2016Spring

Newsletter

We bring the solutions

Since2005

Three-one-two-twoHill Street

Duluth, Georgia

Your Client Needs UX[They just don’t realize it yet]

Most people know that UX stands for User Experience, but that is like saying IA means Innovative Architects. What does that really mean for current and prospective clients? Why should your clients care

about UX when scoping a project? Here’s a hint…UX is not just drawing pretty pictures!

What is UX?

UX is total engagement of the customer. It encompasses not only the usability of a product, but the overall feeling a specific user or users get when using a product. It requires understanding all of the

users and tailoring the experience to each individual user’s needs.

At IA, what is the creative process?

Our process is straight forward: Kick-Off Design Develop Deliver. During the kick-off, the key is defining the users (their needs and wants) and understanding what the corporate brand stands for. Next,

during the design phase, the creative team not only sketches out ideas, but creates site-flow diagrams, wireframes, and any other layout details. The design phase is very similar to the way a cartoonist will

create storyboards for each frame of a TV episode. During the development phase, code is written (yes, even the creative team uses tools such as HTML, CSS, JS, and .NET). Once QA and testing have been

completed, the finished product is handed off to the client.

What is the business impact?

At a quick glance, you may think about creative as simply more billable hours. However, the true impact of creative is additional breadth to a project. UX can be utilized in most every project IA takes part in.

From mobile apps to SharePoint, most projects will benefit and greatly increase by getting the Creative team involved.

What are some common misconceptions about the team?

Many think that UX is a design and hand off type discipline, which is not true. Usually the creative team are involved throughout the entirety of a project. They work closely with UI and development. From

kick-off to QA/UAT cycles, UX is involved.

It’s not just drawing pretty pictures. While the end result is pretty and polished, the key takeaway is a direct interpretation and implementation of the clients’ goals.

How should I get UX involved in my project?

Every popular software product in use today has in benefited from a User Experience team. If users are involved, a UX team should be utilized for everyone’s benefit. If you’d like to find out more about UX or brainstorm ways to incorporate creative into your existing clients and projects, reach out to Jared (and if

you’re lucky, he’ll draw you a pretty picture)!

What are some projects the team has worked on?Winshape Camps, NAMB Cooperative Donations (and other NAMB Projects), NIET, and many more!

How to keep Michelle from cussing when processing your expense reports

1. PUT YOUR NAME ON YOUR #$@&%*! EXPENSE REPORT!!!!

2. Please put the Client name and specific project if billable to the Client, please don’t make me guess.

3. Turn your expense reports in on time, this means within 7 days after your trip.

4. Make sure the dates are correct and remember to change the dates from the expense report template or last report you completed.

5. Make sure we have detailed receipts and that they match the submitted expense report.

6. If an item is for more than one person (rental car, meals) please note that on your expense report with who is included.

7. If you have a rental car that is com-pany paid please make note of this in the Notes column (ie, Company paid Enterprise Rental $124.57) but please don’t enter the amount in the totals column.

8. Mileage is $0.56 this year. This is the IRS guidance.

9. When you submit your finished expense report via the IA Portal, please enter your First and Last Name and submission date in the “Title” space provided.

Andy Carmichael

If you had your human body, but the head of an

animal, what animal would you pick?

If you didn’t need a job, were healthy, and had plenty of time, what

would you do?

When meeting someone for the first time, what is

the biggest misconception they have about you?

Meet The Newbies

Elephant. They are intelligent, have great

hearing, an awesome trunk and I think it would fit my body type!

Andy Carmichael

Samara Duncan

Michelle Gibbs

Eugenio Holgado

Mike Lawson

Stewart Southwell

Sriram Swaminathan

Give my kids the best education money could afford and travel with my family.

I definitely would go for a PhD in computer science as a mental exercise

and as an example to my children.

That because I am initially quiet, I am not a nice person. It takes me a little while to warm up to people.

Penguin. I already waddle like a penguin and squawk like a penguin,

might as well look like one too.

Honestly, I can't think of anything I'd rather do than write code. I love

building things, and while I might be writing games instead of business tools, I'd still have to make some-

thing.

I definitely have a "quiet" mode and a "social" mode. When I meet someone

and I'm in quiet mode it can be quite a surprise when I start talking up a

storm.

A Dalmatian, so I’d fit in with the pack at home.

Have a farm with horses, dogs and cats.

Most people think I am younger than I am.

A pink unicorn. Who wouldn’t want a horn? The color pink best

represents my personality and soul. Also, unicorns don’t forget

to answer questions in the survey.

I would pick a dog – Pug specifically. I think a pug’s face would look the best

with my body-type.

Probably an owl, because they are a hoot.

If the choice is based on behavioral attributes, my actual spirit

animal is a Raven as ‘Raven’ people tend to be very introspective and savor time

spent alone. things less of a chore.

I would prefer to have the head of the cow, because a cow is a gentle animal and it is helpful to humans in more than one way. I would like to live by that standard throughout

my life.

TV, Netflix, Reading (a lot). Pretty much what I do now!

Somehow I don’t think this is the expected answer.

I would like to travel and explore the world.

That I am shy and an introvert

I apparently sometimes exhibit rage face even though I am not mad! I just hide my emotions behind a cool façade. I am not mad at you or unhappy. I just

don’t emote!

I would create a Pug Rescue farm and rescue all

unwanted pugs in the world.

People think I am a serious person, too serious. I think it’s my facial

expression or something. In reality, I try not to take myself too

seriously and appreciate a good sense of humor, in myself and

others.

Ride around the world on my motorcycle. Over 200 countries to

visit!

People sometimes assume I am not really friendly because I like to keep it to

myself when I'm working in a difficult project; I get absorbed by the task at

hand and I REALLY want to deliver no matter what, but I love being around

people.

If you had your human body, but the head of an

animal, what animal would you pick?

If you didn’t need a job, were healthy, and had plenty of time, what

would you do?

When meeting someone for the first time, what is

the biggest misconception they have about you?

Meet The Newbies: Part 2

A Penguin.

John Catalano

Dale Edmonson

Jeremy Collier

Take photos, play music and help people.

Not sure...

Corgi. They’re the best dogs. I would start my own game design company

People usually think that I’m really quiet when they first meet me.

Chimpanzee Build customized cars and write code for charity organizations.

I don’t recall a specific misconception when meeting someone for the first time.

Should that happen, I would want to clear it up directly with the person as

soon as possible so I wold not make the same mistake again.

Eagle or Hawk Powerlift all day, every day

Joseph Chism

THIS IS NOT A GLITCH

Brandon Seda

Keith Beindorf

A sphinx.I would still want to be

developing software, but I’d probably spend my efforts creating applications for charity

organizations. I’d also spend much more time travelling and

woodworking.

Most likely, the biggest misconception is that I’m very reserved, when I really

only tend to seem that way under new situations.

I would say a lion—as long as it includes the cool growl

I would travel and eat like Guy Fieri

For some reason people think that I am intimidating, particularly new

staff or friends of my kids

Probably that I’m a lot more serious than I really am.

Braves Night

Friday, May 27, The company had a family night out to a Braves baseball game! 250 Folks showed up, there were hugs to be had and peanuts to be shared.

Thanks to everyone who came out! IA loves and enjoys getting to treat the employees and their families in this way, that’s why we’re the best!

SharePointSharePoint infrastructure with cloud makes the most of Office 365

products and has become a popular and successful computing model. Organizations use it to reduce their capital and operational expenditures and to gain the advantage of rapid software delivery

to meet their business needs. SharePoint can be used for many things: storing documents, collaborating with colleagues on

projects, publishing departmental information, and even managing common processes like time off requests and expense reports. It is

hard to define since it offers many capabilities, but generally it provides a flexible platform to enable you and your colleagues to

get work done. The great part is that all you need is a web browser and you can begin.

There are two types of SharePoint: one that is run on your compa-ny’s servers, and one that is hosted by Microsoft through Office

365. From the user’s perspective, there is little difference between SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online in Office 365-- they both

offer great ways to collaborate and are accessed through a web browser. Features within Delve and Yammer give more flexibility for dashboard, management, and statistics. Users can make use of

collaboration features within Skype for Business, and explore federation with external users through integration with Outlook,

OWA, web access, client options, and mobile access.

Training Link : https://mva.microsoft.com/product-train-ing/sharepoint#!lang=1033

BizTalkBizTalk is an industry initiative headed by Microsoft to promote Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the common data exchange language for e-commerce and application integration on the Internet. While not a standards body per se, the group is fostering a common XML message-passing architecture to tie systems together. BizTalk says that the growth of e-commerce requires businesses using different computer technologies to have a means to share data. BizTalk Server 2013 provides capabilities to transfer messages using different relay endpoints hosted on Azure, consume and expose restful services, and sending and receiving messages from an SFTP server. It removed the need for dependency on SharePoint farms, while still providing backward compatibility. Since ESB Toolkit is now fully integrated with BizTalk Server, dependencies between artifacts can now be viewed and navigated in the Admin console and it provides the ability to set host handler per adapter, instead of always using the default.

BizTalk is currently moving in the direction of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The current version will let you run your production BizTalk environment completely in Azure without relying on a third party hosting service. This provides a great opportunity to setup your development and QA environments without the pain of a long procurement processes within your organization to provision such environments.

Training Link:Http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/arti-

cles/14598.training-resources-for-biztalk-developers.aspx#q

Microsoft Tricks

By: Sriram Swaminathan

Azure for Data ProsData recovery is a major consideration for IT Pros in any organization. Azure SQL Database provides full-scale, high-availability disaster recovery options that can support a variety of business needs. Since these options are built into the product from the ground up, and they require no administrative overhead or complexity. Azure is based on Windows, so you can write applications in the same programming languages you've used for Windows apps: Visual Basic, C++, C#, etc.

Applications running on Azure run in virtual machines, with each instance of the app running in its own VM on the 64-bit Windows Server 2008 operating system. The cost of creating, testing, debugging, and distributing Web-based applications goes down because you only have to pay for the computer processing time and storage space you need at a given time. You get high availability and reliability with redundant copies of your data and automatic failover. No more worries about backing up data yourself.

You can take advantage of the well-established support structure within Microsoft and company-provided resources, such as TechNet and MSDN, along with the huge ecosystem of Windows developers outside the company. With Azure, you can develop hybrid applications that allow your on-premises applications to use cloud services, such as the cloud database and storage services. Communications services work between on-premises applications and the cloud, as well as mobile devices. Custom software developers can create software solutions for customers who can't afford the costs of in-house development, including hardware costs, and they can deliver their applications to customers as services without building and maintaining an expensive data center.Training Link: https://mva.microsoft.com/product-train-ing/microsoft-azure#!lang=1033

Technology Practices Are Coming to IA in 2016By: Samara Duncan

What Is a Technology Practice? IA offers a large variety of technical solutions to clients. Practices will help the IA team work together to stay on top of new technologies and best practices within each area. Initially, we will establish 8 practices.

1) Data Services & Integration: How do I manage information coming from or going to multiple sources and formats? If thisquestion fascinates you, you might want to join this focus.

2) Infrastructure & Cloud Platform: Great software is useless without the right hardware to run it on. If you love the nuts andbolts of technology, then you may want to look into this practice.

3) UI & Mobile: The best software in the world will remain untouched if users can’t understand how to make it work. Creating agreat UI on any size is a challenge that most of us face at some point.

4) Enterprise Architecture: It is easy to get caught up in the details. Enterprise Architecture is all about learning to maintain thebig picture guidelines for the future of client’s business.

5) BI & Data Architecture: Business’s live and die on their ability to organize and make use of their data. This practice is devotedto learning how to do this efficiently and effectively.

6) Strategy & Roadmap: Sometimes the problem isn’t specific, but needing an overall operational plan. If you beat all your friendsat Risk when you were a kid, this practice might be the place for you.

7) Application Development: Businesses need great tools to operate effectively. If you enjoy building things that people will useon a daily basis, this may be your new home.

8) Collaboration: In order for a business to be effective people need to be able to communicate effectively. This practice is a greatplace for people who love to help others find ways work together.

How Do I Join a Practice? If you would like to get involved with one of these practices, either in leadership or as a participate, email Rich.

Meet The

Interns:What did you learn your first

week at IA?

The biggest thing I learned in my first week is that this environment is perfect for hitting the ground running. Nobody is afraid to throw me into something completely overwhelming, and everyone is glad to answer questions that I have. With this, it’s easy for me to get the work done that I need to, while also learning things on my own (such as databases and visual studio) without having to worry about getting stuck on a problem.

I learned that client relations play a big role in this business. By listening and watching people here talk to their clients, I found that they respect them and care about what they are doing in their life. This as I have seen, plays a big role in client relations here at IA.

My first week at IA, Dan invited me onto a conference call, the whole company wore their PJsto the quarterly meeting, tattooday was mentione and I photo-shopped Scott’s head next to a giant blizzard. So out of that entire compilation, I learned to always be ready for anything. Work Hard, Play Hard as Alan would say. And to always have headphones handy in IASouth.

During my first week at IA, I’velearned a lot of things. IA isn’t acompany with cubicles nor is it acompany where you sit in thecorner and code all day. This is anenvironment where you meet andtalk with people- if you don’t dothat you are actually hinderingyourself. I’ve also learned that theonly thing everyone cares about istaking the interns to lunch.

Azure :the new playground for developers

Infrastructure guys love the cloud. Recently, it's becoming clear that developers love it too! Mic-rosoft's cloud services are the future of the company and Microsoft is doing all it can to bring developers to Azure -- not just the existing crowd of .Net folks but developers from all walks of life (Interesting side note, they are installing datacenters underwater…).

Microsoft's next step is to make Azure into something developers can directly leverage, and not just by renting a slice of Microsoft's data center, as everyone else does.

The next big attraction is Azure Service Fabric, which are the same tools used to build the Azure applications in use today. The plan is to allow devs to deploy those bits on their own local instances of Windows Server and run Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers on that fabric to create their own hybrid cloud for PaaS micro services. The maintenance ops people would normally be expected to figure out (features like updating, rolling back, health monitor-ing, auto-scaling and load balancing in the field) are now built into the product. Developers will spend less time architecting and more time developing.

If the industry is leaving VMs for container technology for apps that scale, Microsoft wants to be part of that -- not just by offering container technologies of its own or interoperating with existing ones, but by making the move to containers as easy and pre-packaged as possible. The less people have flashbacks to their last OpenStack experience, the better.

Microsoft might well offer Azure Service Fabric under an open license. Combine that with the freshly open sourced language and development tools also under Microsoft's realm, and it's possible the Fabric might end up swaddling more than just Windows and Microsoft developers.

One thing Microsoft's not giving away are cloud services like Visual Studio Online. Those are guaranteed to remain for-pay resources, even as many of the pieces (like .Net) become commodi-ties.

The latest wave of Azure improvements is aimed at satisfying core Microsoft developers. Azure App Services, for instance, takes a group of Azure and Microsoft services (the two are becoming interchangeable) and makes them available to app developers in a friendly way.

Microsoft's cloud plans are broader than any one glance might hint at. By the company's own definition, its cloud doesn't just include Azure, but everything from Office 365 to Power BI as well. Azure underpins it all and ties it all together. As developers are empowered to make use of it, Azure will seem like a genuinely transformative offering.

Eugenio Holgado

Microsoft’s Roadmap for Reporting: Power BI and Beyond!

For close to a decade, Microsoft has been recognized as a leader in the area of BI and reporting and for nearly just as long, Reporting Services has not changed. That is, until now. With the release of SQL Server 2016, we are set to see some amazing changes in this venerable component of the BI-stack, and as Micro-soft’s own Patrick LeBlanc puts it, “Reporting is sexy again!” Microsoft’s stated objective is to, “…put the power of data in the hands of every business and person on the planet. It is our objective to serve over a billion users with the Microsoft business intelligence (BI) platform”. And how do they intend to get such

market share? By offering the most comprehensive and alluring suite of tools at the most competitive price point.

First, there’s what MS is now calling “Paginated Reporting”. This is SSRS. But it’s not your daddy’s SSRS. SSRS 2016 is HTML5 and CSS3 compliant. It’s got the fresh look and feel of a modern web application, but with the same great functionality that allows for allow for exact placement of elements on a page and com-plex display logic. Paginated reports are meant for on premise reporting. Next, there is “Interactive Report-

ing”, otherwise known as Power BI. Power-BI is both cloud-based as well as on premise and in terms of capabilities, think Tableau, but with a MS twist and price-point (Tableau is a notoriously expensive dash-

boarding tool).

Then we have “Mobile Reporting”. Built on a recent acquisition, DataZen, this technology is truly mobile-first. It has its own report-authoring client tool and is integrated with SSRS Report Manager for a single admin interface. Furthermore, all your content created in SSRS (Paginated and Mobile) is available for your Power BI dashboards (additional configuration is required but it can be done). Last but not least,

we still have Excel for all those Excel people out there who just can’t live without it. IA’s own Jason Russell has this to say about Power BI: “Power BI allows users to easily create powerful, interactive data visualiza-

tions from multiple data sources. The dashboard functionality allows relatively untrained users to put a “Wow” factor in reports that can’t be replicated with other BI tools. This ease of use allows IA to quickly

create demos to users to showcase possibilities of data reporting.”

I’ve been working with Microsoft’s BI Stack since the beginning (SQL Server 2005). I found the tools so great and so much fun to work with, I left the cold, harsh world of Oracle behind and have not looked back. But

for quite some time, it’s been clear that while other areas of MS BI and SQL Server itself have enjoyed a steady pace of evolution, SSRS was always left behind. Until now. It’s back and it is cool. Watch out Tableau!

Microsoft is gunning for you and Power BI has just the right mix of features and cost that you should be nervous. And that’s not all, because Power BI is just one component of this broad offering that is well poised

to get to that goal of 1 billion users.

- Mike Lawson-

P o w e r b i