DARE/DAWN is a collaborative network of Disability Support Services from multiple third level institutions in Ireland, including UCD, TCD, UCC, NUI Maynooth, DCU, DIT and Queens University.

For DARE Communicraft designed and developed an application, on the java platform, to automate and standardise as much as possible the process employed by these universities to record students’ information and to assess and manage the requirements of these students and the supports they may need.

Communicraft, working very closely with the staff of these support services, defined and specified the system which would introduce a high level of automation as well as a newly formalised data structure, freeing the disability support officers’ time and resources to focus on assisting

their students. Following a clearly defined production process from specification through design, build, quality assurance and user testing, Communicraft delivered a highly effective and dependable system, replacing the disparate and problematic legacy systems and manual processes. The modular design of the system is flexible and extensible, allowing for the regular modifications and enhancements required by the group as their role and goals expand within their respective institutions.

Communicraft liaise regularly with the disability support officers within the individual universities as well as with those universities’ IT departments, much of this interaction being around integration with or data synchronisation between locally held systems and the centralised DARE/DAWN application.