Each year, Kinetik I.T. Software Development Manager and Microsoft Access MVP, Tom van Stiphout, attends the Microsoft MVP Summit. His takeaway in this conference shares some insight into Microsoft's successful products.
For me reading the tea leaves at MSFT is mostly about momentum. It's a company that undertakes major initiatives and responds to its customers. Not all products make it. There are trial balloons, and failures to ignite.
Azure is one of those major initiatives, and it is growing in reach almost every week.
PowerApps is one of those
products with momentum. It just reached General Availability status (GA) but
that's just the beginning. It has synergy with the rest of the Power platform
including PowerBI (another product with lots of momentum) and Flow. It will be
able to connect to the new Common Data Services on top of Azure as well as most
if not all data sources PowerBI can use, and new ones are coming online all the
time. I'm going to closely watch this product, get to know it, and maybe in 6
months or so we can use it to build simple task-driven applications that run on
any device. First only in our tenant, but if customers are asking for it …
The Access desktop
application also has some momentum behind it. It is far from dead. It just got
added to several more flavors of Office 365. If I read the tea leaves correctly
we will see it being able to connect to some of the same modern data sources.
One of the hardest things about Internet marketing is that,
even though it moves and changes at a rapid pace, progress never comes as
quickly as most of us would like (and especially those of us in the business
web design industry). And so, when we come across a rare opportunity to improve
what we do instantly, it's important
to jump on it.
With that in mind, we'd like to share one of our top tips
for getting more from all the things you do online. It's so simple, but so
effective, that it can make an enormous difference in a very short period of
time:
Stop repeating the
same mistakes you’ve been making in the past.
For most companies, following this one single piece of
advice can prevent them from losing time and money that has been slipping away
for months or years. To get a sense of what we mean, here are some common
mistakes that businesses tend to make again and again:
- Choosing the lowest-cost Internet marketing
provider even though they have a poor track record, or can't offer the ROI that
someone else can.
- Emphasizing the look of their website over its
functionality or the viability of a long-term Internet marketing plan.
- Placing too much importance on search engine
optimization and not enough on the process of converting visitors into actual
sales opportunities.
- Making inconsistent investments of time and/or
money that lead to big gaps in the Internet marketing plan, or periods where
nothing gets done.
Obviously, we could go on and on, but the point is that old
habits are easy to slip back into – even if you know you're not getting the
kinds of results you should be. But, if you're really serious about making
things happen this year, it's time to shed the ideas and habits that didn't
work in the first place.
If you're ready to
get to the top with your Internet marketing this year, contact a member of the
Kinetik team today and ask for a free consultation.
Every programmer knows all too well the challenges of software bugs during the testing phase of an application. It's a part of the life of a developer that remains constant, yet the methods used to remove bugs are not always constant. That's where an expert like Microsoft MVP, Tom van Stiphout comes in with his vast knowledge of software and database programming to share little known tips on making life just a little bit easier.
The second open forum webinar in our MVP Hour series, Tom covers techniques in Access and Excel using Visual Basic Tools that beginner and intermediate developers can use for software debugging.
The presentation is published in a couple of videos that can be found on our
YouTube channel. Over time, we will continue to add more videos and encourage sharing them to pass along Tom's advice.
Anyone interested in joining our mailing list to be notified of our next MVP Hour, can
sign up here.
Happy debugging!
We are lucky to have a rare Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) on our team at Kinetik I.T. Tom van Stiphout is one of 3,000 MVP's and one of less than 60 Access experts in the world to carry this title.
Today we had the pleasure of hosting our first live video streaming session online called MVP Hour. Several participants, some MVP's as well, joined the session to ask Tom pointed technical questions related to Access Database, Simil, UI interfaces among other topics.
We thank everyone who made our first experience successful and actually fun. Requests were made to do it again and to record the session, so that is our new plan.
We will orchestrate monthly video streaming with questions brought in by everyone who wants to learn from Tom. If you are one of them, please email questions to tvanstiphout@kinetik-it.com and stay tuned for announcements on coming dates.