If someone asks me what the best and worst thing about SaaS software the answer is easy: it’s constantly changing. It’s great that we buy a subscription for service where customers and admins are consistently pushed features, enhancements, and fixes without any manual intervention needed by administrators. However, that benefit comes at the cost of navigating an ever-changing technological landscape. Often the changes introduced are beneficial, but some can be difficult to plan for and manage. That challenge is exacerbated […]
Data Lake has become a mainstay in data analytics architectures. By storing data in its native format, it allows organizations to defer the effort of structuring and organizing data upfront. This promotes data collection and serves as a rich platform for data analytics. Most data lakes are also backed by a distributed file system that enables massively parallel processing (MPP) and scales with even the largest of data sets. The increase of data privacy regulations and demands on governance requires […]
The business intelligence, automation, and enterprise application landscape is changing dramatically. In the previous incarnation of enterprise technology, line-of-business owners were forced to choose between pre-baked commercial off the shelf (COTS) software, which was difficult to customize and often did not truly meet the business’s unique needs, or custom solutions that (though flexible and often tailor-made to the business needs of the moment) cost more and were far riskier to develop and deploy. Furthermore, certain classes of applications do not […]
2017 was another great year overall here at AIS, and also marked the fifth anniversary of our blog! We hope you enjoyed reading and found our posts helpful and interesting. We’re all pretty passionate about what we do here, and look forward to sharing more thoughts, insights and solutions in 2018 and beyond! As we close out the year, here are the top 10 most read and shared blog posts of 2017: 1) Office 365 Groups vs. Microsoft Teams by […]
My decision to join AIS six years ago was a revelation. After almost seven years spent working as an embedded IT analyst for various government customers, I joined AIS to support a customer who was implementing SharePoint. I soaked up everything I could about this (at the time) brave new world of SharePoint. I loved it. SharePoint 2003 had been available for use in my previous office where I had initially set up out-of-the-box team sites for working groups to […]
The mission was critical, and the task complex: Ushering a print publication like Rolling Stone, a Bondi publication, into the digital age by providing them with a turnkey solution to present their print magazine archives online, for viewing on high resolution-connected devices of all shapes and sizes. Unlike other digital versions of magazines on the market, the new platform would allow the publisher to monetize its own unique brand through the years. The Challenge AIS needed to address multiple technical […]
I vividly remember the iconic scene from the 1995 box office hit Apollo 13 where a team of NASA engineers gathered around a table with a collection of mishmash spaceship junk. From this collection, the team had to create a square air filter to fit in a round receptacle so that the astronauts would not asphyxiate on CO2 in space. It’s an intense, life-or-death scenario of literally making a square peg fit in a round hole, where “failure is not […]
Workflow in SharePoint 2013 has undergone quite the architectural change from its SharePoint 2010 ancestor. I documented many of the major changes in a previous blog post, “What Changed in SharePoint 2013 Workflow? Pretty Much Everything.” While SharePoint 2013 is backwards-compatible with SharePoint 2010 workflows, you may decide that the benefits of the new design are needed. The purpose of this post is to illustrate the new considerations you’ll need to keep in mind when targeting SharePoint 2013 workflows. The […]
Our work with Rolling Stone and Bondi Digital Publishing is yet another example of how AIS can develop technology that creates new revenue streams for publishers. We built a digital distribution platform to usher print publications like Rolling Stone into the digital age – by providing them with a turnkey solution to deploy print magazine archives online for viewing on desktops, laptops and mobile devices. For Rolling Stone, the initial launch included more than 1,000 issues from 1967 to the […]
In this blog I’ll discuss some post-release reporting issues that we faced for one of our projects and the solutions we implemented. On the technology side, we had SQL Server 2008 R2 and MVC 4.0 application (which were hosted in Amazon Web Services) in our production environment. The Problem The post-production release reporting system was not responding as per the user expectations. For most of the high-volume reports (50K rows to 200K rows in report output), we were getting request […]