Buy the Application If You Can, Build It If You Must!
At Coyote Creek Consulting, we recommend that you always look for existing out-of-the-box applications that meet your needs. Most of time our clients are able to find reasonable solutions for their business applications, thereby avoiding the expense of custom development.
But sometimes situations arise where the out-of-the-box solutions don’t integrate well with everything in our clients’ application portfolio. We like to call this situation “when the best of breed don’t actually breed”!
For these situations, Coyote Creek Consulting is available for custom application development. We have the knowledge and experience to successfully develop solutions to integrate applications or to enhance or customize your out-of-the-box products to better fit your business needs.
The Big Disadvantage of Custom Development: Maintenance Costs
Custom applications can save time, but will cost you serious money over the life of the application. Why? Because anything that you develop (or have us develop) will need to be maintained…and the maintenance of any software is generally the significantly larger cost over its lifetime.
If you do choose to have something developed, be sure to work with someone who explains this cost. Any developer worth working with will explain why sometimes it’s best to avoid writing code or integrating applications, because the likelihood of continual maintenance is very high. There are components within Microsoft’s SharePoint, for example, where this is painfully true.
The Big Advantage of Custom Development: Get Exactly What You Need
With customization you can enhance the effectiveness and management of an application such as Microsoft SharePoint or Exchange. You can get unique features suited specifically for your business’ requirements. And you can ensure that the behavior and functionality of your software exactly matches your needs.
Whether you need to manage clients, resources and inventory; automate business processes; or perform niche operations, a custom application can help your business operate smoothly and efficiently.
Custom Application Development Is Ideal For:
- Integrating applications with your other applications
- Customizing applications to your specific needs
- Creating custom workflows to automate business processes
- Developing central data repositories to integrate various data sources
- Enhancing the functionality of existing collaboration platforms such as SharePoint and Confluence
- Generating custom reports
Examples of Custom Application Development
Here are some examples of custom application development projects that Coyote Creek has successfully completed:
- Employee Provisioning: When an employee is hired, your organization’s employee provisioning process is put into place. There are records to create, approvals to obtain, and resources to allocate (phone, computer, email, network access, etc.). How much time is currently being spent on this process? What does it cost your organization in terms of lost productivity for the new hire when the process goes slowly? Wouldn’t it be nice to automate this entire work flow?
A few years ago Coyote Creek developed a full-featured employee provisioning application. We’ve installed this for clients who were looking to replace their outdated manual processes and could not find an existing application that met their needs. Our employee provisioning application covers setting up records and resources for new hires, updating records for existing employees, revoking resources from those whose employment has been terminated, and more. It’s an easy-to-use system, and puts everything in one place.
- Employee Data Mart: As part of our employee provisioning system we also created an employee database (known as a “data mart” in technical terms) that is a central employee information repository. This database gathers all of your employee information from multiple sources – human resources, Active Directory, payroll system, etc. – and holds it in one place. This makes the data easier to manage, more accurate, and available to be accessed by all of your applications and resources.
- Customized Reports: Out-of-the-box applications give you the tools to create attractive, user-friendly reports. The challenge is often how to bring in the data – especially when that data is coming from other applications and/or multiple sources. The data must be located, prepared, and imported into the application. With custom application development we can bring in that data to create the reports you need.
- Platform Customization: We’re often asked to customize various platforms to help our clients get the most out of their software. For Microsoft SharePoint we develop custom web parts, work flows, reports, and templates. For Atlassian’s Confluence we’ve developed custom plug-ins, layouts, and templates. And for Exchange we find that custom notifications – such as determining when a mailbox is close to quota and sending the user an alert before the quota is reached – can be very useful.
To Customize or Not To Customize?
Our advice is that you should always be careful before embarking on any custom development. Not sure if you need a custom solution? Give us a call. We’ll help you determine whether it makes sense, what areas to avoid, and the likely life-cycle costs of the project.
Best wishes,
Mike Faster
Back to News & Events
|
