About Firefly Solutions

Our Story

Back in 2000, two pupils at St Paul's School grew frustrated by the difficulty in finding learning material on the fast growing web.

The school did have a basic intranet, but it was edited manually by a small number of early adopting staff, using complicated web editing software that they had to install on their computer, and couldn't use from home.  Because of the small number of editors, the intranet was incomplete and seldom updated, and each department's pages looked very different from the others'.

The boys' vision was an intranet that could be edited easily by anyone who could use a basic word processor, and only a web browser should be required.  Permissions should be flexible enough that everyone could have responsibility for parts of the intranet, and thus help keep it fresh and up to date.   Out of this vision, and a few school holidays, the original Firefly was born.

The ease of use of the system quickly proved a success, as the intranet at St Paul's grew to several thousand pages, and now contains over 25,000.  It also became clear that Firefly was sufficiently flexible to be used to host the school's public facing website.  And when Forest School expressed an interest in using Firefly, Firefly Solutions was born as a commercial entity.

Some years later, and rebuilt for Microsoft's enterprise level ASP.NET platform, Firefly.NET is used by dozens of schools, has a much wider and growing feature set.  In 2008, realising the system could be just as useful in a small business setting, Firefly took on its first non-academic client, ITAL.  While the team has grown, the two original partners remain.

The small but growing user community is supported by a discussion list, a collaborative area to share best practice, and a yearly users group, ensuring that future development is driven by exactly what clients want.  Why not become part of the Firefly story?