Professional services

The Unilink team designs, delivers and supports secure systems that provide multiple end-user benefits from process efficiencies as a result of digital workflows and automation, to enabling staff to spend more time with offenders leading to improved relations and reduced reconvictions.

We are experienced in delivering GDS compliant, Cloud ready applications. We deliver robust, modern applications on a micro-services architecture on proprietary or open-source platforms (via RESTful services providing interconnectivity out of the box).

Collaboration with key stakeholders and our use of ethnographically derived research findings supports Unilink’s consistent delivery of excellence in terms of the UX.

Given the nature of our operating environment, it is essential that security, the management of access to functionality, logging/audit and resilience are fundamental principles that underpin our designs. Our systems are ‘low code’ providing a wealth of local configurability while reducing the client dependency on us for change.

Unilink has been providing solutions to the justice sector for over 20 years. In that time, we have been part of a number of critical, strategic transformations. Our teams have been involved in the delivery of strategic advice to national and international government departments on offender management initiatives and in supporting implementation of these transformations within local delivery organisations.

Our approach begins with an inclusive review, identifying key stakeholders and affected user representatives, forming an effective forum within which to establish an ideal migration path and to understand the implications of process change. Unilink’s approach seeks to ensure buy-in and internal ownership of change. The principal focus within the justice sector is the management of risk, ensuring that staff, offenders and the general public are kept safe.

Reaping the benefits of introducing technology to replace out-dated systems and processes is only possible when supported by a robust change management programme that ensures all processes are successfully mapped to target operating models. Often these programmes involve a complex group of stakeholders. Our highly experienced team helps organisations through the entire business change process.

The Unilink team has extensive professional experience and knowledge in the justice sector, which we apply to the tasks involved in effective training.

We support many different approaches, ranging from one- to- one sessions, train the trainer, on-line presentations, on-line interactive sessions and designs for local training scenarios – the precise approach is tailored to each client’s requirements and circumstances. Training is underpinned by the delivery of training databases complete with scenarios, reset and ageing scripts and accessible, simple training documentation.

In addition to product- based training, Unilink is also able to provide awareness- raising sessions and to support business transformation through inclusive workshops and plenary sessions.

All Unilink’s services include comprehensive support and maintenance services delivering unrivalled support to our clients. Our engineers are available 24/7/365 to meet our client needs regardless of geographic location. Unilink uses remote monitoring services to detect and fix problems, often before the client notices any issues.

With more than 20 years of experience, Unilink’s approach to support and maintenance is finely tuned to our clients’ needs. Unilink’s support portal gives our clients access to a support log and knowledge database. Our staff are skilled at dealing with issues raised via telephone, email, or portal. Regular updates, deployed without disruption to the end user, deliver seamless improvements.

We are always listening to our users and seeking to optimise their experience. Our software provides facilities for end users to log suggested enhancements in situ, which get flagged to our technical staff and highlighted for discussion at user groups, where issues can be prioritised and added to the development path.

Unilink’s solutions are deployed in multiple public clouds offering security management, backup, recovery management and patch management as standard. Unilink’s experience with AWS, Azure and other cloud providers coupled with support from our experienced DevOps team ensures continuous-integration, continuous-delivery and ISO:27001 compliance for our clients.

Unilink provides ongoing DevOps, Automation and Live Support capability to a number of client applications hosted in AWS or in Azure. We achieve this by having dedicated staff to offer expertise in the development of infrastructure-as-code, implementation of Continuous Integration tooling, and automation of various application and infrastructure deployments.

This includes building and operating robust deployment pipelines through multiple environments – incorporating the assurance of functionality, performance, security and monitoring along the way. Unilink’s approach ensures that systems run smoothly while being developed at pace, with zero-downtime deployments (where possible) to enable the rapid delivery of value to end users.

Unilink has a successful track record of data migration and employs an accomplished team of data architects and technicians. Our team is skilled in the management of a range of different databases and resources, and the delivery of efficient, accurate data management scripts. We are skilled at migrating data from various sources, in varied formats to a common data structure, utilizing unique tools that have been proved in large and small scale data migration projects.

Our team has delivered a number of highly strategic, mission critical, national data transformations and migrations to government departments in the UK. Using a range of third-party products or building our own bespoke approach, solutions depend on the beginning and end states of the migration. Our biggest data migration achievement involved the migration of data from 37 separate database instances, from multiple database platforms and formats, to a single, national probation service case management system, National Delius.

Unilink fully endorses a modern approach to system design and delivery. RESTful APIs allow direct integration with external applications, moderated by secure access and the management of permissions. Unilink has created unique tools to facilitate fast, effective integration services between multi-platform environments. Our proven experience of building micro-services with secure API interfaces delivers reliable scalable solutions.

Integrations are second nature to Unilink, be it authentication, document management, seamless connectivity to third party functionality, collating information in user friendly ways from multiple sources in support of critical activities, or ETL to strategic reporting solutions.