mrc's Cup of Joe Blog

Join us in exploring the world of modern development, evolving technologies, and the art of future-proof software

Year: 2011

Stop wasting money on legacy application maintenance

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Save MoneyAccording to a recent survey, the federal government spends $35 billion every year maintaining legacy applications. In other words, it costs $35 billion dollars just to keep everything running smoothly. When I hear numbers like this, a couple of questions immediately come to mind. How do they determine maintenance cost? How much would it cost to maintain modern applications?

I think the better question is this: Why is maintenance for legacy applications more expensive than maintenance for modern applications? After all, if you modernized your applications, you would have to maintain the new applications too. What makes legacy application maintenance so expensive? While I’m sure there are more, here are 4 big reasons: …

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Create business dashboards the easy way

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Save TimeWhy don’t you have business dashboards yet? In my experience, if a company doesn’t have business dashboards, it’s usually for one of two reasons: Either they don’t see the value, or they think it’s too difficult.

What’s the value of a business dashboard? A good dashboard gives you a clear view of your business, improves your decision making, and helps you find problems before they get out of hand. …

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Mobile applications: Why architecture matters

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Save TimeA couple of months ago, I wrote up my thoughts on developing mobile applications for business. In short, I believe that creating web apps designed for mobile use makes more business sense than creating platform-specific applications. I’d like to go one step further and explain how this concept works from an architectural perspective.

First, you must understand n-Tier architecture. While this sounds like a complicated technical term, I assure you that it’s relatively simple and makes sense from a business perspective. In short, n-Tier architecture breaks an application up into separate layers, or tiers. Typically, there’s a presentation layer (what you see in the browser), an application layer (your business logic), and a database layer (data storage). …

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2 ways a portal will help business (and how to make one)

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Save TimeA customer portal (or customer extranet) is a secure area of your website designed for your customers. They can log in and perform a number of different tasks, such as pay their bill, view their information, purchase new products, ask a question, etc… If your business has customers (and I hope that it does), you should really have a portal set up. Why? I could rattle off a number of reasons, but here are the two biggest ways a portal/extranet will help your business: …

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4 reasons why software purchases fail

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Save MoneyHave you ever been in a “blame” meeting? It’s one of those meetings called when numbers are down or after a project or purchase failed miserably. As you might guess, there’s a lot of finger pointing and blame spreading. Not only are these meetings painful, they are completely unproductive. Since everyone is too busy deflecting blame, no one learns from their mistakes.

I’d like to help you avoid these meetings. Obviously, I can’t write a definitive guide on how to avoid failure, as every business and situation is different. However, I can help you avoid failure in one area that applies to most companies: Software purchases. In my experience, software purchases usually fail for one of four reasons. I’d like to explain those reasons and then tell you how to avoid them. …

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