Adapting to Change: How to Do It and Why It’s Essential    April 25, 2024 Some organizations are risk averse which often means they avoid change to reduce risk. This is a false economy, in my opinion. Sometimes, clients ask Imaginet to help them with failed and delayed projects, and for us to be successful, often we need to facilitate cultural change within the organization. When we have the right support in the organization, adapting to change can happen.   When an organization avoids change, especially in software projects, they keep the same code and ignore technical de ..read more

After a software audit at an occupational health and testing company revealed several technical issues and security vulnerabilities within the customer’s core line of business applications, Imaginet was engaged to help identify the solution and lead the effort to resolve it. Due to the issues with the applications, we determined an application upgrade was needed.   The existing application was built as a .NET core 2.1 web app running on .NET Framework 4.8, with an Angular front-end client. While .NET Framework 4.8 is still supported, .NET Core 2.1 is not. The customer needed a sol ..read more

The Imaginet Difference: Boutique In Size with Big Results  April 09, 2024 Since 1997, Imaginet has been a proud Microsoft Partner. We offer a variety of Microsoft-related consulting, implementation, and design services for the Microsoft tech stack. Some of these services include enterprise content and records management, data architecture and engineering, application development, SharePoint migration, and more. Despite the numerous services we offer, we have always been boutique in size.   Our full-time staff is spread out across North America – we don’t hire contractors ..read more

A telecommunications organization contacted Imaginet for assistance on 2 new application development projects. The first was a portfolio tracker, and the second was an office furniture ordering application.    Portfolio Tracker    The portfolio tracker we built for our client tracks and manages the various budgets they have across different departments. Our client has several districts and district managers, and they needed a way to track budgets across these districts and departments. Another aspect of the portfolio tracker is managing tech deployments within the organization. Fo ..read more

Virtual Workspaces Are Here! How Will You Use Them?   April 4, 2024 My YouTube feed has been full of reviews of the Apple Vision Pro since it became available in the US on February 2. In one of the videos, the content creator used the Vision Pro for working on his script, and several other tasks around his house (See video). This intrigued me and I wondered what it would be like to code in a virtual environment and create virtual workspaces. I don’t have $4k lying around and the Vision Pro isn’t available in Canada yet. So, my ability to try it was rather limited.  For Chr ..read more

A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food asked Imaginet to perform maintenance on their existing data collection processes. We work in a staff augmentation role for this client and do ongoing work for them. Their data departments are divided into different business areas (we will refer to them as teams). On this project, we were working with two of their teams. Both teams required general maintenance and updates to their data collection tools – essentially a data collection upgrade. Team 1: Their primary focus is collecting and processing data about pet fo ..read more

SharePoint Embedded: Full Featured SharePoint Inside a Custom Application  March 28, 2024 Custom applications that require a lot of document management have always been a challenge to build. Historically, we would build an ASP.NET application and then pass content back and forth to Azure blog storage or make the document available for immediate download (but not store the document in the application after the download is complete). Microsoft has released SharePoint Embedded, a new way to store and manage content in custom applications. SharePoint Embedded offers a headless, API-only ..read more

A major Canadian University had contacted Imaginet because they needed reports built on top of an existing data warehouse. This is a long-term client of Imaginet’s, and we had previously built a data warehouse for another department within the organization. Much of the work for this project was about defining the semantic data model on top of the data warehouse and then building the reports on it.   Before they had a data warehouse, they had multiple applications that were reporting data separately. Since the implementation of the data warehouse, the client wanted to use Power BI ..read more

A provider of real estate advisory services contacted Imaginet for support on a system we had built for them a few years ago (mostly built using Azure SQL). They have multiple databases that have monthly costs associated with them. Our client was looking for a cheaper solution as the monthly costs were quite significant. They also had an existing capacity agreement with Databricks, so our goal was to conduct a Databricks migration with our clients databases.   What We Did  We started from scratch and built all the coordinates and objects for our client’s architecture. We used ..read more

CoPilot For Microsoft Teams: A Smart Assistant March 19, 2024 How CoPilot can help you make the most of your online meetings  I’ve been using CoPilot within my Teams meetings for a few months and am really enjoying it. This might be the one-use case for CoPilot that on its own justifies the monthly cost of CoPilot for M365 (approx. $30). Let’s review the basics of CoPilot for Teams Meetings for those that are not using it yet.   What is CoPilot?  CoPilot is a smart assistant that integrates with Microsoft Teams and helps you manage your online meetings more effectivel ..read more