Bespoke Software, Learning Management Systems & E-Learning - Latest Posts

Extending my simple timesheeting dashboard so that I could report on staff utilisation by month was a good way to start to use measures in Power BI Desktop. What I wanted to get to was a chart that showed the percentage of each person's time being spent on chargeable work each month.

From time to time SkillsLogic is asked to help out on a software development project that isn't going to plan. Most of these projects seem to get into trouble for one or more of the following reasons:

Power BI is Microsoft's powerful new data analytics and visualisation solution. Power BI comes in two parts - a cloud based service that makes it easy to share dashboards and Power BI Desktop, a free desktop application for building more sophisticated interactive reports and dashboards. Power BI is low cost - there's a completely free version and the Pro version costs $9.99 per user per month.

SkillsLogic's project portfolio includes both small developments that might take one developer just 2 or 3 weeks and much larger multi-developer projects that are delivered in phases over many months. Our biggest software development projects are long term commitments that last several years (and include both ongoing technical support and hosting). It is possible though to give some examples of the kind of work we do together with ballpark figures. The cost of bespoke software development varies - by definition it's bespoke - but these examples should give you some idea of the likely cost of your project.

The post-16 area reviews are part of the government's plan to restructure FE and sixth form colleges. The idea is to make post-16 providers more financially stable and efficient. Providers are going to be encouraged to collaborate more - that could mean more shared services and in some instances, college mergers.

In this second part of our two part post on real time data replication in PostgreSQL we're going to look at a simple setup of ‘hot standby’ master-slave replication in PostgreSQL.

For the purpose of demonstration we've setup a test rig with two virtual servers. The master server is on IP 192.168.1.100, and the standby is on 192.168.1.101.

Did you know you can use Gmail to manage all your email accounts? Maybe you’ve got a personal Gmail email address and you’re using Outlook for your separate work email address. You can, if you want, manage everything through Gmail - ideal if you prefer Gmail’s browser interface and its iOS and Android mail client apps.

SkillsLogic is developing a big reporting and data dashboard solution and as part of that we need to calculate a lot of medians.

Remember from school, the median of a list of numbers is found by sorting the values from lowest to highest and then picking the middle one. If there’s no middle then the median is typically defined to be the mean of the two middle values.

Why not hire a software consultancy in 2016? Maybe you’ve got an idea for a new software solution or you want advice about upgrading existing systems or perhaps you need help with an IT project that’s in trouble?

Do you want to find a new software consultancy to pick up the support of an existing bespoke system? Making the switch to a new supplier will be easier if you start thinking now about some of the issues the new supplier will face: