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Choice of Technology
We are in the Information Technology industry. It is our business to craft ways to move, process, structure and build information through the use of technology. Information has become the lifeblood of organizations so the choice of technology that keeps the information flowing is crucial to business performance. When deciding on the development tools and technical infrastructure to utilize and implement, we made sure that our technology choices match the following criteria:
 The Total Cost of Ownership has to make financial sense to our clients. We constantly evaluate the TCO of various technical alternatives and compare this with our client’s resources to ensure that we have a feasible solution.
The underlying technology needs to be standards based. Interoperability between disparate systems is no longer an optional feature but a business imperative. For as long as we use industry standards, we can improve on interoperability between systems.
The overall performance of the solution, both the infrastructure and the software, should be able to cover the requirements of our clients. We don’t see the use of recommending the fastest (and most expensive) server solutions that can process a million transactions per minute when your company would probably hit hundreds or a few thousand transactions per minute. However, we also ensure that the solutions we deliver are scalable to handle any planned or unplanned increase in the number of transactions as your business grows.
The solutions should be reliable and manageable. We understand that businesses are very dependent on systems nowadays. A systems failure could make or break a company. Hence, we factor in reliability and manageability when implementing mission critical solutions for our clients.
Security is of prime importance in the solutions we deliver. In today’s highly connected world, private and confidential information has become more accessible than ever. The technology we use has to enable us to grant permission to our client’s resources is only given to people in their circle of trust and this should be as foolproof as possible..
Solutions we develop and implement should be easy of use. Usability is one of the key success factors when implementing a solution. A technical services company can come up with the most sophisticated solution for your business but if your employees cannot use this, it is a failure. The challenge after deployment is to ensure that the people use the systems correctly and effectively.
Considering this framework for deciding on what technologies to adopt, we opted to make use of the following development platform and infrastructure technologies:
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Development Platform
We make use of Visual Studio as the primary tool to work with the .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework. When programming Microsoft Office products, we use either VBA or the Visual Studio Tools for Office depending on the client requirements. During the analysis and design phase, we normally make use of UML diagrams in either Visio or Sparx Enterprise Architect to present the solution to the client and to document this as well. For reports, we normally make use of
Crystal Reports and MS SQL Reporting Services.
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Infrastructure Technology
We rely on Windows Servers and support versions NT4, 2000 and 2003. For the clients, we have substantical experience on working with Windows 2000 Pro, XP and Windows Mobile 2003. We are familiar with the entire Microsoft Office System including servers such as SharePoint Portal Server, Content Management Server, Project Server and Exchange Server. Our database administration skills in all versions of SQL Server are first rate. And we can also configure, support and customize BizTalk Server and Commerce Server.
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