Helping your business to do more business
At Convallis we've been working with .Net 4 for some time and while WCF Data Services has been around (under a different name) since .Net 3.5 Sp1 we hadn't dabbled. However, while implementing a new feature for online ConvallisCRM which required a Silverlight component I decided to experiment with Data Services to provide the Web Services needed by the Silverlight component to exchange data with.
I watched a programme on TV last night called 'Dispatches Undercover Social Worker', it was a secret camera type investigative report where a reporter had gone to work for Surrey Social Services department for 3 months as a support officer. It was disturbing to see that people who by and large cared about what they were doing were hampered by having to fill in a lot of forms after having visited a child at home. A lot more time was spent form filling than in actually helping the child, with many of the workers feeling distress and frustration at a system which values form filling over the protection of the children themselves!
I don't think this is a technology I've ever mentioned before, partly because the reports I build for the applications I write tend to be embedded in the application. But that doesn't mean that I haven't dabbled with it and my increasing interest in Business Intelligence has meant that I've spent more time with it over the past few weeks!
What do you do with the details of the contacts that you meet? In business when we meet new people we seem to invariably exchange business cards. That's great, as we end up with a card giving details of how to contact the person that we've just met. But what do we do with those details? Do we retain the business cards or store them on the computer somehow? For small businesses it seems to be an enduring problem, which people solve in a wide variety of ways. Many realise that the 'best' answer involves some form of database and so the simplest database of all, Microsoft Excel, gets roped into the solution.
This is one of the big buzz words in the database world at the moment. It can mean many different things, at the high end we could be referring to the results of processes such as data mining, whereas I tend to think of it as the value gained from very specific targeted queries that you may well have turned into a report.