Sharepoint support in Scotland for workflow management

To administer documents potentially for compliance issues Sharepoint comes with a variety of predefined workflows (though you can design your own). Typical of the ready to go workflows are those for seeking approval, gaining comments, getting sign off and even time based expiry of documents.

Biztalk in Scotland – what is a Biztalk artifact

A Biztalk artifact simply refers to the various elements within Biztalk that makes the whole system operate. For instance Orchestrations, Pipelines and Ports are all Biztalks artifacts.

Web development in Scotland – images

Choosing images for your website can be hard work but needn’t be expensive. As web developers we use online stock image galleries which are relatively cheap. We tend to look for series of images so that we can keep a consistent feel through the site. And we also tend to prefer images on a white background so that they give maximum flexibility when laying out the website.

Sharepoint support in Scotland for document publishing

Sharepoint allows documents to be shared easily but importantly when a document is uploaded a workflow can be invoked – either from a predefined workflow list or a specific custom built workflow specific to you business. This ensures that review and approval can be managed and administered easily, ensuring your published documents meet your quality and compliance requirements.

Biztalk in Scotland – what is the Biztalk Business Rules Engine

The Business Rules Engine within Biztalk allows non technical folks to modift parameters to influence the underlying behaviour of the Biztalk system. It ensures that when simple changes are required that these can be made a t manager level rather than at a technical level.

Web developers in Scotland – layout

Once you have settled on a CMS you need to think about web layout. The web development capabilities of most CMS encourage the web developer to choose a layout template. That makes good sense and as you look around the web you will see that the vast majority of websites are laid out in a fixed column type style.

A good layout shouldn’t confuse the website visitor – so stick with something akin to a newspaper layout and you won’t go far wrong.

Sharepoint support in Scotland for wikis

Wikipedia may have trail blazed the way but more and more organizations are seeing the benefit of setting up their own internal wikis to ensure that best available information is presented to the workforce. Wikis within Sharepoint are an effective way of spreading knowledge throughout your business.

Biztalk in Scotland – what is Biztalk Business Activity Monitoring

BAM or Business Acitivity Monitoring in Biztalk is simply a way to monitor and report on the activities that Biztalk is carrying out. In essence it’s a reporting tool.

Web development in Scotland – we use DNN

The web development package we use is the unlikely named DotNetNuke – DNN. It’s written in .Net and as we are very experienced in Microsoft .Net development it made good sense. We have extended it significantly to add in lots and lots of extra functionality and capability.

Although a Microsoft based CMS it’s an open source package – BSD. That makes it a great platform to use are there are lots of experts out there.

Sharepoint support in Scotland for form creation and reliable data

Sharepoint provides the capability to create web based form to let your business gather information effectively. Forms can check data on entry to ensure that the data is valid before being stored in your databases.

Biztalk in Scotland – what is the Biztalk Orchestration Designer

The Biztalk Orchestration Designer is a visual designer to let you build simple flows to control activity based on the content of the messages passing through Biztalk. Because of its visual nature it allows designers and business analysts to discuss things easily.

Web developers in Scotland – choosing a CMS

You can shell out good cash and buy a CMS – not a bad idea but often Open Source CMS packages are a better deal. Maintained by legions of dedicated coders they can offer better support in some cases than commercially available packages.

Some CMS packages are tailored toward specific target markets – photographers for example. However it better to choose a more open and generic CMS as it is almost bound to have a richer feature set and will therefore be better when it comes to web development.

Sharepoint support in Scotland for enterprise content management

Enterprise Content Management within Sharepoint provides the content management you would expect but also embraces content other than website content such as documents and files. It also provides management control facilities to ensure that information is preapproved before going live.

Biztalk in Scotland – what is a Biztalk orchestration

In some cases it is important to do more than simply change the structure of a message as it passes through Biztalk. In those situations you can influence what should happen – ie you can orchestrate an activity such as a simple go/no go rule. To create the rules you use the Biztalk Orchestration Designer.

Web development in Scotland – get a CMS

CMS or Content Management Systems allow you to develop and maintain websites in a much more easy way than hacking around inside pages and pages of html. However, not all CMS packages are the same. To get the most out of any CMS package you will need some basic HTML coding skills and some CMS’s are better than others than providing this. So shop around and seek opinion. Make sure you can edit Metadata including image tag and description metadata. Almost all web developers will use a preferred CMS or work with a couple.

Sharepoint support in Scotland for portal creation

The word Portal now sounds sort of old fashioned and it’s better to simply say that Sharepoint allows enterprises to create websites whether internally or externally facing that are highly personalized based on the user/visitor and their permissions.

Biztalk in Scotland – what is a Biztalk pipeline

Once accepted incoming messages are passed along pipelines which, if required, can perform transformations on your data to ensure the outgoing message is compatible with the receiving system. The result is a highly efficient data transformation process allowing your systems to communicate effectively.

Web developers in Scotland – some guidelines

As web developers Web Wise Business are often put in a position of trust by our customers who look to us as the experts. So as a way to share some of our thoughts and to help explain what we do we thought we should document a few of what we believe are important web development guidelines.

Biztalk in Scotland – what is a Biztalk adapter

Biztalk accepts messages using a wide range of available adapters which are specific to the message in question, and as you would expect bespoke or custom adapters can be created. Your adapters can, therefore, be set up to cope with Web Services, SAP, Siebel, Oracle or IBM Webshere for example.

Sharepoint support in Scotland for collaboration

The key benefit around Sharepoint is Collaboration. Or in simpler language that means “working together”.

Teams of any size can benefit from the Sharepoint platform as it allows information to be shared easily – whether that is through it’s ability to assist in the sharing of documents or via blogs and wikis to keep information flowing around the enterprise.

Biztalk support in Scotland – what is Biztalk

We have added Biztalk to the range of services we offer as think the need for the product is now either at or just beyond the tipping point.

Biztalk allows disparate applications to communicate with each other regardless of the message types.

Because of that systems of differing types can communicate effectively. In addition Biztalk also provides the user with a Business Rules Engine in order that decisions can be taken based on the data being transferred.

Sharepoint support in Scotland

As software developers Objective Associates based in Stirling, Scotland have long used a wide range of Microsoft products. Now we have started to promote our services for businesses using Microsoft Sharepoint but have came to that point through an odd route.

For a good while we have been using the Open Source Dot Net Nuke product and have now extended the DNN CMS product so much we felt we should be offering our customers something complimentary.

Our extensive dot net skills and DNN developers allow us to tackle the most challenging projects and we have cracked a good many using DNN. So why the addition of Sharepoint to our portfolio?

Well it's not that DNN has failings or issues that we can't resolve it’s just that we know that customers like to be given a choice and often have their own views on what platforms they would prefer to use. So we have added Sharepoint to the portfolio and will be supporting Sharepoint in Scotland from now on. So from Open Source to Sharepoint - interesting route to get there.