Many used to hate the Companies Office website (certainly it had few fans among the army of NBR journos and contributors beavering away on the 2010 Rich List).Visiting it was often a super-slow torture-by-Java, and in some web browsers it refused to load
Many used to hate the Companies Office website (certainly it had few fans among the army of NBR journos and contributors beavering away on the 2010 Rich List).
Visiting it was often a super-slow torture-by-Java, and in some web browsers it refused to load at all.
But that was then (or at least last Thursday).
Now, after being offline Friday and most of the weekend, the MED agency’s new-look site has debuted day - just in time for the Open Government conference today in Wellington.
Based on a customised platform called "Enterprise" (itself built around the open source Plone CMS) the new Companies Office site is much, much faster, and a lot more user-friendly and easy to navigate.
Frequent users will appreciate that the tremulous dialogue boxes have been replaced with a single drop-down search menu. And searches themselves now yield richer data.
There are also several new features for those who upload data, including the ability to register all types of companies online (including NZ unlimited companies and co-operatives, and Australian limited liability companies). See a summary of other changes here.
And registrations can be cross-linked to the new Financial Service Providers online registry, due to be launched in July.
The occasion of the makeover is also being used to push the igovt login system, which allows you to register once to use the same password and login to many government sites.
The new site is not perfect.
For one, NBR would like to see the MED institute a regulatory change so that all companies had to fill in searchable e-forms rather than have the option to upload unsearchable scanned PDFs.
But it’s looking a whole lot better than Thursday.
Update: a few gremlins emerge
Online a number of commentators have noted that the new site has problems displaying properly in Firefox if scripting is disabled, or someone is using a third-party script-blocking programme (as some do to block malicious software).
The Companies Office open data offshoot, coys.co.nz, was down this morning, but back up and running by the afternoon.
On the other side of the fence: not so impressed
And although NBR continued to find the new site a fantastic improvement for searching for annual returns, directors and company data, with results much more easy to navigate, those on the other side of the fence were not so impressed.
"The new website is a substantial improvement on the previous one and elements are very good. I welcome the launch. However, there is still a lot of work to do," entrepreneur Lance Wiggs told NBR.
"I found it frustrating to try to connect to my existing shareholdings and directorships, and parts of the site were slow or broken."
IT consultant and commentator Ben Kepes told NBR he had no problems linking his company to the new site.
