welcome to the Cobalt Skyway

Hi, the CAI team here at Cobalt Sky consists of 4 senior programmers, Andy Salmons (Deputy CAI manager), Fiona Walmsley, Michelle Glass and Alastair Sweeney, all of us report to our manager Mark Morton (who also manages the IT Development team). All of us come from a Quancept background, Andy and Fiona used Quancept CATI and Quancept Web and all of us used Quancept for mrInterview. Here's a scary thought, between the 4 programmers, we have approximately 50 years experience in the market research industry!!!

Andy started scripting in Dimensions back in 2007 with the others starting to use it in 2008 and all members of the team are now highly competent with its use and capabilities. Despite IOM scripting being totally different to what we were used to with Quancept, everybody picked it up fairly quickly and we think it's fair to say that none of us would want to go back to Quancept. After years of programming with Quancept for mrInterview, most of us were used to the idea of metadata and
understood that variables consisted of many different properties, we think this really helped us when it came to learning
about object orientated programming.

With the added pressure these days to make interviews more respondent engaging we're finding that we're not just survey programmers any more, our design skills are coming on in leaps and bounds and we're all having to learn other skills like Photoshop, HTML / CSS and Javascript. It's good to learn new things and it's really rewarding when you can sit back and
look at something nice on the screen and say I did that!

As a department we will be sharing some of our experiences of using Dimensions. we hope you find this useful. Please feel free to email the team cai@cobalt-sky.com to let us know what you think, or if you have any questions. There is a steep learning curve to start with - not many scriptwriters have a VB background, and object oriented programming can be fairly scary for a beginner. But trust us, it’s worth it!

The CAI Team

Senior DP Consultant, Rebecca Cole works as a Senior DP consultant and heads up the Innovations Unit at Cobalt Sky