benefits and tax credits. It also represents people when they lose or fail to get benefits. Its aim is to ensure that people get their full entitlement to benefit.

The service has around 50 staff based in six offices around the county who all use OfficeTalk, which runs on the council's computer network.

The service had traditionally used paper diaries which had meant that opportunities for appointments were sometimes missed and there would be gaps in the diary and the necessary information wasn't always entered. Alex Walker, Lancashire Welfare Service's  ICT Development Officer said, "We originally used Lotus Organiser but they changed the application in such a way that it no longer did what we wanted it to do in terms of collaborative working.  Then OfficeTalk came along and did even better what Lotus Organiser had previously done."

Alex found OfficeTalk back in 1998 when it was a free trial on a CD on the front of a computer magazine and has used it ever since. Alex said, "I played with it on my 30 day free trial and I showed it to one or two people and on the back of that we used it, against the advice of the corporate IT department who didn't want us to use it as they said it was from a smaller unknown software company. They try to encourage us to use the corporate system, which is Outlook. So every time a new version of Outlook comes out I look to see if the collaborative element has been incorporated but so far it's not there. It doesn't do what we need to drive our business. We're not simply going to use an application because it's a corporate tool if it doesn't help us in our business delivery."

"When the general public ring up and ask for an appointment the secretary searches all the diaries to see when any of the Welfare Rights Officers have an available appointment slot and then enters it into any of the team members' diaries. We couldn't do that in Outlook, we'd have to have a team diary as well as individual calendars and the actual logistics of team members remembering to put the appointment in their own calendar, well, I know it would never happen!"

"The Council would make me use a corporate system over my dead body!" Alex joked, "I've hung onto OfficeTalk by the skin of my teeth just on the basis that it's a business tool that we rely on to such an extent that if we didn't have OfficeTalk we couldn't do our job as efficiently. If we were to use Outlook for example, which is the corporate tool, we would have major difficulties in delivering our service to the public in the way that we currently do. That's the crux of the difference between Outlook and OfficeTalk."

"People like using OfficeTalk," added Alex, "It's very user friendly. People asked me originally why they were going to have to use another application and why they couldn't just use Outlook.  If you asked those people now if you could take OfficeTalk off them there would be mutiny!"

"With OfficeTalk we offer a better, quicker, more efficient service to our public, particularly when offering them appointments and the like. It's the only product that delivers in the way that we need to deliver our business, particularly through searching multiple calendars, which you can't do easily in Outlook and it's certainly not as sweet as it is in OfficeTalk," said Alex.

"I've called the Softalk support team only in so far as reporting glitches with the Beta version. I've found them so far so good."

"It meets our needs well and we've actually adapted it to meet our specific business needs but it's the collaborative working, the easy access to each others calendars that really does help our business, especially the group selection so you can quickly see who's doing what. The planners and project modes are also very useful," Alex enthused.

"OfficeTalk saves us valuable time as we're able to offer maximum appointments to the public that provides them with better value for money.

"I do like the look of the new 4.5 version, it's a lot cleaner, more modern, Outlook style look and feel. There are also some fixes in there that we've been asking for with no success until Softalk took the product back and very quickly delivered the goods."

"I often recommend OfficeTalk to people in other departments within the council and to those I have dealings with in other organsiations because the collaborative group dynamic works so well and if they're looking for a user friendly way of sharing vital information with other users then OfficeTalk is the only product that can actually do that."

"To sum up Office Talk has enabled our business to be more efficient and effective in providing better service to the public especially with regard to the provision of appointments and home visits and the like."