Web Applications

Of course there were horror stories with the cost of custom software development before the New Millennium, and there will be others. But since the New Millennium though, the crown of horror stories often goes to Commercial Softwares under license like Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, etc., to which many large corporations and Governments have given humongous mandates (often outrageous purchase orders).

Evidently, the vast majority of commercial softwares’ exaggerated costs and deadline overruns come from integration and personalization; services normally de facto included within the cost of custom software development mandates but which we don’t always measure accurately the impact when buying a commercial software… since everybody else has purchased it, right!

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The New Millennium has witnessed the splendid triumph of « best practices » and « quality control » concepts, in almost all fields of activities. And most of all, best pratices and quality control have come to define the true nature of Custom Software Development in particular and IT in general, Communications and Information Technologies, which have accelerated their broadcasting.

2000 à 2010 – reminder

• Web democratization, as well as Web design and programming jobs
• Communications, Sharing & Implementation of Best Practices
• Democratization of « best practices » concept in custom software development

Who defines the concept of best practices, broadcast it and why?

Expert firms such as Gartner, Forrester, KPMG, Deloitte, etc., that counsel large corporations and assess the evolution of standards within different industries to take their pulse, which is quite useful for investors and shareholders as well as for managers. It helps decision-makers to weigh their enterprise against their industries and to get to know the necessary means to keep the pace with the competition.

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Visual Studio is one of the most popular software to create application or website in .Net environment. This software supports Sass and Less but it doesn’t compile those two languages making them complicated and useless.

In the new version (Visual Studio 2015), Intellisense has not been fixed and still has difficulties to make links between Sass and Less file types.

Even so, the new version of Visual Studio offers some new features that help us with these problems.

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Gulp plugin is a task runner. For example, you can easily: transform your Sass (or Less) files in css files, minify them, using autoprefixer, join them in 1 files, check your JavaScript files with jsLint and much more. If you code a little bit it can be really useful. It is one of my favourite tools for my web site development and it is totally free. It might be a little frightening at the beginning but with some practice and courage, it is easier than it looks.

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We will discuss 3 Web Development Best Practices that can help you safely launch your new specialized banking & financial services application. We should have said three Web Development Best Practices of security since security is so crucial in the Banking and Finance sectors and it is the main topic of this post.

Do we really have to go back and review all the security threats and online hacks and attacks that happened over just the last 5 years or so… I hope not?

All financial institutions and banks have developed a strict policy for systematically securing their critical clientele web applications. But they should also apply such a targeted policy when developing web applications dedicated to their personnel by making development choices that will address today’s security requirements and adapt to help meet tomorrow’s challenges.  Therefore, they must carefully identify all web access to database and process involved in these web application projects and assess the level of risk presented by each type of online communications or user group; ideally, at the development stage.

Because security fixing costs 100 times more to correct once in production than in development. So, it would save a lot of pain and revenues to test-find security flaws at the latter stage.

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A Gain vs. Risk analysis favors rapid development of financial & banks web applications mostly because it will shed some light on some potential design issues, which is no small matter if this happens when you’re already far down into the development process.

Whatever field of activity you’re in, if you’re thinking web applications, it clearly involves providing access in the field to both process and data to Clients and / or to the Sales Force.

And when it comes to Banking and Finance, security is of the utmost importance, of course, even more so if we’re talking mobile web deployment but one would be wise to go beyond the “personal data and hacking risk paradigm”, and assess accurately and globally the level of security needed around each of its applications and each type of data involved in your next web application development.

This exercise will benefit you by simplifying application design; thus, accelerating your web applications development.

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Managing growth while successfully controlling your expenses, retaining your critical resources and facing competition; and simultaneously increasing profit margin, of course, to please shareholders!  Well, it’s not an easy business to be a manager these days. And very few can boast being a visionary one!

One of the key factors of success is certainly productivity, or  the ability to  increase productivity!  And this, nowadays more than ever, goes through technology.

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Let’s not forget that Mobility didn’t happen just yesterday; in fact, the sales process of the notorious Avon representative were, well… 100% mobile.

In short, we’re really Back to the Future nowadays, only now the nature of the Sales Process is executed in a different way; it’s entirely mobile or almost and mostly automated, stored, secured… and green!

Just to be clear, let’s reveal the true nature of the Sales Cycle of a typical Sales Force of today!

Mobility

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In today’s business reality, not only do we take for granted that the right information will be accessible anytime, anywhere but also that it will help us make more enlightened decisions instantaneously, on-the-go !

The ability to adjust our business offering in real-time, to make some real-time Marketing. It can constitute an undeniable competitive advantage.

Real-Time Marketing – first, a corporate vision

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Everybody talks about BI (Business Intelligence) and its virtues since a few years; everybody wants BI seeing in it a miracle remedy to its enterprise or Sales Force performance or thinking it could be the new growth vector they’re looking for. And probably with good reason but it can’t be done with a blink of an eye, there has to be a sound analysis done before mobilizing Business Intelligence!

Challenges of Business Intelligence

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