Tom Clifford – IT Manager: 1st
June 2014
So it was about time we had a holiday, we had not been away for over a
year and both myself and the wife had been working really hard on IT projects
for our businesses.
My project needed something else, something that would gather
everything together but I was not sure what and I needed time to think, time to
go over how this would work when we delivered it to the board, the management
and our users.
So this morning I’m off down the travel agent to see what they have
available.
Ray Kemp – Technical Director at DSCallards: 1st June 2014
My dev guys have been
working for a couple of weeks now trying to bring together as much social media
information as possible. We are attempting to connect twitter, facebook, web
page hits, linked in; basically as much as information we can get to form a
profile of our customer … those who follow us and those who talk about us here
at DSCallards.
This is not wasted time as
we have a customer who is looking for this requirement and we wanted to
understand the complexities. As we moved from one social network to another it
was good to see that they were all using oAuth as a standard interface … a
little hassle with facebook but the information started streaming in.
Tom Clifford – IT Manager: 1st
June 2014
Well that was lucky … we had always fancied Mauritius, and the local
agent had a last minute deal, better than I could find on the web so we are
booked for next week. The photo of the resort accommodation looks breath
taking.
The wife is over the moon, decided to travel light … we needed very
little. I checked with the resort and they have free public wifi, so the only
technology I am taking is my tablet … perhaps if I can clear my mind of all the
other project work going on I can investigate how we are going to eventually
present this information to the board, the management and the users.
Ray Kemp – Technical Director at DSCallards: 6th June 2014
It’s taken a week to
collate this information, and eventually had to use an open source database
that holds the information in document objects rather than the normal
row/column format of standard server based databases. This was because each
social source had a totally different structure and needed storing and indexing
in a specific form.
Once stored, we watched
the data updating real-time by the web services our amazing development team
had built. We then needed to find relationships between these sets of data.
Page hits, location data,
date and time, locales, related word searches within twitter … all this
information was initially confusing. But within a day I had our BI team finding
relationships … and things started to make sense. They have such a set of
skills, just like the development team … you ask for it and it just starts to
happen!
I decided to use
Yellowfin … we are the UK partner for Yellowfin and I knew we could get to the
information quickly once the development and BI teams had done their work. This
stuff is so easy to use and so powerful.
Having been down to
Melbourne recently talking over the new features in Yellowfin … I knew this
would not take long.
Tom Clifford – IT Manager: 7th
June 2014
Well we made it. The flight was not too bad and once we landed we
needed to be shuttled across to the resort on the island. It feels like the
rest of the world is a million miles away.
The beach is stunning … we went in snorkelling this morning and the
water is so clear you could see forever.
So the wife has gone off to be pampered with a massage and some beauty treatment
this afternoon. About time I had some time to myself to see if I can find a
solution to the data retrieval within this BI project.
Let’s get the tablet out whilst I’m on the beach and see what there is?
BI tools and dashboards, that’s what we need something that looks good
to the users and can help management see things out of the data that you cannot
normally track.
Hey, this looks good … Yellowfin. Let’s download some of these white
papers. Gartner have some great feedback, they are in the quadrant which is
important to get buy in from the business. It looks like these guys are
learning from others and getting it right.
Nice website, looks like DSCallards are the guys I need to call when I get back. Have tweeted my guys back in the UK to check this out but while I have some peace and quiet, let me go through the website …
Ray Kemp – Technical Director at DSCallards: 7th June 2014
Ok, the data has started
streaming in now and Yellowfin is working really well. The data views were easy
to put together. So let’s see who is checking out our website and tweeting our
details around the same time.
“Hey guys … come and look
at this. There is somebody in Mauritius with a tablet browsing our website and
he is tweeting about Yellowfin. He’s got to be on the beach!”
Note: These are actual
stats taken at 12:25am on 7th June 2014. Thanks to Yellowfin and our
stunning development and BI teams here at DSCallards ... I know nothing is
impossible.
Written by: Ray Kemp, Technical Director, DSCallards
On a recent i-Pad development project using Phonegap and the Ionic framework we ran into issues with the orientation seemingly being set to portrait only. We had been labouring under the somewhat misplaced apprehension that changes in orientation were just supported with no code being necessary.
