All Things in technology service delivery

When it comes to exporting data from one application and importing them into another one, many of the old-school .NET coders just jump right into what they know best: code away to map the source and target. Wrong approach! If these data-sets happen to be large, I've seen so many developers just working away nights and weekends as their code moves data on row at a time. Add some business rules and logic in the mix, project becomes a disaster. These days, there are just too many good ETL tools out there. Some are very feature-rich with a ton of out-of-box connectors.  Look for one that fits your budget and meets your need. Don't forget to consider the learning curve needed and the folks you have in your team. I've been using the suite for  Simego for a while for many data migration, integration and automation projects Data Synchronization Studio - XML Files Just an awesome tool that works fast for moving millions of rows of data between systems including ...

My team has been tasked with a lot of PDF forms that needs to be designed and coded for merge fields. These fields are coming from a very large list with exact names of merged code fields and sample values to go with them. Once they are built, team needs to test form naming of the fields and formatting of values in them. A ton of really boring hours of manual typing and populating values in each field so we test for consistency and formatting before we upload them to the destination web app that uses these. Time for a little automation to help the team. Needed to build a little app that takes Folder containing PDF forms with merge code fields List of Merge Code filed names and sample values As input. Click a button and get these PDF forms populated with applicable sample values and flatten them. Here are the results: Windows Forms app Loop through the directory to find and process all pdf forms Loop through form fields in each PDF.  Log ...

I recently helped a local non-profit  Al-Salam Foundation with their fundraising efforts .  Al-Salam is a small organization led and managed by a small group of folks. These folks are business owners, physicians and professional in other areas. Running AL-Slam is a part time thing for them with little time to spend and spare. Their focus has been growing the organization in Carmel community through civic engagements. They've had little time to research and implement right techs and tools to enhance and compliment their efforts. Such is the the situation in most small non-profits; especially religious institutions. Two immediate needs jumped out:  1.      Ability to accept credit cards from small donors. o     Onetime donation with ability to receive receipts o     Recurring donations that just works o     Ability to charge credit cards; POS style. 2.      Abi...