Do you have “one of those web applications”? You know, it’s critical to your business but it makes you feel like you’re back to using DOS? Maybe it’s something you directly use, or maybe it’s something you’ve linked from your corporate website for visitors to use, but in either case - it’s just doesn’t work quite as well as you’d like, or looks like it’s from the early 90s.

The Problem

In one case a client of ours was using Eclipse, a powerful inventory management system that provided unfortunately only an extremely basic web application portal for customers to login and order products. The web application portal was not well supported by the developer and any enhancements would take 4-6 weeks.

Because the customer facing portal was so basic we were tasked with developing a pleasing, powerful front-end that continued to tie into the Eclipse system. Creating that system was relatively straightforward, being developed in ASP.net with a SQL Server database.

However, we quickly found that as we were able to provide a customized, clean looking interface that the Eclipse parts of the system were found to be lacking. If only we could take the output from Eclipse and modify it before showing it to the user, enhancing it as needed. More modern systems would have a Web Server API or another way to get the data from the system prior to showing it, but unfortunately Eclipse did not.

The Solution

An old developer standby known as screen scraping. Screen scraping, in a nutshell, involves an application making requests to a program and getting results by interpreting the responding content. In this case, we needed to make requests to Eclipse, find patterns in the results, and then recreate the pages before outputting them to the customer.

By implementing a screen scraping solution we were able to fully take over screens that Eclipse had to handle before, and make both design and content changes as required. This could be as simple as hiding some content, but in other cases could be the integration of data from Eclipse and from our own SQL Server database.

Downsides

There are some downsides to screen scraping. One is that if the underlying content changes you will almost certainly have to tweak the screen scraping application. Another is that performance could be slower, depending on the amount of processing on the screen scrape. In our case we did not notice a performance problem.

Upsides

However in this case the upside is huge. When in the past our client was asked to make changes to add a new client, they had to either say “no” or that it would take 6 or more weeks for the change. By screen scraping changes could happen in hours, not weeks - all while maintaining integrity of the system data and offering a more robust web application.

I’m about halfway through the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.   The gist of the book is that if you can find a new way to provide goods or services or a whole new market, then you can make the competition irrelevant and be a unique provider in a calm blue ocean of marketplace.  No longer will you be stuck in the churning bloodbath or “red ocean” of competition with others who all provide the same products or services and are forced to compete by price-cutting or other sales tactics with no hope of taking over meaningful market share.

To make your competition irrelevant, you have to take an in-depth look at what you and your competitors all do:

• Determine what truly has value to the customer (to do more of this)
• Uncover what the customer doesn’t care about (to reduce or eliminate)
• Look outside of your existing marketplace to see if there is untapped potential for creating a new service or product to address needs of people who do not do business with you today (untapped potential customers)

The hardest part is to put aside your preconceived ideas of your industry and open your mind to think of new ways to solve your customer’s needs.  I’ve been in the technology field for over 20 years, so this has been easier said than done, but it’s a great mental exercise.

Think about your own business.  Do you do things because “that’s the way it’s done”?  What could you eliminate or reduce without hurting the customer experience?  What could you increase or create to enhance the customer experience and set yourself apart from the competition - possibly even creating something never offered before?  What if you could recapture past clients that you had lost, new clients who chose a competitor, and potential clients with demands that are not being met in your marketplace?

If you have ideas for us to consider for what you’d like to see if anything was possible for technology support or web sites, or if you would like to brainstorm about your business to get an outside perspective, I’d love to hear from you.  Please leave a comment on the blog or email me at tlf@foresitetech.com.

With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research.  Naturally where did I start?  Google.  As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.

To begin, Microsoft is claiming that Bing is supposed to help users make intelligent decisions, not simply push back results so that seemed like a good starting point for comparison.  I decided to do some parallel searches with Google and Bing to see where it got me.  My first search was “Where should I eat dinner tonight?”.  For both search engines, this was just too vague.  As a seasoned searcher, I added “in Hartford” to the search to see if that helped.  While a few restaurant guides came back in each, none were very relevant or targeted for my purpose.  For example, there were ones for “restaurants close to the Hartford Court House”.  As helpful as that may be for your repeat offenders, I try to stay in the more mainstream areas in Hartford and out of trouble.

Then genius hit me.  As someone in the network support business, I searched for “Network Support Hartford CT” to see some relevant results in today’s business world.  The results in Bing were mixed.  While 3 of the top 4 results were network support companies (including ForeSite in position #2), only 5 of the 10 results on the first page were relevant.  In Google, 8 of the 10 were related to network support though 2 were for jobs in the network support field.  While I personally believe that we should be the first result in all engines we were #3 in Google.  When you remove duplicate sites in both search engines, and the paid results in Google, the results were very similar though and it would be tough to make a decision on this alone.

Bing did have one feature that I thought was helpful which was the Document Preview feature.  When hovering a result, it tries to grab relevant text from the site and display it in a pop-up window without having to go to the site.  This was helpful to see if the displayed result was relevant without having to go to all of the different web sites listed.  This is not ground breaking, but was helpful.  Bing’s last feature that was obvious was the recent search results on the left hand side of the search page.  I’m not sure how helpful this will be over time, but I could see a few applications for it if you are looking for something you found in the recent past but can’t remember what you searched for.

So, I think this is a “no decision” unfortunately for Microsoft as they will have to come out with some real bells and whistles to de-thrown Google in the search business.