Maximizing IT Investments | Applied Information Sciences Blog

Technology is advancing rapidly, and with its advance comes new and useful ways to complete everyday tasks. In this post I’d like to talk about some of the benefits of replacing the paper- or desktop-based ways of an employee whose job is performed primarily in the field. (Home health workers or field service technicians, for example.)

Quality custom software that’s designed to meet the specific needs of a business is easy to adapt and should have minimal adoption time and training costs. Workflows that are built according to an employee’s ideal task flow should encourage thorough service calls and better communication flow in all directions.

As an employee who may have to make several service trips per day, mobility is essential. Paper can be completely eliminated, pictures no longer lost or need to be transferred by media card, forms can be filled out by simply speaking into a microphone and tapping on some check boxes. Signatures can be captured easily just by swiping a finger on a screen, bar codes can be read and captured. The possibilities for becoming more productive are expanding each day. Read More…

Sam Larko

N-tier development is not a new methodology. I remember learning about it in 200-level courses back in 2000, and I used it in ASP.NET development before I jumped on the SharePoint bandwagon. However, one of the things I’ve noticed over the years as a SharePoint developer is that most project development is done in the SharePoint object’s code behind or a few helper classes. This isn’t always the case —sometimes the solution isn’t complex enough to warrant a tiered approach (i.e. a single Event Receiver). But a recent project highlighted the power behind N-tiered architecture.

The client has a custom solution that they provide as a service: A master document (Microsoft Word) is split into section documents (also Word) by a project manager. Each section is assigned to a person to be modified in Word (the client also provides a Word plug-in for this modification). Once the sections are properly marked up, the master document is recreated from the sections. We were brought in to implement this solution in SharePoint 2010. Read More…

Warren Steger

In order to meet ever-increasing customer demands and compete on a global scale, many organizations need to be able to fold new systems and/or new features into existing systems quickly and cheaply. These organizations — and perhaps yours — have portfolios of existing systems and infrastructures that were implemented literally decades ago.

These “legacy” systems, while well-architected for the demands and market conditions of the past, have often become increasingly complex through the years and more costly to maintain. What’s more, these systems are based on technologies that simply don’t provide the flexibility and disciplined agility that modern programming languages and frameworks can. Read More…