Considering a new business application? Start with your business process.

When considering a new business application, it's essential to start by understanding your existing business processes. Here's how you can approach it:

1. Identify Your Business Processes: Begin by identifying and documenting your current business processes. This involves breaking down the different activities and tasks involved in running your business. Examples may include sales and marketing, customer support, inventory management, order processing, invoicing, and financial management.

2. Analyze and Evaluate Processes: Once you have a clear understanding of your processes, analyze and evaluate them to identify pain points, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement. Look for bottlenecks, manual tasks that can be automated, and any gaps in your existing processes that need to be addressed.

3. Define Goals and Objectives: Determine the goals and objectives you want to achieve with a new business application. It could be streamlining operations, improving efficiency, enhancing customer experience, or gaining better insights into your business data. Clearly defining your goals will help you select the right application and prioritize the features you need.

4. Prioritize Requirements: Based on your process analysis and defined goals, prioritize the key requirements for your new business application. Identify the essential features and functionalities that align with your business needs and will have the most significant impact on improving your processes.

5. Research and Explore Available Solutions: Research and explore different business applications that align with your requirements. Look for solutions that specialize in your industry or provide specific functionalities relevant to your business processes. Consider factors such as ease of use, scalability, integration capabilities, security, and vendor reputation.

6. Consider Customization and Integration: Assess whether the selected application can be customized or integrated with your existing systems and tools. Integration with other applications you use, such as accounting software, customer relationship management (CRM), or project management tools, can streamline workflows and improve data accuracy.

7. Evaluate User Experience and Training: Consider the user experience of the application. A user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation can improve adoption and minimize training requirements. Look for applications that provide ample training resources, documentation, and support to help your employees effectively utilize the new system.

8. Assess Cost and Return on Investment (ROI): Evaluate the total cost of ownership, including licensing fees, implementation costs, maintenance, and ongoing support. Consider the potential return on investment (ROI) from the improved efficiency, productivity gains, and cost savings that the application can deliver.

9. Pilot and Test: Before fully implementing the new application, consider piloting or conducting a trial period to test its functionality and effectiveness in a controlled environment. This allows you to identify any issues, fine-tune configurations, and gather feedback from key stakeholders.

10. Plan for Implementation and Change Management: Develop a comprehensive implementation plan that outlines the steps, timeline, and responsibilities for deploying the new business application. Consider change management strategies to ensure smooth adoption and minimize disruption to your business operations.

By starting with your business processes and understanding your specific needs, you can select or develop a business application that truly drives your business ahead of the curve!

Handy display adapters

With smaller laptops these days VGA ports are not always included. 

Be ready for presentations with these adapters: 

Mini-display port to VGA:

http://amzn.to/1O3PB2i

USB to VGA is a bit more flexible:

http://amzn.to/1VMXZWK

Upgrade your laptop with a nice SSD drive

If you have a decent laptop that is only a year or two old, a great upgrade is an SSD hard drive.  It really perks up the computer. 

Here are some of our favorites from Samsung featuring: 

• Form Factor: 2.5 inch
• Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (Compatible with SATA 3Gb/s & SATA 1.5Gb/s)
• NAND Flash: 32 Layer 3D V-NAND
• Thickness: 7.0 mm
• Optimized performance for everyday computing needs
• Sequential read speed 540 MB/s; Sequential write speed 520 MB/s; Random read speed 100K; Random write speed 90K

Sizes: 

500GB: http://amzn.to/1MAGy1G

1TB: http://amzn.to/1MAGgb4

2TB: http://amzn.to/1H9uFDy

What to do when your Dell computer ships without cables

A lot of recent dell orders have come in without the cables for the monitor.   Here are your options: 

Use normal DVI cables:
http://amzn.to/1Q3IypR

You can use the display ports with normal DVI monitors with these adapters:
http://amzn.to/1Q3IEhn

OR if your monitors and computer both have display ports, you can get Display Port only cables:
http://amzn.to/1OlriMA

Insurance Cost: How much confidence do you have in your values?

In today’s data driven insurance market, insurers are digging deeper into property values than ever before. Do you have the information they need? 

By leveraging the Rennroc survey and property data tools, you can have ALL the information you need, from ALL your locations at your fingertips. Accurate data is proven to result in premium savings.

Disaster Recovery: How do you know EXACTLY what locations you have in a certain disaster zone?

Example: An earthquake hits southern CA. 
How long will it take you to compile:

• What locations you have in the affected area?
• What is the total exposure or loss potential?
• How many employees are affected?
• Where are the critical operations?
• How do you know upon which locations to 
• focus your recovery team?
• How fast can you get this information?
• Can you see satellite views of locations?

We have seen well organized corporations take DAYS to come up with this information.

Rennroc can provide answers to these questions in seconds. Using the Natural Catastrophe module, simply drag and drop over the affected disaster area on the map to find your data.

Desktop scanners we recommend

If you have to get up to scan somewhere else in your office, it likely will not happen.  Its best to have desktop scanners for productivity. 

We have used and worked with many desktop scanners over the years.  Fujitsu has been our go-to bulletproof performer.

The Fujitsu Scan snap is the entry level around ~$400 and they go up from there.  If you are looking to get started wiht scanning, you cannot go wrong with a Scan Snap.  If you need a LOT of speed, and will be scanning all day, go for the faster option below. 

Entry level option:

Scansnap:http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/scansnap/ix500/index.html

Good place to buy: Amazon

Faster performance option: 

Faster:http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/fi/index.html

Good place to buy: Amazon

Tired of excel sheets opening in the same window

I’ve been working a LOT in excel lately, and with multiple sheets and multiple monitors its SO FRUSTRATING when excel sheets open in the same instance EVERY time… working around it to open excel first is a drag, so I finally found some instructions on how to change it.

Go here, put some registry keys in, and be on your way to Excel opening in SEPARATE windows every time!

http://www.excelqa.info/2011/06/17/how-to-open-excel-files-in-a-new-application-instance-windows-7-or-vista/

Digital Solutions from the Right Team

How are you driving your business ahead with digital?  Corner Edge provides digital innovation in application and web development. Dynamic media rich content delivered though advanced solutions. Custom developed tools that precisely fit specific business needs while also being flexible and expandable. Unique design and marketing services for all media outlets, print, web and social solutions. Multi platform Design and Development for desktop and mobile devices. Responsive support team on the cutting edge of IT to keep you up and running efficiently. Make Corner Edge your technology partner.

Check out the video here

Bridge the gap between print designers and web developers

We’ve  heard both sides of the story, from an art director venting “the programmers don’t understand the brand” to developers saying “the designers don’t understand the web.”

Corner Edge provides a unique service to several design studios and advertising agencies that eliminates this issue, allowing creatives to maintain complete creative control while reducing overhead cost through outsourced development. What makes our development service so unique is not only our top notch developers and database engineers but their collaboration with our design staff.  Our designers are steeped in a traditional print background. In addition to being excellent interactive designers, our staff has more than 20 years of experience in advertising, packaging, collateral and publishing. This diversity  makes Corner Edge designers ideally equipped to serve as liaison between our clients creative departments and our developers.

We understand both sides of the spectrum so nothing is lost in translation. If your agency/studio is geared primarily towards providing print advertising, package design or branding yet has a need to also deliver integrated, branded web initiatives Corner Edge can help you provide that service. Because our designers posses well rounded creative experience in both web and print they can effectively communicate with your creative team in the same language to ensure a cohesive brand translation from print materials to web and mobile devices.  This translates into time savings, fewer missed deadlines, and project success.

If your client needs a web site, mobile app, social media marketing, or other interactive product and your considering outsourcing the development be sure to partner with a company that understands your business and one that can bridge the gap between print and web.

Low Cost Disaster Recovery Options For VMware

For years now Corner Edge Solutions has been using VMware exclusively for all of our new server installs, and even for hardware upgrades by virtualizing the original server install and configuration to a new physical server with VMware.  This goes for even a small, one server setup as well.  We have felt this is a great way to increase reliability as well as improve disaster recovery times.

While having two complete setups of VMware is probably cost prohibitive, with the small footprint of VMware ESXi, you can use a simple workstation or even a laptop as a cold spare DR backup.  As you’ll see below, I have easily installed VMware on my laptop, and with a large enough hard drive, and enough memory, I could run a small to medium office server environment setup on my one laptop, or even a mid-range business desktop.  The cost of these is usually around $1500-2500, and when you consider the cost of a second server may come in at $5000 or more, this is a great low-budget way to have your office back up and working quickly in the event of a major disaster.

To do this simply, just power off the VM’s on a schedule that fits your DR needs and copy the files from the main DataStore and upload them the the DataStore on your backup setup.  You will want to make sure your backup processor is a 64-bit proc with VT enabled if you are running 64-bit VM’s, you have enough storage space for the foreseeable future, and definitely install as much memory as your budget and workstation will allow, and that should be it.

You clearly shouldn’t expect the same performance of this setup as you would get from a true server, but it would get people back online and running again while you work on the main server.

Here is a quick picture I took of my laptop running VMware ESXi just for fun.  I had installed ESXi on a USB stick, and booted to that when I powered on my laptop.  This install was originally done on a PowerEdge 2950, and without any modifications to the install, it came up just fine on an Dell Latitude E6500.  Simply carry a USB flash drive and a large external storage drive and you can have a backup ESXi server wherever you go.

Concatenating Multiple Data Fields for the DataTextField Property

Many, many times I’ve had the situation where I want to bind a data-set or data-view to a DropDownList, CheckBoxList, or other ListItem-based control, but I need the display text set through the DataTextField property to use multiple data fields from the result set, and not just the 1 field that it is designed to support.

For example, I might have a user’s name separated into 2 distinct data fields: User_Name_First and User_Name_Last, but I want it displayed in the DropDownMenu as “User_Name_Last, User_Name_First”.

Maybe you can relate.  What are the options?

1.  Modify your database query to merge the fields in the SELECT.  This is likely the most efficient solution, but not always the most practical depending on your environment.

2.  Add a new DataColumn to the result set, enumerate through the results, and set the value of the new DataColumn upon each iteration.  Does the job, but not very efficient or elegant.

How about this… go ahead and add a new DataColumn to the result set, but make it an Expression Column.  Example:

oDataSet.Tables(0).Columns.Add(new DataColumn(“MyNewFieldName”, System.Type.GetType(“System.String”), “CurrentField1 + ‘, ‘ + CurrentField2″)

I finally stumbled upon this solution (as simple as it seems) and it is such a relief!  I feel like a goof since it  never occurred to me until now, but its not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last.  Many online searches yielded several comments on the first 2 options above, but not much else.  Now that I am on this side of the fence, I find it curious as to why there isn’t much discussion on this technique.  Maybe there is a lot of overhead to it?  Not sure, but certainly seems better than iterating through the result set record-by-record.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Jewel Precision launches new informative interactive site

Corner Edge Solution breaths new life into an ailing website. With this new design, jewelprecision.com finally reflects the quality of their product. The strong use of color exemplifies the durability engineered into every surgical case Jewel produces.

The home page demonstrates the benefit of having Jewel designed sterilization cases through the use of an interactive Flash animation. Likewise on the products page you can click through the various components of the Jewel Custom Case or snap brackets into the versatile SIOS (Surgical Instrument Organizing System) Case. The site offers detailed information with crisp photos of Custom Cases, Modules designed for holding small parts, SIOS Cases and Trays as well as all the SIOS accessories.

Check out Jewel Precision and learn about their 25 year history and their commitment to quality and adhering to and surpassing industry standards. Jewel certifications are available in Adobe pdf format.

Flash AS2 Tips for Designers, variables in target paths

How can I use a variable in a target path? This may be a well known bit of info for many Flash developers but for this designer who is not code jockey it was a  quite a challenge. I have a flash file that has a movie clip (myclip) attached to it dozens of times, each clip is dynamically named (myclip1, myclip2, myclip3, etc.) and each contains a variable (var_in_myclip) which is loaded from xml. The root contains 2 variables, one is a number (var id:Number;) and the other is a string (var whichclipvar;).

So I need my “whichclipvar” to be the same as one of my “var_in_myclip” in one of “myclip” movie clips and I want to use my “id” number to target a specific “myclip” to get it’s var, like this

whichclipvar = _root.myclip1.var_in_myclip;

But I need the myclip1 in the target path to change if “id” changes.

The solution is to create a new variable that can be used as a string in the target path. Like this:

var myclippath:String=”myclip”+id;

Then use [myclippath] in place of the movie clip in your target path. The square brackets are important for this, and no preceding “.” who knew? The whole code looks like this and requires a movie clip on the stage with an instance name of “myclip” and its symbol properties must be set to export for action script and named “myclip”:

var id:Number;

//// NOTE: the id var can be set in any way that works for your purposes///

var whichclipvar;

var mycontent:XML = new XML();

mycontent.load(“my_content.xml”);

mycontent.ignoreWhite = true;

mycontent.onLoad = function (success) {

if (success) {

var myxml = this.firstChild;

for (var i=0; i<36; i++) {

myclip.attachMovie(“myclip”, “myclip”+i, (0+i), {var_in_myclip:myxml.firstChild.childNodes[5].childNodes[i].childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue,});

}

}

var myclippath:String=”myclip”+id;

whichclipvar = _root[myclippath].var_in_myclip;