Should You Phase Out On-Prem SharePoint Customizations?
I was recently asked to comment on a recommendation that SharePoint leaders should phase out on-prem SharePoint customizations that may inhibit a cloud migration. The argument goes that tightly coupled customizations likely won’t make the hop to the next on-prem version, let alone the relative long-jump to the cloud, and thus you should rework them […]
How to Use Azure to Jumpstart Mobile App Development
Azure App Service is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Microsoft that enables you to deliver mobile apps quickly to market and do it at scale. Azure provides all of the tools you need to enable everything from the back-end database to the front-end user experience. On the back-end, cloud data […]
How to Select the Best Mobile App Development Platform
Selecting the platform for your next mobile app development project is not straight-forward. There are a variety of valid approaches each with its own trade-offs. Furthermore, no single approach has yet to establish itself as the overwhelming choice in the industry. There are three main paths down which your development team could go: Hybrid application […]
3 Key Takeaways from An Event Apart 2015 in Austin
I just got back from An Event Apart – Austin 2015, and I had a great time! In addition to the amazing food, I had three days of great speakers about the future of web design. Here are my three takeaways: 1) Responsive web design is essential for our multi-device future With the growth of […]
4 Unique Challenges for Testing Single Page Applications
Watch out for these four key recurring issues to prevent a bad user experience when you’re testing single page applications. First, you need some sort of loading indicator for your pages. You cannot let your users stare at an unchanging page for several seconds without any indication that clicking a link did something. In […]
3 Simple Questions to Decide if Office 365 is Right for You
Recently, a colleague here at Entrance told me about an IT department looking for help with SharePoint totally unrelated to Office 365. The company has 400 employees and contract workers both out in the field and in the corporate office, and that they tend to collaborate with vendors and customers outside of their company. As he went on the describe […]
Top 4 Microsoft Tools for Your Move to Office 365
If you are considering a move to Office 365, or you’re in the middle of a deployment, here’s a little inside information from a Microsoft Partner on the tools and services Microsoft makes available for free to help you save time and money. You may be wondering why someone who makes their living helping clients move […]
Master Data Management with SQL Server Stack
Many solutions exist in the marketplace for Master Data Management, such as Informatica, IBM InfoSphere, and Oracle MDM, even including industry specialists such as EnergyIQ. However, many software buyers don’t realize that they already own an MDM platform through their existing Microsoft SQL Server licenses. Even if you don’t currently have Microsoft’s MDM toolset, it […]
3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Hire an Offshore Developer
Offshoring your outsourced software product development may seem like an easy choice based on cost but the decision is really much more nuanced than just straight dollars and cents. #1: Don’t underestimate the value of face-to-face meetings between the technical team and your business users. This is crucial to project success. Make sure your product […]
Why go agile with your development team?
Why go agile with your development team? Simply put, an agile methodology allows you to deliver the most business value per dollar spent. The foundation of agile lies in its iterative process – every 2-4 weeks, the development team demos a fully functioning piece of software with key stakeholders. This process has the following benefits: 1) Ensures […]
Should you hire a freelance programmer?
We’ve seen it many times with our clients: since you’re not a “computer person”, it’s sometimes hard to know how to avoid the common pitfalls when you build technology solutions for your business. We often talk to people who’ve hired a “lone ranger” programmer as a short-term fix, which just ends up creating long term problems. Building […]
Faster, Cheaper App Deployment for Field Data Capture with Azure Cloud Services
Your field workers can update their Facebook status and text loved ones from the job site, but they’re still using clipboards and paper to record technical information for your projects? It’s not as expensive as it once was to stay connected to your remote workers. Why are you still bogging your employees down with paperwork, and […]
Enabling Field Worker Productivity with Office 365
IT and Operations managers want to enable field worker productivity, empowering remote employees to be as efficient and as connected as possible. Office 365 will help you overcome the unique technology challenges you face in order to make this happen. A traditional enterprise IT model requires you to issue hardware to your field technicians with […]
KnowledgeLake Office 365 with SharePoint Online
There are many reasons a company would need to keep records of their documents such as compliance or needing to refer back to them. Moving these documents into SharePoint rather than keeping boxes of paper documents, shipping them off to Iron Mountain or filing them away in the file room is a much easier way […]
Office 365 + SharePoint + Azure Data Sync = Easy Access to Line of Business Data
One of the first questions asked by potential adopters of Microsoft Office 365 is: “How easy is it to access our critical line of business data stored on premise from SharePoint in the cloud?” Unfortunately, with the initial versions of SharePoint Online, there really wasn’t a great answer. Transforming external data into the metadata required […]
Microsoft SSIS as an Alternative to BCS (Business Connectivity Services)
SharePoint developers and power users have had a love-hate relationship with SharePoint’s BCS and its’ older brother BDC (Business Data Catalog). BCS requires several services to be installed along with some user accounts and permissions. If any of those services become unresponsive or go offline, BCS becomes effectively useless along with any SharePoint lists that […]
The Microsoft Single Page Applications Approach: WinJS
Microsoft has been steadily working to improve WinJS, their implementation framework for Single Page Applications (SPA) using JavaScript. This framework is a modern alternative to existing ASP.NET client-side infrastructure (MVC and WebForms). At Entrance, our approach for SPA uses several frameworks: Backbone Marionette, jQuery, Underscore and Bootstrap. If we were to look at getting on […]
Why AFE Cost Management Is Falling Short In The New Reality Of Low Commodity Prices
Companies that hope to thrive (or just survive) in the new reality of low energy prices need to adopt a culture of cost control based on new ways of thinking as well as new tracking tools and technologies. One major area of vulnerability for most organizations is the potential for project costs to overrun because […]
Spotfire Dashboard Demo of a Shale Type Ternary Diagram, Well Map, and Source Wells by Formation
Since rock type will have a bearing on completion and drilling practices, you definitely want to know the results of wells with similar rock types. Normally, geologists, petrophysicists, and reservoir engineers who need to find data from wells and formations by rock type to perform evaluations have to plot out data in Excel, but making […]
Using Real-Time Dashboards for Performance to Plan KPIs
One of the biggest complaints that we hear from our clients is how tedious, time-consuming, and sometimes even impossible it can be to try to get a daily or real-time grasp on whether the assets, projects, business units, and employees they manage are performing as expected against their business goals. They’re having to pull numbers […]
