Some of the CompanyNet team will be attending the Microsoft Ignite Conference at the end of September in Orlando, Florida. The event will showcase Microsoft’s products and services and provide an insight into “tomorrow’s tech”.
Power BI can connect to a wide variety of systems to collect data to drive reports and dashboards. But what if we want to consolidate data from multiple locations, such as a large number of dynamically created SharePoint lists, into a single dataset?
You might be tempted to first consolidate this data into a location such as Azure SQL, before connecting to that SQL database from Power BI. However, this isn’t actually necessary, as we can use Power BI’s own API to create a dataset into which we can push data directly, removing the need for a separate database.
This blog post outlines the steps involved in using the Power BI API to manage data. These are:
It was into this climate that CompanyNet was born. When we were founded in 1996, there were immediately lots of exciting new business opportunities to service – particularly building websites and portals, often based on Microsoft technologies.
Bespoke software development was the name of the game, and we enjoyed the challenges and satisfaction of coding custom systems.
Ten years later, inspired by a Microsoft Partner Conference, the business articulated a bold new strategic direction – platform-based development. Custom code was becoming relatively expensive to build and maintain, and new options were becoming available to customers, challenging the established business model. Platform-based development would become the basis of our future success.
In May 2017, Audit Scotland set out a number of principles to follow for customers in pursuit of a successful digital future. One of the principles was simply to:
“Be an intelligent client.”
The target audience for the recommendations was the public sector in Scotland. But the recommendations apply much more broadly than that – in the private sector, and way beyond Scotland’s shores.
In 2012, Audit Scotland had set out the main attributes for being an “intelligent client”. These were:
But these attributes all feel very dry, functional and transactional. They speak nothing of the customer-supplier relationship, of the emotive connection – a meeting of minds, mutual trust and professional respect.
Watching the video above, you might be left scratching your head. What would drive the mild-mannered employees of a successful IT business to commit an act of wanton destruction against an innocent server?
Look again. That server is anything but innocent. It’s the Sangoma Lync Express, and we hate it.
If you’ve ever tried to set up and use your own Lync server for voice communications, you might be nodding your head rather than scratching it. The destruction was a moment of pure catharsis – the purging of two years of pent-up frustration at an infuriating piece of technology that caused our business hours of pain and grief and cost.
How did it all start? What happened to let it get this far? And did it really catch fire? (No.)
But what is it, and is it more than just a repackaging of existing apps? Our infographic reveals all…
Businesses spend a lot of time thinking about the customer experience – whether that’s delivering an excellent service in person, or creating fulfilling interactions with the business online. But what about the digital experience for employees?
If the day-to-day experience for your workforce is inconsistent with the quality of service they’re expected to deliver to customers, you’re creating a breeding ground for problems. By not providing a great digital experience for your staff, you create issues that bubble just below the surface, harming retention rates for good employees and eating away at your bottom line.
At a fundamental level, employees who feel there’s a discrepancy between their experience of your business and its outward message simply won’t be engaged with their work. At best, that view leads to a cheapening of the experience they deliver to your customers; at worst, it will lead to staff leaving for pastures new.
Modern Publishing includes a fully-redesigned page editor which makes laying out content in SharePoint an extremely intuitive and satisfying experience. The process of creating and editing content is now easier than ever.
The changes mean you can copy and paste formatted text and tables directly from Word, without breaking them. Rather than going through a process of several steps to upload images, they can be dragged and dropped directly into the page. Editable multi-column layouts let you create more engaging-looking pages, and you can even embed colleague profiles and inline document previews.
The regulation has been in law since May 2016, but fortunately there has been a ‘grace period’ of two years to allow businesses to take advice, train staff and make their data and processes ready. That period comes to an end in May next year, so if you haven’t yet tackled GDPR, now is the time to do it.
This is a complex piece of legislation which will require every business to tighten up how it collects and processes data. Unlike previous regulations, which had punishments viewed by some as a ‘slap on the wrist’, GDPR will impose fines of up to €20 million or 4 per cent of your company’s turnover.