Microsoft’s New ‘Spaces’ Feature and What it Means for Your Business
The Verge recently published an article about a video leak of Microsoft’s new ‘Spaces’ project, which is designed help you organize your O365 emails, meetings, and docs into project spaces. This follows the trend we see in general, which is that people are moving away from centralization of both Content and Collaboration.
Rather than monolithic intranet projects which are top-down content production, we see distributed teams …Read More
React Native vs. Xamarin in 2020
We’ve recently been developing a mobile app using Xamarin, a departure from our usual stack of React Native for mobile apps. Both frameworks allow for cross-platform development. This means that we can write the code once, and have it work on both iOS and Android. Normally, these two operating systems use two completely different programming languages and completely different APIs to access them. So cross-platform …Read More
Three Office 365 Trends to Pay Attention To
If you are already using Office 365, or if you are considering switching from an on-premises environment, you should pay attention to how the platform is evolving. Microsoft regularly pushes out changes (take a look at their robust Microsoft 365 product roadmap if you don’t believe me) and unless you are scanning the horizon and letting your users know about upcoming tweaks, they may be …Read More
The Landscape of Big Data Analytics and Visualization
Are you considering which of the big data analytics and visualization tools will work best for you? For our money, Tableau is leading the pack. However, there are several competitors who offer some interesting options. Here is a look at a few of those.
Please keep in mind this is a high-level sampling of capabilities mostly pulled from company websites and customer feedback where we can find …Read More
Seriously, Where Are All the Computer Idioms?
Idioms are far from uncommon throughout the technology industry. Whether you’re in software or hardware development or handle the business end of an IT company, you’re going to hear phrases such as kill two birds with one stone, bells, and whistles, everything’s running ship-shape, and in Layman’s terms, just to name a few.
These expressions are shorthand for the much more complex processes going on, keeping communications between developers quick …Read More
What Is AWS S3?
Amazon’s AWS S3 is a versatile, economical, and safe way of storing data objects in the cloud. The name stands for “Simple Storage Service,” and it provides a simple organization for storing and retrieving information. Unlike a database, it doesn’t do anything fancy. It does one thing: letting you store as much data as you want. Its data is stored redundantly across multiple sites. That …Read More
AWS Lambda vs. Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Lambda vs Elastic Beanstalk
You’re contemplating a software migration from your own servers to cloud hosting. There are many ways to do it, with varying options. This article looks at two of them from Amazon Web Services: Lambda and Elastic Beanstalk. Both are great choices, but they serve different purposes. Lambda is simpler and less expensive, while Elastic Beanstalk lets you run full applications and …Read More
Designing an Application for the Cloud | A Case Study
Case Study Overview
Our team designed a cloud-based solution using AWS Lambda, AWS S3, Docker Containers on AWS Fargate, AWS Step Functions, AWS API Gateway, AWS RDS, and Slack integration in order to allow for intermittent, heavy compute by a company analyzing data collected via drone for the agriculture industry.
Project Background
Our team recently put together a design to solve a pretty interesting problem that an innovative …Read More
The Benefits of the Cloud and What Prevents Adoption
Entrance Founder Nate Richards talking about the benefits the cloud can provide to you and what keeps people from adopting the cloud. Transcript:
The cloud itself allows companies to rapidly deploy new technologies inside the company.
It used to be that companies had to go and buy servers, which means they had to figure out the hardware, figure out the connectivity, figure out the backup, figure …Read More
AWS Lambda and the Hybrid Cloud | Get Your App Off the Ground
This article will detail how to use the hybrid cloud and AWS services to get a custom app off the ground and quickly and inexpensively.
You’ve got an app that’s so badly outdated it looks like it was cobbled together from tree branches and the hide of a mastodon during the Internet’s Stone Age. You want to bring that ancient app into the 21st Century by …Read More
AWS Lambda and Virtual Machines | Use Cases and Pricing
This article compares AWS Lambda and virtual machines, discussing when to use each and digging into pricing.
A virtual machine isn’t the only way to get computing power on AWS, and it isn’t always the most cost-effective. Sometimes you just need to set up a service that will perform a task on demand, and you don’t care about the file system or runtime environment. For cases …Read More
Why SharePoint and O365 Implementations Go Wrong
Our Director of Consulting, Carol Donnelly, talking about why SharePoint implementations go wrong and what you can do about it.
Transcript:
There’s a number of reasons why I see SharePoint implementations go awry. One of the biggest reasons is thinking that people who aren’t implementing SharePoint on the daily, on the weekly, are going to come in and implement a SharePoint solution for their organization and it’s going to take …Read More
Why People Choose Custom Software
Entrance founder Nate Richards talking about the unique value that custom software brings to business (Transcript Below)
As a business why would you consider custom software today when there’s so much available off the shelf? Number one is, the off the shelf software is built for the lowest common denominator in the industry so that it can be implemented over and over and over and over. …Read More
What is AWS Lambda-And Why You’re About to Become a Huge Fan
What is AWS Lambda to someone like you who hates wasting money and losing sleep at night? Everything. Because AWS Lambda is a sweet piece of worry-free tech you pay for only when it’s actually doing its thing.
And its thing is running code. Your code.
If there’s no need for code to run, then Lambda goes silent and does nothing. It can lounge around by the …Read More
n Reasons to Embrace Serverless Architectures in 2018
Serverless architecture is here, it’s been proven, and companies from start-ups to Fortune 500 are jumping on this rapidly evolving bandwagon. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, read this first and then come back so I can convince you why you should want this.
1 – Avoid Under-Utilization
This one should be obvious, but it is the primary reason serverless is my preferred design approach, so …Read More
What is Serverless Architecture?
The fundamental theme is to get servers out of the path of software development and focus on building features unique to your product or solution. However, there are several competing cloud providers and a rich marketplace of third-party services, so it can be difficult to navigate when trying to get started. There are also several tiers of serverless offerings, ranging from the DIY to the …Read More
How Lightweight, Low-Cost Tools Allow Small Businesses to Create and Market Custom Software
Our Engineering Manager, Kenny, recently wrote an explanatory article on a modern approach to software development that we’ve created that embraces open-source tools and services. This approach minimizes server footprint and licensing costs, spreads up-front costs over the life of the product, and ties expenses to product usage.
Kenny’s article explores the technology that makes all this possible. For this blog, I wanted to reflect on …Read More
The Entrance ‘What, Why?’ Series: React Edition
Welcome to the ‘What, Why?’ series hosted by Entrance. The goal of this series is to take different technologies and examine them from a technical perspective to give our readers a better understanding of what they have to offer. The web is filled with tons of resources on just about anything you could imagine, so it can be really challenging to filter out all of …Read More
4 Ways Engineering and Construction Firms Use Big Data
HOW SMART, TECH-DRIVEN ENGINEERING & CONSTRUCTION FIRMS ARE USING BIG DATA TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS AND REDUCE PROJECT COSTS.
“Big Data” is one of those buzzwords you hear a lot in the tech world, but what does it mean for the engineering and construction world? As our business moves into the digital world, we’re amassing huge amounts of data: everything from reports, to GPS data, RFID …Read More
Taking the SharePoint Framework for a Test Drive, Part 1
The developer preview for SharePoint Framework was announced late last week, so I decided to work through the ramp-up tutorials and offer my initial impressions. I hope this will help you avoid a couple of stumbling blocks that I encountered and get you thinking about this new (and imo, very cool) way of approaching SharePoint customization.
If you’re not familiar with what the SharePoint Framework is, …Read More
