In my previous post, we looked at the exciting new possibilities of Office 365 as a development platform, including Add-ins implemented as independently hosted web applications and programmatic access to enterprise assets in Office 365 via APIs like the Graph API. Today we’ll look at a rich example of leveraging the Office 365 platform: Microsoft’s Matter Center.
As a full-stack software developer with a penchant for UI/UX, I must admit I was a little skeptical when I was recently tasked to investigate Office 365 as a development platform. What I found surprised and impressed me. The Office 365 Development Platform We’ve gotten really good at spinning up web applications that help users solve problems and increase productivity. That’s great, but it can also leave users with all sorts of disparate applications and stand-alone tools to interact with throughout the […]
Like every business that’s dependent on consumer sales to fuel growth, you and your team members are probably constantly thinking about how you can make your organization’s sales processes fast and efficient enough to support the growth and customer retention that your executive team desires. Well, we’ve figured out a way to do just that – our client organization is in the highly competitive insurance industry, and needed a way to increase sales volumes. Enter AIS; we were able to […]
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an interesting and powerful business application. A core out-of-the-box (OOTB) benefit of Dynamics CRM is the ability to extensively tailor the application to address business needs, and here there are two approaches to consider: development or customization. Determining which approach to take is the key to maximizing the benefits of Dynamics CRM while keeping costs low. Dynamics CRM is a basic web user interface fronting a SQL Server database that manages relational data. However, it is flanked […]
2013 was a great year for AIS — we worked on exciting projects for our terrific clients, built some cool apps and won some cool awards. We were honored with the 2013 Microsoft Mid-Atlantic Cloud Practice Award and are among the first Amazon Web Services partners to earn a “SharePoint on AWS” competency. And throughout the year, we wrote and blogged about our passion for cloud computing, SharePoint, going mobile, and doing “more with less” for our government and commercial clients. Here’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
Software development is a risky endeavor, with many things that can go wrong. At any moment, you may find that your budget or schedule targets have been completely missed and your developers and customers disagree about the scope and functionality of the project. In fact, numerous studies state that up to 60% of projects completely fail or massively exceed their budget. A recent study by McKinsey found that on average, most software projects over $5 million exceed their budget by 45%, […]
Mobile solutions are already transforming the way we do business and interact with customers, partners and colleagues, but many organizations are still struggling to fully embrace the changes and opportunities. Today’s workforce wants mobile technologies that allow them to work when they want, how they want, and from where they want. (And not to mention using whatever device they want.) Here are 10 reasons to rethink your current mobile strategy and fully embrace the concept of enabling a true mobile […]
Dynamics CRM 2013 is about to be released and if you have already made a large investment into SharePoint as a development platform, you may be asking yourself why Dynamics CRM matters. After all, you are already using a wildly successful platform that underpins collaboration tools, intranets, your ‘corporate’ social media and quite likely a base of custom applications and tools. Why would you need yet another platform if SharePoint is capable of handling everything you throw at it? First off, […]