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The latest version of Marsden’s new weight tracking app is now live in the Google Play and Apple app stores. The app was designed and developed by Sheaf Digital.

The Marsden Weighing Group is based in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. For over 90 years, Marsden has been supplying high quality, accurate sales to the UK medical profession and industry. Marsden now sells a range of Bluetooth enabled scales. The Marsden Connect app can connect directly to one of these scales - weights can be downloaded and recorded without the need for manual input, thereby reducing errors and increasing data accuracy.

I wanted to backup a PostgreSQL database automatically to some offsite storage/server.

The first thing I had to do was decide where to put the backup. In the end I decided to use Azure as part of the solution. I know people say Azure’s expensive, but you can get a 12 month free trial. So at the time of writing, this solution doesn’t cost anything.

Power BI calculated columns and measures can be confusing at first - they seem to do almost the same thing. In the following example we use some simple school attendance data to explain why calculated columns and measures are different and we show you which one to choose when you want to do more analysis of your data.

The goal with this report was to create something interactive (and engaging) that non-technical stakeholders could use to explore student satisfaction data. That’s important - we are not trying to develop a super flexible, complicated reporting tool, but instead we want to use interactivity to engage non-technical stakeholders with data about student satisfaction.

How do you choose between Microsoft Dynamics 365 and a bespoke customer relationship management (CRM) solution if you want a new back office system to collect and manage information about customers, products and orders? Perhaps you want to capture new leads, allocate them to your sales team and then track sales conversations. When is a bespoke CRM system a better long term solution?

Writing software isn’t difficult when you know what you want to do. Coding is the easy bit. The tricky bit is working out what your end users and your customers really need. And when you think you’ve done that, you’ve got to document it and communicate it in a way that makes it as easy as possible for your development team to design and build the best solution.

A bespoke customer relationship management solution is an affordable alternative to more complex off-the-shelf software. It will put you in complete control of the information you collect about customers, enquiries, leads and sales; you make better decisions when you can report on accurate, well organised data.

Here are ten reasons why you should consider a bespoke CRM solution:

This post was inspired by Joel Splosky’s 'The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code'. That post is now more than 20 years old, but it is still very relevant and has plenty of good, clear advice for its software developer audience. This one is slightly different because my intended audience is customers - people with little or no software development expertise who want to commission bespoke software. It’ll take you less than 5 minutes to read and you never know, it could save you a lot of time, hassle and money.

The best way to learn React is to dive straight in and build something. To keep things simple I decided to copy our current www.coursedate.com website (PHP with Twig templates) in React. That way I wouldn’t have to spend any time thinking about the usual stuff that comes with a new web project (requirements, UI design etc), instead I could just focus on understanding how React works.

The sitemap file for Coursedate, our online course booking system, is generated on the fly using PHP.

We don’t manually update the sitemap.xml file each time a training provider creates a new course. New course pages now appear automatically in the sitemap file as soon as they are published in Coursedate’s course directory. That’s less work for us and it means the sitemap is always up to date when search engines do their indexing.