Enable Consulting LLC

What’s in your toolkit?

admin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:24:33 +0000

It used to be that we needed to carry around our box of 5 1/4″ floppys with all of the possible utilities that we’d need for a given day’s development work. That gave way to 3 1/2″ disks, CD’s, and now our own laptops, tablets, and flash drives. At this point I find that when working with customers, I can most often use my laptop which gives me access to the myriad of tools which I’ve acquired over the years. Still, sometimes, there will be situations where you’re constrained to be only within the client’s environment and your machine cannot be used. Even in those circumstances, you can usually plug in a flash-drive to exchange files.

So that all leads me here: sometimes you want to look at a database but cannot get access to the appropriate client. It just isn’t installed on the machine that you’re using, and you can’t remote to any machine that has it either. Enter “Query ExPlus“. This is a wonderful, self-contained 176K executable which lets you connect to SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC, and OLEDB databases. This tool is like a mini-SQL Management studio and the real beauty of it is that you can run it from a flash drive! There’s no installation required. Granted, it isn’t as fast or fully-featured as OEM front-ends, but it is a real life-saver when those tools aren’t available.

Query ExPlus is an Open Source application available on SourceForge here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/queryexplus/ as such, there’s minimal documentation and only community support is available.

I highly recommend you keep this one handy for the times when you just have to peek into that database but can’t, or don’t want the overhead of installing SQL Management Studio or another heavyweight DB UI.

Balsamiq Mockups: A kinder, gentler wireframing tool?

admin — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:43:20 +0000

Wireframes: as architects we all need to develop them. The question revolves around what tool to use. There are many schools of thought on this which range from the paper and pencil/pen method all the way up to creating a working prototype in your development tool of choice. I’ve fallen victim to using all of these methods and usually end up somewhere in the middle and spending too much time throwing together a mock-up which has to be tweaked a bunch before it is approved anyway.

Enter Balsamiq Studios (http://balsamiq.com) with Balsamiq Mockups, their Rapid Wireframing tool. Mockups gives you one step above paper and pencil mockups without having to do real development work to get your wireframes built. It gives you the ability to easily put together “low-fi”, sketch-type screens and build rudimentary interactions between them.

Mockups comes with several pre-built elements to make your life easier. There are menus, icons, lists, grids, textboxes and many many more. The application includes elements for client applications, web applications, mobile devices and you can download more from users who’ve shared ones they’ve built themselves from Balsamiq’s MockUpsToGo (http://mockupstogo.net) site. The elements all work as you’d expect. For example when you create a menu, you can choose a “selected” item and when you preview the wireframe, that item is appropriately highlighted. The toolbox also includes various “markup” elements which allow you to put callouts, sticky notes, and other information on the mockups. These can be used as reminders to ask questions or to clarify uses of the other screen elements when demonstrating the wireframe.

Each mockup is a single screen and is saved in its own file. All of the screens associated with an application are saved in a single filesystem folder. Almost any element you place on a mockup has the ability to link to another mockup. Another nice feature is that you can create a blank mockup, or copy the one you’re currently working on and use that as the basis for a new one. This copy feature is invaluable when linking mockups together so you don’t have to rebuild a mockup from scratch.

Once you have your wireframed application, you can preview it and walk through the screens using the links you’ve defined.

The product operates on all the usual platforms, exports to PNG, PDF, or XML formats. The Export function will also export all of the mockups in a single folder in a one operation so that you don’t have to do each screen separately.

There are many more features that I’ve not touched on but, suffice it to say, Mockups is an excellent, rapid wireframing tool which we’ll use over and over again as the starting point for our prototyping needs for the foreseeable future. This tool has become one of my favorites for the first steps in generating new prototypes. Lastly, its tongue-in-cheek user interface is great for developers. How many applications have a choice on the “help” menu that says “What should I make for dinner?”

Download the free 7-day trial and if you like it, buy it for $79, that’s cheap for what you get!

Enterprise Application Store & The Purposed Application

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:18:36 +0000

The iPhone App Store and similar mobile store models from Android and Blackberry have experienced tremendous consumer acceptance. Total downloads from the iPhone App Store alone recently crossed the ten billion mark. Applications come in all varieties and mash up a set of capabilities that deliver rich user experiences. The category of applications that has seen the highest adoption is social platform tools like FaceBook, Twitter and FourSquare. This rapid consumer adoption is now crossing over into the enterprise as business and IT organizations are being faced with the challenges of supporting this new class of mobile worker.

The one common element of App Store applications is that they are purposed for a specific target solution. Enterprise applications, on the other hand, tend to incorporate the full functionality of a business process within their design. Organizations that have taken the first step to extract important business functionality from existing applications have turned to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The SOA model enables the decomposition and access to business logic and data layers – enabling externalization of the most critical functions. This results in the ability to share services across the enterprise as well as externally to partners and others within the organization’s business ecosystem.

SOA makes the design of an Enterprise App store possible by developing purposed applications that integrate with externalized services to perform specific business functions. Examples of purposed applications in the Enterprise App store could include:

Decomposition of CRM processes into the most used functions such as capturing an Activity, scheduling, or Contact entry.
Delivery of purposed HRIS capabilities like time reporting, benefits management, time off and Company Handbook
Streamlining of corporate portal Personal Profile Management and Company News

An Enterprise App Store has some very tangible benefits for the enterprise:

Users can provision applications that are important to their business function
Application simplification is made possible – each component app has a specific purpose, making it easier for users to learn and thus reducing training and support overhead
Automatic updating of applications – users don’t need to be concerned about what version they are running as the latest will be pushed to the device
Installation and removal of applications is seamless, using the capabilities of the device’s operating system
Application components execute in a mode understood by the user alongside other applications

There are six technical factors to determine organizational readiness for an Enterprise App Store:

Is mobility adoption on the rise with demand coming from field or remote users?
Has there been a history of complexity challenges in existing application interfaces?
Can specific and frequently used pathways through existing applications be segmented as standalone capabilities?
Is the application development approach iterative?
Is SOA design an element of the overall IT architecture?
Can security architecture and mobile device management be delivered?

Organizations looking at future architectures must consider incorporating the Enterprise App store model and SOA approach to streamline interfaces and deliver applications that meet the needs of today’s mobile workforce. Let us know what is happening on this topic within your organization by responding to the post.

Integrating with Cloud-Based Applications: Where should I host it?

admin — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 20:45:39 +0000

One of the trends we’re seeing recently is a growing business need for integrating internal business applications and data with cloud-based applications. Our experience in this space is mostly with SFA & CRM applications and, of course, the ubiquitous Google applications and services. As these applications are often targeted at the sales force, there are moderate numbers of users (100s-10s of thousands) with high availability requirements.

SOA is the de facto standard for integration with most cloud-based applications, so there’s no real architectural barrier to integrating with them – no matter where you host.

Factors to consider include:

Are all of the internal applications/data that you need exposed via SOA?

Many businesses have already jumped on the SOA bandwagon, and already expose much of their internal data through SOA. Where there is a gap, you will need to plan for the development effort of creating a new service.

How data-intensive are the planned transactions?

While SOA is great for easily implementing interfaces, latency and perhaps bandwidth may require other approaches. Possibilities include caching data within the cloud and/or replicating data into a cloud-based database.

How secure does the data need to be?

You obviously give up some control when pushing applications and data into the cloud. However, the cloud providers have a large financial interest in implementing and enforcing security.

Do you have the infrastructure required to support the application with its availability and performance requirements – and is it cost-effective?

For many companies that have an existing infrastructure, the incremental cost of supporting the integration application may be more than the cost of deploying it into the cloud.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes a lot of sense to host business critical applications in the cloud. For most organizations it’s easier & cheaper. You get redundancy and scalability.