At D Hilton I worked with a terrific web designer and wonderful person, Pam Maxwell. See Pam's work at MultiFX.
In Fall 2001, my main project at D. Hilton was designing and building an online project manager for the advertising/print marketing group and their clients. The web based software allowed the advertising project managers to track the jobs for each client, assign due dates, update the status, and record notes and hours, and produce traffic reports for all the writers and designers. It keept a history of each project and allowed the client to view the status of all their projects, and proofs at any time thru their client login on www.dhilton.com (the application is no longer live/acitve). The clients could also view a listing of delivered projects for the year.
The project manager software was written in ASP, VBScript with an Access 2000 database. It ran on NT/Win2000-IIS4/5. It had numerous forms, reports and admin pages to manage clients, users, and projects.
I also wrote an intranet web application for D. Hilton Associates, Inc. Headhunters - a tool for a team of sales people who need to share a common call list. It is not public so there is not a link to it. DHA recruiting consultants used it to generate call lists for their recruiting calls. They stored notes from each call they made and searched the notes later.
I also wrote a bunch of custom online surveys for D Hilton clients to measure customer and employee satisfaction.
I rewrote the D Hilton Job Center public website and admin pages from cold fusion to ASP so it could be moved to consolidate webhosting and saving the hiltons some money for their next vacation to hawaii or alaska (the company is privately owned). A web designer co-worker and I rewrote/redesigned the entire dhilton.com site, eliminating the need for their third website, e-hilton.com, consolidating (eliminating webhosting costs) and building a cohesive marketing vehicle for the consulting company's line of products and services. Obviously I made sure other people were in charge of typing and spelling.
Working for the Hiltons was sort-of interesting. If you like dragons. If you are entertaining an offer from DHA or just want to completely understand Debbie Hilton read the Po Bronson book, Bombardiers. She was a bond trader in the 80s and I think this book, more than anything, helped me see where she was coming from.
While at DHA I tried to get direct deposit for our paychecks. It was such a hassle. We work, two weeks later you pay us our money. Then we mail our check to the bank (my bank was in dallas so I had to mail my check). It took so long to get the money, into my account! We had administaff for the payroll. Our clients were CREDIT UNIONS! and we did not have direct deposit. I checked with administaff and they offered the direct deposit service. I asked about it at a staff meeting. My co-workers wanted direct deposit, but cautioned me not to press Debbie because she was known to lash out and fire people who asked questions.?? Off with their heads and all that! At the staff meeting Debbie said direct deposit was not available. So, later, somebody submitted a question via a web form submission on the administaff website....dear administaff - please clarify. we are being told by our hr person that direct deposit is not offered but we want it. etc. It couldnt be traced to anyone person's computer so debbie did not know to whom to direct her rage! brilliant. There was even a meeting to try to find out -who- submitted the question. HA! We still didnt get direct deposit - How can someone be so greedy that they have to hold onto that money. one. more. day. ?
I'll offer one more story because I was there. December 2001, late in the week before Christmas on Tuesday. The graphic designers in marketing are working long hours/short-handed trying to meet all the deadlines and deliver all the promised work before the holiday. The Hiltons come into the office, bags packed for a ski trip, on the way to the airport, -fire two people- and then go directly to the airport and go skiing for two weeks. Kind of a scroogie thing to do. The fired people have no jobs, no notice and are stunned. We are all stunned. The remaining graphic designers work even longer days shorter handed than before - it is a month before someone new is hired to replace the fired people. Doing the reduction in staff this way, creates the appearance that the owners can pay for their ski trip however they want to. It appeared that didn't care about anyone's holiday but their own.
DHA wasn't a good place for me to work, so I left. No one understood what I did. They wanted me to create this big giant spam list and spam everyone on the planet. (like they did with broacast faxes) I didnt work on that spam very much (thought it was ethically wrong and would turn-off our customers) and instead worked on other stuff that helped the consultants and the IT guy at DHA do their jobs and saved money on the websites etc. When my last project was near the end (testing / bug fixing phase) - I gave my manager 2 weeks notice. Debbie asked to meet with me for my exit interview since she did all the HR work (as i mentioned they used Administaff). The meeting did not go well. She wanted me to leave before the end of the two weeks. I asked her if I was being fired. I thought it was a fair question because I gave notice to my manager that my last day would be x date and she was asking me to leave before that - I still had bugs to find and fix! She said no, you quit. And she told me to leave immediately and then the very next thing she said was she wanted to hire me contract at the same hourly pay as my salary. (which is a cut because contractors have to pay their own taxes) Since that didnt interest me, I declined. End of story.