How To Choose A Right Software Development Company

 

In the present scenario, the demand for technology is surging at a fast pace. The world is getting technologically advanced, it makes companies hire skilled developers on a constant rise. Business owners often seem to be confused when it comes to how to choose a software development company that provides them value and quality services. Although, choosing the right software partner is a tedious task as it requires deciding the appropriate database, front-end applications, picking a scalable framework, and so on. The major problem with standard software products is there is no product that fits all business needs; this is the reason software development companies are in demand which offers all services you need. Let’s not beat around the bush, if you’re here to do something innovative that generates higher ROI, then must know how to choose a software development company and developers to accomplish any specific project.

Key Considerations Prior How to Choose Software Development Company Are:

Define your objectives, resources, and time frame – Before hiring any software development company, it is important for you to clearly define business objectives that match your business requirements. What issues do you want to resolve? What solutions will help you to achieve business goals?

To do so, prepare a list of key goals against the solutions and also explain how it will manage each of them. Prepare a realistic time frame for your project and plan all the reasons for going to be allocated. Thus, hiring a software development company with that much info assists in project accomplishment.

Start by getting referrals – You can reach out to people who know the best software development company and ask for referrals. This will enable us to track the process of how to choose a software development company, with getting honest feedback about their work.

Check out the company’s portfolio – It is important for you to check out what the company offers, with this you will get more valuable information. By reviewing a company’s profile, you can understand what type of services they offer and what type of applications they have built. With this, you can decide whether or not the company has the expertise and know-how to develop the solutions you’re looking for.

Guage for the talent pool – While hiring a software development company, it is important for you to know the experience of developers in specific technology or domain. It makes you think about whether or not the company is able to fulfill the project requirements in an effective manner.

Do you know that you can also ask for the CVs of the developers or take interviews who are going to work on your project? It is vital to hand over the project to developers who are well-skilled and have great experience in a specific technology.

Compare offers – During your hunt on how to choose a software development company, you may look for rates. It is common when someone sees lower rates; you might be tempted for it. And even sometimes, you can find the rarest of gems with quality work. Although, we know that there is no such thing as good, cheap, and fast at the same time. Hence, if you just go for cheap, you may spend much more than you have planned for earlier, why? Reasons are given below –

• If someone doesn’t know how to work, it may increase the project timeline automatically.
• You may spend more time in fixing errors.

Hence, it is important to compare the cost of different companies and I want to recommend going for quality instead of cost.

Benefits of Choosing a Software Development Company?

In this competitive era, the demand for software development companies is increasing at a fast pace. The reason behind this is great flexibility which allows companies to reform business solutions as per the specific needs and requirements. Many businesses are dealing with the problem of how to choose software development companies to accomplish projects in the desired manner. It will be beneficial when you hire software development companies to meet daily challenges, such as –

• Custom software development companies enable you to tailor the exact needs and specifications It will offer you to provide all the functionalities required to reach peak productivity.
• They understand your business needs and apply the latest tools and technologies to make it more profitable and effective.
• A combination of technical excellence and great customer services leads to value for money.
• Value creativity and collaboration signify that ideas are shared, communicated and everyone contributes individually to accomplish a common goal or objective.
• Tailor new teams for each new project, it helps in making the best possible combination of skills, knowledge, and experience in order to meet your needs and provide high-quality solutions.

Conclusion

With the help of the aforementioned tips, you can choose the best software development company for your business. How your future application or software will run or look like, depends on the skills and experience of developers are involved in its development process. In this relation, it is imperative to choose the right software development company to attain desired business goals and objectives so that customers’ can experience bug-free, optimal use of technology, and high-performance products. One last thing to be remembered in the process of how to choose software development company is its openness and staff flexibility. Ensure that all the process is transparent and unforced from the initial stage of the project.

Hence, working with a software development company assists to get intelligent solutions in order to meet the client’s emerging demands. This collaborative working style contributes to developing effective and robust projects as well as an again high competitive edge in turn.

For More Details And Blogs : Aelum Consulting Blogs
If you want to increase the quality and efficiency of your ServiceNow workflows, Try out our ServiceNow Microassesment.
For ServiceNow Implementations and ServiceNow Consulting Visit our website: https://aelumconsulting.com/servicenow/

How To Create An Effective And Interactive Website With Responsive Features ?

 

Website is one of the key features for the growth of your business and it is your responsibility to ensure that your website is responsive and interactive.

Nobody is going to refer your website to people if it is poorly designed.

Your website should always pay attention to the target audience for which it is simply created.

What is an effective and interactive website?

An effective and interactive website is a website that allows you to interact with the users. An interactive website ensures that the audience is interacting with the website. Increasing Interaction means you are providing quality content to your audience. Your UI Should be collaborative. Engagement is the key to an interactive and effective website.  The major goal for the interactive website should be users engagement. The addition of more internal links can provide you with major leads.

Why do We Need it?

All Organizations want a website that can represent them globally. They are competing with each other to increase their audiences. The presence of an interactive website can give you more business and build your networking worldwide.

Interactive websites have a long-term effect on your audiences and they keep interacting with your website for their needs.

Interactive websites allow you to collaborate with your live audience and get their feedback from time to time. It allows you to pass on your message and quality content to them sometimes in the form of mails or say weekly Newsletters

How to make your website interactive and effective?

• Addition of interactive elements– This concept is based on the Principle of the first impression is the last impression. The addition of interactive elements can change the way people look at your website. We can add on better UI elements, Hovering effects over the content. The addition of Animation effects on posts and the presence of hovering slides give a huge impact on your business.
• Responsiveness– Website should be responsive means that it should be mobile friendly and work with the same intensity and features in mobile too. Content should be clear even in tabs and mobile phones too.

• Contact forms-Addition of Contact forms can give you the major leads. Using contact forms you can get user feedback from time to time. Putting the contact form at different places on your website increases the user’s interaction on your website and gives you more business.

• More Visualisations– If you add more visualizations to the website it is easy to pass on the message to your audience. People always remember the content using display images, more statistics, and visualizations.
• Videos– Videos are one of the proven methods for increasing the audience’s attention to your website. It is observed that People interact more with the website containing videos especially relatable to their products. YouTube Videos can be added to your website and it will publicize your website and you-tube channel at the same time.
• SEO and keyword research– Perform the complete SEO and keyword analysis for your website content. Use specific keywords and internal links on the page to increase user engagement on your website. Perform Google Analytics on your website from time to time to get your user’s engagement report.

• Newsletters– Adding Newsletter to Your website gives you regular readers for your website content. It allows you to feed your client’s mail with your quality content regularly. It allows you to provide deals and packages to users.

• Searching Feature– Searching Bar is one of the functionality for the website which allows your website visitors and customers to search any content available on the website. They have no need to scroll through all the buttons and pages. This search Option will directly take them to the required page.
• The Easier Navigation-Navigation menu provides the hierarchical orientation to all the pages. It divides all the content into different sections. You can add hovering effects to the navigation and increase the user’s attention towards your website.
• Speed Optimization-There is many websites over the internet but still, some websites are there with low-speed loaders. It is very important that when your targeted audience is going through your website and visiting your products, they need smooth navigation for the same. Better speed increases the visitor’s interest in the website and it gives ease to the person to scroll over other pages too.
• Dynamic Web Design-Dynamic websites are those websites that keep changing their content from time to time, Interactive website comes under the section of the dynamic website where users and businesses can interact with each other. They keep adding their services to the page and updating it from time to time.
• Addition of social media apps- Social media is the key source to share your information with people. Social media is used by billions of people globally. When we are sharing something online we are sharing it with all of them. When you share the news, products, or say some content online it starts coming under the google rankings as per the SEO and keywords used. Adding the social media apps on your website allows people to interact with your social media channels directly through the website. It gives you more subscribers and viewers.

• Presence of Chatbots- Artificial Intelligence is the most trending current technology and it allows machines to act like humans. It is based on the principle of providing intelligence to machines. The presence of chatbots works as the maintenance and support system for the websites. Using chatbots visitors can ask questions to the bot and it is designed to ask answers for the same. Chatbots provide you the quick answers to your queries.

• Google Maps– The facility of Google maps on your pages gives the user exact location identification for your business. It provides authentication to your visitors and allows them to reach you using Google Maps. Sometimes only address information is not enough to locate the exact place. The use of Google Maps provides the ease to reach an exact location.

Conclusion

These were all the required key factors for your interactive and effective website. An interactive and effective website with responsive features can give you business leads globally. Ease of Access to your website increases your user’s interest in your website and products and also helps in digital transformation.

For More Details And Blogs : Aelum Consulting Blogs
If you want to increase the quality and efficiency of your ServiceNow workflows, Try out our ServiceNow Microassesment.
For ServiceNow Implementations and ServiceNow Consulting Visit our website: https://aelumconsulting.com/servicenow/

Blog On: Batch Update Set Vs Merge Update Set

Deployment Challenges

We all have faced the tough situation where multiple developers are working on the same application then it’s hard to decide which one should go first or not. Sometimes the sequence of update sets is a big challenge for developers.

Do not worry, we have solutions to make this process easier.
ServiceNow has introduced 2 solutions

1. Merge Update Set
2. Batch Update Set

Merge Update Set

Merging an update set creates a new update set and combines all customer updates from all update sets in a merged update set. The latest update overrides the oldest one.

Suppose ServiceNow Update set A contains the latest update of Client Script than Update set B. Merged update keeps the update form A as the latest one. It reduced the risk of missing/overriding the latest updates.

Batch Update Set

Batching of update set organizes update set into a hierarchy. Likewise, we create a parent update set and link all child update sets. A child update set can be both a child and parent, enabling multiple-level hierarchies. One update set at the top level of the hierarchy acts as the base update set.

In order to deploy the changes preview or commit the base update set. The sequence of updates and checks for collisions are done by the system automatically in the target instance.

Batch Vs Merge Update Set

In merging an update set, all changes are moved into the same update set and in the case of batch update set, it creates a parent-child relationship hence changes remain in their respective update set. So it’s easier to identify changes/versions into batch hierarchy than merged update set because all changes and versions are combined.

Undo the changes in case the Merge update set in the source instance is not possible but possible in the case of the Batch update set just remove the update set from the child update setlist.

The important point with the Batch update set is if back out of any update set is required it’s easy to back out any update set from the batch but in case of a merged update set, we have to back out the entire update set.

For More Details And Blogs : Aelum Consulting Blogs
If you want to increase the quality and efficiency of your ServiceNow workflows, Try out our ServiceNow Microassesment.
For ServiceNow Implementations and ServiceNow Consulting Visit our website: https://aelumconsulting.com/servicenow/

Manage Location-Based Work Efficiently With Field Service Management

 

Field Service Challenges

As businesses try to set themselves apart from the competition, service quality is becoming more and more critical. That includes scheduling on-site workers like insurance adjusters or home health aides as well as sending technicians to install or repair equipment. Unfortunately, field service technicians and customer service aren’t always in sync, which leads to reactive service, multiple service calls, and higher costs.

Your mobile workforce could not be equipped with the necessary knowledge or components for the job without a strong relationship with the client and knowledge of their resources and history. Additionally, poor visibility might result in neglected maintenance and expensive, unforeseen break-fix work. Multiple visits annoy customers, who also feel left out of the loop. 

ServiceNow Solution

ServiceNow Field Service Management

You can manage site-specific work effectively and safely with the aid of ServiceNow Field Service Management. It connects customer service, the help desk, and field service activities easily with ServiceNow Customer Service Management and ServiceNow IT Service Management and it can also be utilized independently.

With ServiceNow Field Service Management you can:-

• Finish the job correctly the first time by assigning the job to the worker who is most suited for it. Their expertise, location, inventory of parts, and availability are taken into account during manual or automated scheduling.
• Use preventative maintenance and asset management to address issues before your clients become aware of them.
• Increase the productivity of mobile workers to achieve service level agreements with a user-friendly, native mobile app for iOS or Android that contains details on work orders, travel instructions, the locations of parts, knowledge base articles, and safety checklists.

Easily create work orders

To expedite problem-solving, integrate with ServiceNow Connected Operations, Customer Service Management, or IT Service Management.

Provide clients with visibility

Allow clients to book meetings and receive text message updates on the location and arrival time of employees

Gain better insights with reporting and dashboards

Use pre-built reports and dashboards to your specifications to gain real-time insight into parameters like as capacity, usage, customer and geographical demand, and more.

Utilize a mobile interface to streamline fieldwork

With or without an internet connection, accept or reject jobs, monitor travel and work time, use safety questionnaires, access knowledge articles, and collect client signatures acknowledging work completion.

Continual Improvement Management

We Align people, processes, and data to launch and monitor improvements across the organization.

Streamline the handling of parts and inventory

We Utilize ServiceNow Asset Management as a centralized location for inventory management and stock assets.

You can drive value with better field service. With proactive service and a single, integrated system of action, you can improve experiences and lower effort. Encourage communication between field staff, customers, and operations. Increase revenue by automating operations.

For More Details And Blogs : Aelum Consulting Blogs
If you want to increase the quality and efficiency of your ServiceNow workflows, Try out our ServiceNow Microassesment.
For ServiceNow Implementations and ServiceNow Consulting Visit our website: https://aelumconsulting.com/servicenow/

Tour To ServiceNow Rome With AI And Employee Experience

 

The Rome release adds new functionality to the digital workflows. It helps the customers to create really great employee experiences. New AIops enhancements are there to resolve the problems quickly and increase productivity. 

It has the tendency to solve the customer problems earlier. The presence of a Mobile App builder allows the developers of different skills level to create the apps and more engaging experiences for the customers. 

App Engine Studio

• Major enhancements are made for all the developers. It allows the developers to create great experiences. They can even collaborate to get better output by giving the right level of access to developers.
• By giving proper collaboration descriptors such as Owner and Editor, we can assign required permissions to them.
• AES and UI builder support allows admins to give controllable permissions to the developers.
• There are more possibilities of giving permissions like Application manager, programing tools, Deployment, File type access, Security / Entitlement. These can be added for individuals or groups.

• Developers can work together and collaborate accordingly, they can invite others but it requires the permission of the administrator.
• Only assigned, specific users can work on that application.

Error handling in Flow Designer

• Flow Designer contains the “ERROR HANDLER” switch which helps to create actions if an error occurs.
• If the main part is not executing, we can write the logic in Error Handler sending a notification to HR about the logs.
• There is one more way of handling errors that is under the action flow, we have Error Evolution, which takes the condition of error and gives the output.

Integration Hub

• Another low-code feature from ServiceNow Rome is the REST API trigger for IntegrationHub can help to simplify inbound integrations in a low-code capacity using FlowDesigner.

• Automate import tasks from a new design environment that consolidates several legacy forms into a single modern interface.
• Support for duplicate query parameters.
• Support TLS 1.2 for outbound integrations where all data in transit is encrypted using cryptographic standards that comply with FIPS.

IT Asset Management

Till previous versions we only have Software asset management and Hardware asset management, now in ServiceNow Rome we also have Cloud asset management.

Why Cloud asset management? 

• This allows the users to analyze the full range of costs associated with our cloud assets.
• We can stop and start the assets by scheduling.
• Identify the assets which are not having any ownership and eliminate them.
• Eliminate the uncertainty associated with owner-less assets. for a specific model or software to understand the no. of license owned with a detailed explanation.

Field Service Management

• FSM will manage work tasks performed on location. We can match the tasks based on skills and available inventory.
• It allows agents to record details like travel time, spent time, and completion of a task.
• In ServiceNow Rome, Crew members can work together on the assigned task for a set of hours, days, weeks, or months.
• Crew leaders can record the entire crew’s work contributions.
• By this technician can minimize his travel time, reduced the administrator burdens.
• Presence of Mobile Timesheets that can Manage timesheets on the go. Allow technicians to record and submit time entries from a mobile app.

IT Service Management

ITSM improves productivity, resolves issues quickly, and full fill the user requirements. In ServiceNow Rome, we have lots of updates on the ITSM module. Here are some of them mentioned below:

• Change management: Change management is being able to schedule changes through the REST API, which helps to lower the risk.
• Vendor Manager Workspace Changes: We can monitor service agreements breaches, If any of the incidents or service availability is outage then we can analyze the effect of multiple breaches by the same vendor.
• Digital Portfolio Management: Giving service, application, and product owners a unified workspace to collectively manage them throughout life cycles.

IT Business Management

• Managing our team anytime, anywhere using a mobile device. This is available to both android and IOS.
• The ServiceNow mobile timesheet app is allowing users to create, edit, view, enter notes and submit timecards/timesheets from their mobile devices.
• Managers/Users are able to approve, reject, view, and recall a timecard/timesheet from their mobile. Log hours on the time card, update hours for the week for a specific time card.
• Improvement in employee experience by allowing them to submit their new ideas.

HR Service Delivery

• Employee journey management: HRSD module mainly focused on an easy way to get HR services.
• Giving access to any time, anywhere to HR services to increase the employee’s satisfaction.
• There are many ways to find answers, make requests, and provide help to the employees through the mobile app and Employee Center.
• Employee Center has also added the ability to delegate assigned tasks to another agent using granular delegation.
• If a user is out of the office, that user can delegate responsibility to other employees.

UI Builder / Now Experience:
Portals, Workspaces

• Bind conditions to static or dynamic values like data resources, page properties, client state parameters, etc.
• Replace hardcoded conditions with dynamic.
• Delegated Developer support for UI Builder and AES.

Virtual Agent

• Transform user engagement and simplify developer experiences with features such as asynchronous chat, Virtual Agent Designer, and conversational analytics.
• Increased agent productivity and improved customer experience with Conversation Autopilot, which enables agents to temporarily transfer control of a live chat to the Virtual Agent.

Tips For Rome

• Able to schedule a plugin installation.
• Disable the ability to create Home pages by making sys_property(com.glideapp.home.deprecate_homepages) value as true.
• On the reports if we are blocked by ACL, we are able to request from there itself(Request Access button), the request will directly go to the administrator.
• Able to see the plugin summary by calendar available in the find in store button.
• Automation discovery: Identify opportunities for automating ServiceNow applications, such as Virtual Agent and Agent assist. End the struggle with how and when to turn on automation solutions from ServiceNow and increase deflection while lowering MTTR.
• Platform security enhancements: Increase the protection of data with multi-factor authentication and data export metrics for visibility on unauthorized table exports.
• Platform encryption enhancements, NLU Workbench enhancements, AI Search enhancements, and in Rome.
• Inbound email actions: Change to the incoming email processing to look at cmn_notif_device for alternative persons. which means one person can have multiple emails. So, it will directly go to that table and return the user.
• Reactive scan: It can run on specific failures, suppose whenever we are doing up-gradation or update set if that fails then we will test with Reactive scan which will give us cause.

 

“The ServiceNow Rome release empowers the digital workflows, create delightful customer experiences, deliver AI-based services, and increases the productivity”

For More Details And Blogs : Aelum Consulting Blogs
If you want to increase the quality and efficiency of your ServiceNow workflows, Try out our ServiceNow Microassesment.
For ServiceNow Implementations and ServiceNow Consulting Visit our website: https://aelumconsulting.com/servicenow/

Employing Field Normalization To Resolve Data Quality Issues In ServiceNow

Suppose you are having a lot of abnormal data in your instance and you are thinking about fixing it for a very long time. Field normalization plays an important role here to resolve your data quality issues and standardize them. It is very important to keep all the data in a more organized way with less redundancy to optimize the quality levels in it. We can simply start it with the CPU type field in the computer forms.

The records are added in the ServiceNow platform from various sources like importing records, manual entry. A field value can appear in various forms based on how it is added or introduced to the database.

Types of Field normalization

Field normalization has two different ways to increase data integrity and reduce redundancy.

ServiceNow Normalization

Normalization looks for the variations of similar field values and converts them all into a preferable single standardized value. You can normalize all the field values in ServiceNow.

Normalization forces the platform to eliminate duplicate records and focus on making the searching process better for everyone. When a user enters a value in the normalized field then the system decides to normalize it automatically by replacing it with a standard value. Normalization works better with descriptive values like names and standard units of measurements.

Examples of ServiceNow Normalization

Operating system

You can easily import the details of configuration items from discovery. The name of operating systems will vary based on the information stored in the system.

• Windows 7 Pro
• Windows® 7 Pro
• Windows ® 7 Pro
• Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
• Microsoft Windows Professional 7

As you can see there are many different operating system names for the windows operating system we can standardize all of them with a normalized value like “Microsoft Windows 7 Professional”. It will make reporting and reconciliation easier. 

Manufacturer

Hp has different manufacturer names based on various imports and discovery scans. Field normalization will take all these names and convert them to a common value “HP”.

• HP
• HP Inc.
• Hewlett-Packard
• Compaq

Field normalization will take all these names and convert them to a common value “HP”.

Transformation

It allows an administrator to transform the raw field values into standardized values. The administrator can control the transformation by defining rules and conditions for the field values.

Examples of Transformation 

Disk space

You can round off the disk size to the transformed value after rounding off the values. Suppose you have 9.8 GB of disk space; you can round it off to 10 GB, 4112 MB to 4000 MB.

How does ServiceNow Normalization work?

Step 1: – Creation of normalization record

• Navigate to Field Normalization > Configurations > Normalizations.
• Click New.
• Create a normalization record.

Add these values after a better understanding of field and input values.

Fields

1. Name– this is the unique name creation for the normalization record. We use it just for reference purposes.
2. Table– In this, you will select the ServiceNow table for the field being normalized.
3. Field-Select the field to normalize.
4. Mode-There are three modes of normalization. It can be active, test, off. All normalization records are created in test mode by default. If you are selecting aliases for your normal values, you should change your mode to “active”. We use “off” mode for the purpose of disabling the normalization.
5. Normalize query-Apply to all queries using this field.
6. Coalesce each normal-Select this checkbox to reset all the references in the database to records containing an alias value
7. Raw Field-Select this field to show the original/non-normalized input values in a form.

After adding these field values. Click save

Step 2: -Create normal values

Normal values are the standardized value that will replace all the variations of values in the system. It will help you to reduce duplicate values and ambiguity in your records.

Step 3: -Create Alias

Aliases are the variants of the field values that will be later replaced by the normal values So, we can say that alias are the different names of the same record in the table. ServiceNow allows you to define your own aliases.

 Step 4: -Set up Rules

Here you can define your own rules for normalization based on the patterns. For e.g.- the CPU type contains “Xeon”.

Step 5: – Optional raw field

It is one of the important custom fields created by administrators to show the original values of normalized values.

Step 6: -Activation

If you are ready for the job. You can turn the mode to active.

Step 7: – Run data jobs

The process of field normalization creates data jobs to normalize the value.

Step 8: – Normalization in action

When all the data jobs will be finished then, you will get your normalized data.

Step 9: – Rollback

The data rollback feature allows you to undo the normalization at different stages before committing changes.

To conclude finally, this was all about the steps of employing field normalization and transformation to best resolve the data quality issues in ServiceNow.

For More Details And Blogs : Aelum Consulting Blogs
If you want to increase the quality and efficiency of your ServiceNow workflows, Try out our ServiceNow Microassesment.
For ServiceNow Implementations and ServiceNow Consulting Visit our website: https://aelumconsulting.com/servicenow/