mrc's Cup of Joe Blog

8 must-have features of a good Business Intelligence application

By Joe Stangarone / Business Intelligence

If you’re looking around for Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, you’ll certainly find plenty of options. Some are flashy. Others are plain. Some are expensive. Others are free.

How do you know which one is best for your business?

To answer that question, let’s get down to the absolute basics of BI. A good BI solution will provide simple access to any aspect of your data whenever necessary–ultimately leading to well-informed business decisions.

Now, that’s easy to say, but what does that look like in real-life? How can you know whether or not a BI solution will fit that description before you buy? What features or elements do you look for?

To help you answer that question, let’s take a look at a full-featured BI application, and then highlight each feature and explain why it’s important. Sound good? Okay, let’s get started. Click the image below to view the demo BI app.

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How one IT department completed a 1,000-hour project in 300 hours

By Joe Stangarone / Web Development

Here’s an inspirational story for any IT department facing impossible project deadlines. It’s about an IT department that had a huge web development project with an immovable deadline…but faced one big problem.

They weren’t sure how they were going to do it.

They estimated that it would take 1,000 hours, but with only one web developer on staff, completing the project on time seemed impossible.

What did they do? They found a way to let the rest of their staff develop web applications, and managed to complete the project in just 300 hours. To learn how, you can read the whole story right here.

4 big problems caused by old browsers

By Joe Stangarone / CSS, HTML5, Tutorials

About a month ago, an online retailer made the news for imposing an “IE7 Tax” on its customers. Any customer using the Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser was charged a 6.8% tax on their total bill. In their opinion, the tax helped offset the cost of supporting the IE7 browser.

While the move probably riled up a few customers, it brings up some good questions: What’s so bad about old browsers like IE7? Are they really that expensive to support? Why are modern browsers so important? To answer those questions, let’s take a look at 4 problems caused by old browsers: …

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Better applications use intelligent links

By Joe Stangarone / Application Development, Web Applications

Here is a quick primer in how to make your applications better.

There’s a brilliantly simple concept known as “Intelligent Links.” In short, it means you can pass live data to your hyperlinks on the fly. How might that be useful? Here are a couple of examples: …

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6 big Business Intelligence trends of the near future

By Joe Stangarone / Business Intelligence, Tech trends

Business Intelligence (BI) is changing. In the past, BI was used mainly by company executives, providing them with monthly/yearly reports on various aspects of the company. Using this data, executives could formulate company plans and strategies.

While BI is still a vital piece of the planning and decision making process, this idea of “traditional BI” is quickly fading. As the workforce becomes more mobile, BI is moving outside the confines of the office. Modern business leaders demand real-time BI that’s always accessible–from anywhere at any time using any device. They demand BI that gets the right information into the right hands precisely when it’s needed.

So, what trends are driving this new approach to BI? Here are 6 key trends that I believe will dramatically alter the BI landscape in the very near future. …

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Yes, you can use GPS with mobile web apps (with proof)

By Joe Stangarone / HTML5, Mobile, Mobile apps

There’s a lot of misinformation being spread about mobile apps. Just last week, I read yet another article from yet another mobile app “expert” that made me cringe. The article falsely claimed that native apps are necessary if you want to use the phone’s hardware sensors, like the GPS.

Okay. Let me set the record straight: No, they’re not!

Native apps are not required to use the phone’s GPS, and that’s just the beginning. Mobile web apps can actually access almost every hardware sensor that a native app can access. If you’d like to learn which sensors a mobile web app can access, read this article.

So, how can you access the GPS using a mobile web app? It’s simple, and we have two short tutorials and a demo to prove it. …

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Application modernization comparison chart

By Joe Stangarone / Modernization

Here’s a million dollar question: What’s the best application modernization method for your company?

Here’s the answer: It depends.

If your company needs to modernize existing legacy applications, choosing the best method varies largely on your needs, goals, and resources. You’ll need to answer a few questions before you begin, such as:

Why are you modernizing in the first place?
What’s your budget?
When do you need the job completed?
What do you hope to accomplish?

If you need help choosing the best modernization solution for your company, here are a couple of things that could help: First, here’s a free whitepaper entitled “Crash course in modernization,” that takes an in-depth look at the modernization basics. We’ve also created a handy little comparison chart, which compares 5 different modernization methods.

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7 reasons why mobile web apps are better for business than native apps

By Joe Stangarone / Mobile, Mobile apps

If your business is planning to build native mobile apps, ask yourself this question: Are you building native mobile apps because you need to, or because you think you have to? While native apps are popular with consumers, they’re quite impractical for most businesses.

To understand why, let’s first look at why native apps are popular with consumers. Native apps do a couple of things very well: They deliver highly graphical interfaces and they’re easy to find and download. While these are important factors for consumers, are they really important to your business?

For most businesses, the answer is a resounding “No”. Unless your business needs highly graphical applications, mobile web apps simply make more business sense. How so? Here are 7 reasons why mobile web apps make more sense from a business standpoint: …

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Even small IT staffs can accomplish big things

By Joe Stangarone / Application Development

Fill in the blank: “Our company needs to _____________, but our IT staff is too small.” Based on feedback I received from a tech conference we recently attended, this is one of the biggest problems facing IT departments these days. IT professionals know how to help their companies, they just lack the time and resources to do anything about it.

It’s a depressing thought–knowing how to help your company but realizing that you can’t. You feel stuck. But don’t worry…if you’re facing this problem, you’re not alone and you’re definitely not stuck. Here are two stories of small IT staffs that found ways to complete urgent projects despite their limited staff. I hope you find them useful:

1. This 2-person IT staff found a way to quickly modernize their green-screen interface and replace their order entry system without bringing in any outside help.

2. This 3-person IT staff built a brand new, custom extranet, and did it faster than it would’ve taken to deploy an off-the-shelf option.

See? Even small IT staffs can accomplish big things! …

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