Announcing mrc's new customer portal

mrc's newly re-designed Customer portal was created using m-Power and has more of a dashboard feel. Here's what you can do with it:

Reactive to proactive: How to escape the 80-20 Rut

This article in Computerworld, "Escape the 80-20 Rut" is a great little follow up to the white paper we discussed last week about determining the value of your IT projects.

This article gives you some other ideas on how to save by creating a consolidation strategy, and as they put it: "The goal is to free up dollars and personnel from maintenance and management tasks and create an infrastructure flexible enough to react to business changes and problems."

The secret to finding the Value of IT might all be in where you look.

In a recent poll by CIO Insight, 94% of IT executives at companies that don't measure any ROI say that it's because it's too difficult to calculate.

But perhaps we're making it too complicated. Here are some quick and dirty measurements you can pull together to create a better understanding of the value of your IT projects.

This article by one independent IT research firm gives you the high points to predicting ROI to help establish the value of your IT initiatives:
Measuring your Return on Investment: Quick Reference Guide»

And here's one of ours, containing a lot of good general information about where to find value in Web initiatives Determining the Value of Delivering Web initiatives with m-Power»

What SQL Server Magazine has to say about m-Power

Have you seen the recent blurb on mrc in July's edition of SQL Server Magazine?

It talks about how m-Power has helped solve the universal problem: how to get business intelligence to users in the form they need it...when they need it.

Read it here»

Cool Web Typography Tool you should know about

After your crash course last week on the basics of Web Typography, here's a free, and easy-to-use tool to help you pick and choose the look of the text on your Web site.

The tool, called Typetester is used via the Web, and it will help you to drive home that Typography knowledge you picked up in last week's article.

A link to the tool, and some quick pointers on how to use it, is located in this new Forum post.

The future of e-mail

Technologies emerging from R&D labs will make e-mail more productive and give it new roles in the next few years.

This article gives insights from industry experts about what we can expect from email in the future.

Breathe new life into your applications...by freshening up your look.

One unique benefit to mrc's new drag-and-drop m-Painter feature and n-tier flexibility, is that it's easy to quickly change the look, and often breathe new life (as user applications) into old applications.

1) 2)
3)

Above is the exact same application with 3 different looks. (You can click on them to see a larger version.)

1) The first app, on the top left, helps you drill down to the customer you are looking for by a number of criteria.

2) The second app also helps you filter by criteria to find the customer you are seeking. There are some navigation changes, and the links are icons. Overall look and feel is different.

3) The third application includes more intuitive navigation along the left side, and the icon of the m-Power bar links to a maintainance application to allow outside users to update their information in one step.

Enterprise portals: A set of pre-built apps and a place to host them isn't enough.

If you're considering building a portal, this article might be helpful.

One interesting point it makes is: "A portal may provide a nice set of built-in applications that can get you off the ground in a short period of time. In reality though, what often happens is that portals prove to be just the tip of the iceberg, with much more work to customize and integrate the various layers than most customers expect."

The secret, is knowing how to create those customized and integrated portal applications on your own in a fast and efficient way.

If you'd like to get started, but aren't sure how to serve a portal, here's a list of Portal vendors you might want to check out.

Web Design Tips: Navigation

With all you have to do in IT, no one expects you to be a Web designer too.

Or do they?

Here's a new section in our User Forum we've added called Web Design Tips, to give you the basic tenets of Web design to help you keep your applications looking neat, professional...and downright cool.

This week's topic? Best Practices in Navigation.

Tivo for your life? Future data searches may mean total recall.

Have you ever attended a meeting or a class without your required morning cup of coffee, and left looking at your notes wondering what some of them meant?

Or, how about when your spouse asks why you didn't switch the laundry when they asked you to...and as you stare at the molding clothes in their arms, you struggle for recall.

Now, imagine you can do a data search on your handheld "memory banks" and replay what happened. It would be great on one hand...maybe not so great on the other.

In 2021 upgrading your memory is going to mean something completely different...at least according to Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft.

Read more here»

Better to try and fail, than never to try.

If you don't believe how easy it can be to create enterprise-level data-driven Java applications, you should just try it for yourself.

A wide range of users from Java novices/end-users to Java development experts use m-Power to hit the productivity sweet spot in their Web application needs.

Just sign up here to get password access, then follow the quick and easy steps of m-Power's interface to create two Java servlet applications. You'll have a Java servlet in minutes--with no training.

There's nothing to download. Just sign in now to give it a whirl!

Can't Find a Parking Spot? Get out your cell phone!

Sometimes it's difficult to see beyond our current solutions to the future. You've probably already looked at each Web application ten different ways, trying to make it more user-friendly, faster, better looking, more complex, less complex...but have you really turned it on its side?

Take, for example, a city government. Where would wireless technology possibly apply there?

Well...what if your citizens could pay their parking tickets via their cell phone? Instant revenue. No lag time. What if users could pay for meters that way as well? Think of the labor saved on changing meters, money saved on paper tickets.

That's coming, and so much more. For example, here's what will happen in a few years when you can't find a parking spot.

Data driven Web applications are only beginning to make their mark on how we live our lives. Where can you take yours?

Cool new m-powering things you can do: The definitive list.

You probably don't know the half of mrc's most recent enhancements to m-Power and the mrc-Productivity Series...mainly because they've been happening so quickly.

This concise, and comprehensive quick reference gives you the highlights.

The moral of the story is...The right architecture and $1,000 one-time setup can get you $100,000 (in one month)

This is one of my favorite e-business stories...

So, a 2-man IT department at a medical supply distributor wanted to create a B2B Web site to give their hospitals and clinic customers a more convenient way to place orders...and they wanted to build it in Java so they weren't tied to any one platform or vendor. Only they didn't know Java...

But, using m-power, they created a Java-based B2B e-comerce site, running on Linux and served from a PC--and ALSO used m-Power to begin teaching themselves Java as they built it.

The beta-test (launched to just a handful of customers) took in a whopping and unexpected $100,000 in one month of online sales...even though the set up cost was less than $1000. Talk about ROI.

This was possible because of n-tier architecture, which allowed this company to run part of their Java apps on Linux from a PC, while accessing live data from their iSeries.

If you'd like to learn more, fill out this form, or view the case study.

mrc Movex User Seminar

The Movex User Group in the UK is holding a one-day FIG (Focused Interest Group) event for Movex users to specifically discuss their uses of mrc. Here is an overview of the event.

There are only a handful of spaces left, so if you would like to attend this UK event, please contact Andy Vigrass directly.

Reminder! mrc has moved!

mrc has moved to lovely new offices on Friday, June 2, 2006.

mrc
555 Waters Edge, Suite 120
Lombard, IL 60148

p.(630) 916-0662
f.(630) 916-0663

Here's a cool birds' eye view of our new location!

(You can get directions here as well. Maybe if you look close enough, you can see us working away.)

The Age of m-Powerment

"If you need custom Web applications or access to corporate data housed in multiple databases, and Java looks like an answer, mrc's m-Power can help developers with no Java experience produce useful applications quickly."

The rest of this new product review hot off the presses for platform-specific publication, iSeries News, goes miles to showcase how m-Power hits the Productivity Sweet Spot between end-users and developers of any platform.

CIOs struggle to generate full value from their information

According to CIO Insight's Management Poll: "Most IT executives say business users frequently complain they are not receiving the information they need. The bottom line: despite the massive investments in information technology and gathering, companies have a long way to go before they gain anything close to full value from information."

Despite poll view, there are many easy ways CIOs can gain better BI value

Well, the CIO Insight Management Poll above may say one thing, but there are many ways CIOs can provide better, more flexible and versatile BI to users and their business. Here are a few examples:

Roll over this sales revenue graph to see dollar details, and then click on each graph to drill down.

This reporting interface lets your user select from a series of parameters to pull detailed (and flexible) reports.

This shop floor calendar lets managers track and update shipments going in and out of the warehouse.

To learn more about how these were created, fill out this form.

Looking for your two cents...

We recently started a business application/Web Development forum in December, and since then there have been many articles posted as well as thousands of views. However, there haven't been a lot of posts/interactions/questions from you, our subscribers.

The idea for this forum was from your suggestions, to provide a place to exchange ideas/experiences/questions and make each other better business application and Web developers.

How can we help you help each other?

Please be candid here. Let us know why you haven't posted (if you haven't posted)...and which topics would drive you to participate if we included them. Or, if you don't plan to participate, please tell us why. Is it because you must register to post? Are you shy? What is holding you back?