Working away from the office is a viable option and, in many cases, the preferred way for mature employees to work.

From 2005 to 2007, my wife worked from Las Vegas for a San Jose, CA insurance company as an in-house underwriter. She managed a very large case load when technology was not as advanced as today. It was a win-win for her and her company. She was a known self-motivated employee and her company decided to experiment with the concept in order to retain her services. Physical case files were shipped via DHL daily and everything else was done through fax and Cloud tools.

There are many aspects to consider when allowing (or encouraging) some of your work force to work away from the office. These include the maturity of the employee, the type of work to be done, how well management can track productivity and quality control, etc.

Given that an employee is mature enough and the work load can be done away from the office, working off-site is the answer.

First, let’s consider the cost to the company. Cloud database systems can be expensive but our experience at S W Business Solutions shows that expensive is a relative term. Most business software is subscription based. S W Business Solutions, LLC uses this model where a fee (nominally $1,000) is paid during development and then a fee is charged thereafter. This puts the burden of development costs onto us. We make conversion to the Cloud affordable.

One major cost saving is computer system infrastructure. You no longer need your IT team to maintain expensive computer servers and networks. Even if you provide your staff with laptops and printers, the cost is dramatically less than a server, routers, switches, cabling and workstations.

Furt
View Full Post    Online Workforce  

I keep hearing criticism from others that ColdFusion is old-fashioned and dead. Not so. Not by a long shot.

This year (2020) in October, we will attend the ColdFusion Summit (a developers and managers conference) for the sixth year in a row. It is a two-day conference with multiple, simultaneous sessions. Sessions focus heavily on new features of the ColdFusion world, future enhancements and security.

The newest version of ColdFusion will be released later this year and will expand on becoming the hub in a net of disparate microservices as well as a tool to create microservices. It is every bit a modern tool that keeps evolving. Every two years a new version is available.

What about cost?

ColdFusion server costs money. If you host your own server (or server farm), licensing is a serious issue. Years ago I discovered Hostek. They provide ColdFusion (and many other elements of the necessary stack) in a wide range of service models. You can have a site on a shared box for as little as $6 per month. Or, you can have managed services with dozens of boxes via their Managed Services model. Plus, everything in between. Best of all they are a major sponsor of the ColdFusion Summits and I have seen them working closely with the Adobe ColdFusion team.

Having your site at Hostek is secure (and GDPR compliant) and very affordable. No need for updating the servers or server software nor for making backups. I had a client clobber a database and call me at 7am in a panic. I called Hostek and they asked me if I wanted the 6am, the 2am or the previous 10pm backup restored. I selected the 2am backup and a couple minutes later the database was restored.

What about security?

I use a combination of Hostek, ColdFusion and MySQL (amo
View Full Post    Web Development   Web Technology  

Working from home is currently a requirement due to the quarantine. However, it is actually a very cost effective way to work for a lot of businesses.

The downside is that it requires mature, self-motivated staff. That is not always the reality. So what can a manager do to ensure employees are actually working?

The answer is behavior metrics. S W Business Solutions develops robust, cloud-based, browser-hosted database business applications. These are custom pieces of software that can track whatever a manager needs.

We have existing systems that track behaviors such as login time, logout time, excessive idle time and work flow analysis. Every event (clicking save or opening a record) can be tracked and analyzed with minimal additional burden on the system. Reports and graphs can be generated that can be reviewed by authorized management to determine production rates and worker effectivity.

S W Business Solutions is managed by a former mid-level manager for a TRW company. We are business professionals that have the experience to write effective business software.