iCompass Technologies Blog

iCompass explores the ever expanding Electronic Age

  

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As iCompass encourages the staff to start blogging I sit here wondering what to blog about. Strangely enough this exercise provides useful insight to everything I have going on around me and the Dilemmas facing busy IT Professionals in the ever expanding electronic age.

Balancing business growth with the technology .NET revolution changing by the day - which trends should I follow what web browsers should we support and how do we test every bit of functionality for them all. Supporting document types provides more and more challenges as product consumers expect seamless compatibility, Photocopy companies try to compress PDF files in custom ways to reduce the document size, word has more functionality than the web can support. Product consumers also have high performance expectations.

Today there is so much information available to us on the internet that it seems harder and harder to know that you should read, causing paranoia that you are missing the useful information, tends come and go, we need to remain agile and not over build our CivicWeb and AcademicWeb solutions yet at the same time we don't want to under-build them. Modern web based systems should be intuitive, busy professionals can't afford to spend learning a new system , they just want to do their job more efficiently and effectively. Our servers need to be up 24/7 yet somehow we also need to perform maintenance tasks. We read every day about the Cloud like Google and Amazon but when you lift the hood and look underneath there are numerous ways to set up the hardware all with their own benefits and drawbacks - which should we choose? how will things change in the future and will we be able to scale the solution we choose? where is the midpoint for all the dilemmas?

Paul Archer, Director of Application Development & Quality Assurance