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H i s t o r y
After being co-owner with a Doctor in exercise physiology of a company who developed an exercise prescription program for cross-country skiers, for the French company Salomon Sa, Yves Sabourin started Soft-Connect Inc. with another associate in the Fall of 1988, operating under the french name of "Interface Humaine" (the human interface) in the french speaking community. Aware of the narrowness of the marketplace for exercise prescription, Mr. Sabourin turned to user friendly management applications to ease the workload of managers.
QUEBEC
One of the associates being a teacher by trade, the new company at the beginning, carried out many training assignments in office automation for different departments. After a little more than a year, the new associate felt a little uncomfortable in heading a company. Mr. Sabourin thus bought out his shares to become the sole owner of Soft-Connect. Faced with harsh competition in office automation training, Mr Sabourin progressively left this field, except for a few mandates for in house training, to concentrate his strengths on developing applications around databases.
Starting in September 1991, Soft-Connect was hired by a Quebec City management consulting firm to give technical support and to develop applications for its specific needs. The main project was to develop tools that would help the company to manage its activities, its receivables in more than one currency and the production of statistical reports.
In August 1994, in order to diversify its income sources and based on the gained expertise, Soft-Connect started developing ConTemPro, a program that manages time billing, and is multi-platform, multilingual and multi-user. At that time, the company became a member of the Quebec Software Promotion Center now known as the Interlogic Network.
UNITED STATES
In September of 1996, Mr. Sabourin went to Florida to develop a sales force automation system for the Vincam Group. It allowed the Michigan, Georgia and Colorado representatives to enter their activity reports so they would be available for the head office in Miami. A year later, he was asked to go to Gabon, Africa, to do the maintenance of the financial management systems used in the Gabonese universities.
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F R I C A
In April of 1998, Mr. Sabourin came back from Gabon and it is from that moment on that, aware of the importance of the Internet, Soft-Connect started specialising in Web applications, relying again on its expertise in relational databases to conquer new markets with the Web interface. In the Fall of 1998, Mr. Sabourin was asked to participate in the development of Air Liquide Canada’s Intranet. The English version of the Intranet was delivered in June 1999 and the transactional part in August of the same year.
The moment this stage was finalised, the development of the French version began. A new version was started from scratch in order to market the product eventually. A first delivery took place in December 1999 and in August 2000, Soft-Connect received the final approval for the product. From then on, the cosmetics were completely redone and the launch of IntraRed took place in November 2000. In March 2001, a market survey was done, the demo was improved and the multilingual version completed by Autumn 2001.
Other than that, Soft-Connect got approval for the "Centre National des Nouvelles Technologies de Québec" on September 6th 2000 and moved to its new offices on January 26th 2001. An important contract has again been realised with Gabon, as one of the employees of Soft-Connect acted as a database administrator at the University of Science and Technology of Masuku in Franceville, while Mr. Sabourin trained, at the beginning of 2001, the head of Data Processing Services of that institution in order for him to become a database developer.