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A global law firm gained a planning and billed-hours edge with a new custom SharePoint application, incorporating an intelligent data dashboard, developed by the experienced team at AIS. This custom-developed solution continues a rich history of success, as the firm views AIS as their IT project partner and a long-term extension of their team.

Background

The long-time AIS client is a top law firm with household name clients in the technology, financial, healthcare and retail industries. They staff more than 1,000 lawyers and offices in 12 cities in the United States, Europe and Asia. This client offers comprehensive legal capabilities for intellectual property, tax issues, real estate, bankruptcy, environmental, corporate law and more.

The Challenge

AIS was initially brought in to build the firm’s global intranet. The project, a SharePoint intranet application, was very successful and user adoption exceeded expectations. Around the same time, the firm hired another company to build a resource application for its main legal practice areas. But because of poor user feedback and bad performance, the application never made it to production. After nearly three years of time and money spent, the firm turned to AIS for help.

Click here to read the full case study.

AISblog

Good question. And we’ve got the answer.

Here at AIS, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of hours envisioning, designing and constructing SharePoint-based solutions for our clients. With each new version of SharePoint, we make additional investments to deeply understand the new release’s capabilities.

We’ve taken a look at all the changes and enhancements in the latest version — and you just have to look at our blog archives to realize that a LOT has changed in 2013 — and put together a short, easy-to-read whitepaper that highlights the top new features that make SharePoint 2013 a must-have for your business, including:

Smarter Search
Simpler and Mobile-Ready UI
The game-changing SharePoint App Store Model
Better Workflow
Social SharePoint
Easy Migration Tools
Lower Costs
And much more!

Please CLICK HERE to download your free copy.

Not familiar with SharePoint as a business solution? Take a look at our SharePoint solutions on our website and contact us to learn more about how SharePoint can transform your organization.

AISblog

We’re honored to announce that AIS’ own Media Center app won an Appy award for “Coolest App” at the SharePoint MVP Summit 2013. Media Center is a SharePoint app that allows you to integrate your Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS) assets in SharePoint. And we agree that it’s pretty darn cool.

You can download the award-winning Media Center app for free from the Office store.

And here’s a brief video demo of the app’s capabilities:

Congratulations and special thanks to AIS team members Jason McNutt, Harin Sandhoo, and Sam Larko for their contributions to Media Center!

AISblog

Have you taken a look at the new SharePoint yet?

If you’ve spent any time reading our blog, you know by now that SharePoint 2013 introduces extraordinary new features to change the way you work, share, discover, organize and build sites. And now we’ve put together a quick guide highlighting the top features that may inpact your business.

Download The Top Reasons Why Your Business Will Love the New SharePoint now! (No form required,)

The Top Reasons Why Your Business Will Love the New SharePoint guide provides you with an overview of the latest and greatest that comes with SharePoint 2013, including:

Smarter Search
Simpler and Mobile-Ready UI
SharePoint App Store Model
Better Workflow
Social SharePoint…and more, including easy migration tools and lower costs.

Download your copy today!

And if you’re in the DC area, AIS is hosting an “Introduction to SharePoint 2013″ event at the Microsoft office in Chevy Chase, MD on March 20th. Click here to learn more and register.

Vishwas Lele

Email
@vlele

Congress may be lame duck but our new voting app is not!

Netizen is a Windows 8 app (available in the Windows Store for free) that brings the voting record of your congressional representative to your finger tips, directly from your Windows 8 device. Simply select the member of Congress you want to follow and “flick through” their voting record. Information about each member’s voting record is stored in Windows Azure Storage and is updated daily.

But don’t just follow how your representative is voting in Congress, make your voice heard. By clicking on the “Like It” button on the mobile application, you can influence your friends and neighbors about the bill through the power of social networking. For each bill, Netizen automatically provisions a Facebook page[1] dedicated to your member of Congress. This page acts almost as a virtual ballot for a bill as well as a community hub where fellow constituents can gather to express their support. Read on for more, plus some screenshots from the application:

Vishwas Lele

Email
@vlele

Media Center is a SharePoint app that allows you to integrate your Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS) assets within SharePoint.

Before I describe the app functionality, I think it useful to take a step back and briefly talk about why this app is needed and the design choices we had to make in order to build it. This is also a great opportunity for me to thank the team who worked very hard on building this app including Jason McNutt, Harin Sandhoo and Sam Larko. Shannon Gray helped out with the UI design. Building an app using technical preview bits with little documentation is always challenging, so the help provided by Anton Labunets and Vidya Srinivasan from the SharePoint team was so critical. Thank you!

At AIS, we focus on building custom applications on top of the SharePoint platform. Among the various SharePoint applications we have built in the past, the ability to host media assets within SharePoint is a request that has come up a few times. As you know, SharePoint 2010 added streaming functionality, so any media assets stored within the content database could be streamed to the SharePoint users directly. However, the streaming functionality in SharePoint 2010 was never intended to provide a heavy duty-streaming server. For instance, it does not support some of the advanced features like adaptive streaming. Additionally, most organizations don’t want to store large media files within SharePoint in order to avoid bloating the size of the content databases.

Enter Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS).
Read More…

AISblog

We’re super excited over here — AIS’ own Vishwas Lele has published an eBook about the next generation of productivity possibilities with Office and SharePoint 2013, entitled The App Economy: Coming to an Office™ Near You.

In the eBook, Vishwas presents app solutions for different scenarios, with perspectives from a cast of characters which includes a power user, a developer, an administrator and an industry analyst. In these scenarios, the following questions will be answered:

• Why are apps needed?
• What nagging problems are they designed to solve?
• What kinds of apps can we expect to see in the marketplace?
• How will SharePoint apps be secured?
• What are the various revenue models supported?
• Would in-app purchases be allowed? What about ads?
• What is the difference between a public app store and a corporate app catalog?

“I decided to write a story about friends and co-workers and their day-to-day productivity challenges,” said Vishwas, “and how Office and SharePoint 2013 —combined with the cloud —will change the way they all do business.”

The eBook is available at Amazon.com, and is FREE during the SharePoint 2012 conference.

Vishwas Lele

Email
@vlele

Last month, a group of us from the Washington CTO council visited Nova Labs in Reston.

Nova Labs is part of the maker movement that has mushroomed around the country. This movement is a confluence of things coming together including 1) open source hardware that promotes advancement in hardware design though common standards and crowds sourcing, much like the open source software, 2) the availability of some highly-advanced machines such as 3-D printing, high-precision laser cutters at a price point within the reach of hobbyists, and 3) the do-it-yourself (DIY) mindset that encourages participants to make stuff (hence the term “makers”). There are over 1,000 such makerspaces in the country.