Advanced Website, Web Application/Portal, and Mobile Application Development
Summary
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Advanced website development is needed when the public website needs to enable the web visitor to enter data to and/or retrieve data from a database. For instance the web visitor wants to see all the dealers in his/her zip code area that sell a Volkswagen Beetle or a Honda Civic. Such dealer and car data will reside in a database, and needs database commands to retrieve it. If the advanced website developer is using the right development tools such as ASP.Net, the advanced website will be resized automatically when it is displayed as a mobile website on a cell phone or tablet. This is called responsive web design. There will be no need to develop a separate mobile website.
A web application is needed when private data is to be retrieved or entered after the web visitor signs in with his/her user id and password. Such a web application may also be called a private extranet portal. When only the employees of your company can enter or retrieve data in such an application, such an application will be called an intranet portal. A web application can be built from scratch, or can be built using a development platform such as Sharepoint Online from Microsoft. Other development platforms exist such as Joomla, Drupal, Sitecore, etc. ..
A mobile application is an application that runs on only a cell phone or tablet including iPad. For instance your bank mobile application, your airline mobile application or your store mobile application runs on such devices. They will normally require you to sign in. They can be very simple because they don’t need to access a remote database. However most of the mobile applications do need to access a remote database to display eg. the Uber driver’s position. Ideally the mobile application should be generated from the advanced web application. For instance the mobile application for the Acumatica ERP is generated from the Acumatica ERP web application. In general if something changes in a form in the Acumatica ERP web application, the Acumatica mobile application is immediately adjusted.
Internet Customer Solutions has developed advanced websites, web applications/portals, and mobile applications successfully. We use cloud computing in our own company. We combine web applications in the cloud with Sharepoint Online and MS Teams. See our "All in the Cloud" solution. We look at the total of your IT needs based on your business needs, and plan for the best IT solution for your company. Plans and developments are always documented and discussed in the cloud.
Advanced Website Development
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Advanced website development requires developers to program or write code in languages such as Microsoft ASP.Net, C#, JavaScript, JSON, Java, JSP, PHP, etc to access the database, process (make calculations, retrieve more data based on retrieved data and conditions) data, and to display it in a certain format. This can become very very complex especially when you have to process a lot of data at once, and you need to keep the response time for the web visitor to less then 2 seconds.
Internet Customer Solutions has built many such advanced websites in ASP.Net and JSP. In fact Internet Customer Solutions was one of the first companies to build a totally database driven public website for JVC Professional. This means that the JVC PRO marketing people themselves entered all their product information into a database, and these products were automatically displayed on the public website without writing any code.
An example of this website is given at the right.
You can see this website here.
Advanced Web Application/Portal Development
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Advanced web application or portal development requires the developers to secure the application and data from hackers. The developers build secure login screens. It requires developers to program or write code in languages such as Microsoft ASP.Net, C#, JavaScript, JSON, Java, JSP, PHP, etc to access the database, process (make calculations, retrieve more data based on retrieved data and conditions) data, and to display it in a certain format. Internet Customer Solutions has built many such advanced web applications in ASP.Net and JSP. Internet Customer Solutions built advanced web applications for a gutter cleaning company, that automated all the business functions except the accounting. They automated business functions were as follows:
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Lite Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application
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Creation of sales orders, assignment to sales people, and creation of job orders
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Optimal routing for 50 crew trucks visiting each about 15 customers a day
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Scheduling of job orders for the field technicians (crews) (Assigning of field technicians to job tickets)
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Creation of job tickets with barcodes for the job tasks to be done
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Scanning of job tickets for completed jobs to create invoices
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Transfer of invoices to Quickbooks
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Batch processing of credit card payments
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Financial and sales reporting
Simpler web applications or portals can be developed using eg. Microsoft Sharepoint online development platform. Such web applications need to store only documents online, lists of tasks or issues or contacts or team members or web links, and calendars. A non-IT person can add such documents or items him/herself. However if more processing is need for such items, a web portal developer is needed.
Internet Customer Solutions has built numerous Microsoft Sharepoint Online site collections, sites and subsites with documents and items. Examples are given at the right. Our company integrates such sites with MS Teams.
Regarding storing information properly in MS Sharepoint Online, a storage plan needs to be discussed first with all the departments of your organization. It is like organizing all your file storage cabinets properly so that employees know where to file information, and know where to find it. This is a very serious undertaking but, once such a plan is agreed upon, implemented properly, followed with discipline and updated timely, the cost savings are enormous. No more paper shuffling. Information is available instantly at anytime from anywhere with any device. Internet Customer Solutions has done this for many companies and does it internally. A general outline of such plan can be seen here. We combine this now with MS Teams to enable chat and video calling (desktop screen sharing) , and with Yammer for discussion forums. So much more efficient than email, and avoiding loss of text messages. MS Teams has a mobile app for texting messages. Yammer has a mobile app also. So you are completely mobile and in the cloud. See a MS Teams site for all Acumatica Manufacturing ERP Partners, ISVs and Acumatica employees below. It includes Yammer. Your company can have the same!
Mobile Application Development
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Mobile application development can be done from scratch or can be generated from an advanced web application.
When built from scratch, a database needs to be built first with all the required data. Then the developers build the mobile app for the cell phone and tablet. However the size of the data forms has to be adjusted for the small screen of a cell phone or tablet. Our developers use ASP.Net, Xamarin and other native tools to build those mobile applications.
When generated from an advanced web application such as the Acumatica Cloud ERP, the developers can quickly change forms and business logic in the Acumatica Cloud ERP without changing the mobile application. However the advanced web application needs to be a true web application that is accessible by a web browser. An HTTP client or a personal computer client software or browser plugin will not work with such automatic generation.
This mobile app. is generated from the Acumatica Field Service web application.