Sitecore and EpiServer are WCMS with an enormous presence on the web. Both use .NET technology which only works on IIS and Windows based. Both have a great developer community on their developer sites. The main storage system is MSSQL but Sitecore also uses Mongo to manage analytics information. This content management systems are used to create complex websites because of their facility to build and manage new content.

​In this blog post, we will talk about communication within the office, how we can improve it, what we can do to read and respond to emails effectively, how to create a more productive work environment and above all how to pay attention to our colleagues. At the end of the day, they are the ones we share most of the time with.

If you want to know Sitecore for the first time, be prepared to be a close friend of the Powershell, Stackoverflow and the Sitecore Community. Coming from a background where the only technologies related to web development are JavaScript, HTML, CSS and PHP, it’s not too common to hear about a technology like Sitecore, and first impressions may be tough.

Sitecore just announced their mid-year product update this July 22, 2019 which features some upgrades and a few new releases mostly focused on giving marketers and developers a unified platform to own the entire content lifecycle.

When we want to build something, big or small, and we have a vision or a dream, even a goal, we always look for instant results or imagine ourselves reaching our goals at that precise moment.

Stand out from the crowd by making a great “first impression” with your résumé’s appearance!

I admire Steve not only because he excelled at what he did but also because he has inspired a lot of people and even whole industries to do things differently...

A Silicon Valley’s computer scientist’s views on social media.

This article will give the reader an introduction to the basic concepts of data analysis using statistical tools and how to implement them using the Microsoft Excel Analysis ToolPak.

What’s new with EF Core 2.2-preview. How was the presentation of Entity Framework Core 2.2 Preview in .NET Conference 2018

Define what data science and machine learning are and how they can be used in software development projects. Identify tools and resources that will be of help to a developer that wants to get familiar with these topics.

Realm Mobile Database is an alternative to SQLite and Core Data. Simple saving. Fast queries. Save weeks of development time.

Give an insight on the creation of a sample application that exemplifies what is the Internet of Things and how an application can be developed that uses the existing frameworks and resources provided by Microsoft.

A new official language for Android developers has officially arrived this year. Everyone talks about how good it is, is it true?

When making a creative work, sometimes it feels like none of the ideas you visualize are good enough or if they're even going to work in real life. This is where sketching wireframes comes in. A smart process can make the real difference.

This article quickly explains how to send an email automatically and periodically using windows service, SMTP Server (for sending the emails), Event Logs and many more technologies or concepts.

Brands have types and subtypes, and we have to consider them when it comes to content creation for social media. Corporate brands are a type, and by experience, I can say those are the most difficult for creating engagement because the information has to be sober, educational and distinctive.

Invest time doing what is “Important”...

Develop into a specialist in multiple areas with a broad base of knowledge. The most valuable developers have deep knowledge in different areas.

An introduction to Sitecore Speak featuring a basic example application.

Have you ever wondered if there are different ways to learn English other than textbooks and in normal schools?

An introduction to Groovy's concepts.

Challenges of Business Analysts transitioning to an Agile approach.

Important tips to help people have a good interview for a QA position.

A brief introduction to Scrum and key concepts.

What does it take to be an outstanding QA Engineer?

Which are the different financial funds?

Is SaaS a good decision for my business over hosting my applications on local servers inside my offices?

Workflows used in Sitecore allow users to have an efficient system of the content publishing. Here is an example of how we use them at Inflection Point Systems.

How to connect UI to a Salesforce backend.

Useful advice to improve your financial health.

In this article I will tell you a bit about my experience using Sitecore Experience Platform for the Inflection Point brand and how it has helped directing our digital marketing strategy.

We will learn the basics about this powerful tool and be able to manipulate a lot of data without affecting the application with multiple requests

New companies are not carrying any cost of providing the service but take a good portion from those millions of consumers which buy from them.

"It is not a lack of publications on social networks, it is a lack of interaction and engagement."

Did you see this technology based sea change coming?

In this article we will review an example of how to consume a REST service simulating that it will return the results in a JSON format.

Millennials and their culture are shaping the way business are carried out.

We are among the top 5 Best Working Mother companies in Mexico due to our working culture and scope towards mothers who work.

What makes QA and testing so important in the Software process?

Gathering requirements is a crucial task for a project to succeed, therefore documents must be precise, measurable, clear and understandable.

Are you going to save that extra cash under the mattress? This article may result interesting:

A quick manual on how to upload test cases to ALM using Excel

The PERT technique is one of the best time estimation tools, widely spread to provide accurate estimates and schedule the tasks in a project by a Gantt chart.

An example of how to consume a REST service simulating that it will return the results in a JSON format.

Companies might need money to expand their markets and government might need to fund projects, how do they borrow money?

Grasping the concepts of UI, UX and IxD might provide a better understanding with our coworkers and our clients.

This is how I lived the SkyQuest 2.0 experience.

Are you curious about stock trading and learning how to buy and trade stocks? Then this post is for you:

In this post I will wrap up some of the content we discussed on the last posts and include bibliography as reference.

The basic concepts of UI and UX are commonly confused and even misunderstood, so let's break it down.

More techniques and tools to aid agile development and lower technical debt

Requirements gathering has a stronger impact on the business than you might think of.

Strategies to keep tasks on check

Owing to code is a strategy that can solve many use but must be kept in control.

There's other methods to correctly speak rather than studying a bunch of rules

Not everything in life is coding.

All about Scrum, how it's gaps can be positive for building a project and the G.R.R. Martin effect.

How to build code which prevents your Database from receiving too many hits.

There are some changes on how Angular 1 and Angular 2 work, next we will show what we think are the key main updates made and how to use them.

One of the most common issues when starting a project for the 1st time with FACELETS (XHTML + XML) is that it does not handle very well JAVASCRIPT enclosed in a normal <SCRIPT> tag within the JSF file.

Angular 2 is built for speed: it has faster initial loads and change detection, plus improved rendering times. It takes advantage of features provided in the latest JavaScript standards, such as classes, modules, and decorators.

Software development frameworks will provide you structure and direction to develop software in a particular or preferred way like “Agile” or “Plan-driven”, but it is up to you to decide what is the best way to do it; and that is the key difference between the two.

Based on my 13+ years of experience as a professional software developer; I will like to discuss about “Agile”; its virtues and is dangers, its myths and misconceptions, its pros and cons; and also some of the common pitfalls I have encounter during the years.

Have you ever wondered if there are different ways to learn English other than textbooks and in normal schools?

It is this blur social networks have created between customers simply intaking publicity and customers reacting to publicity which has created a bliss/hell in many ways.

As we discussed on my last blog, assertiveness is a personal quality of being confident, direct and self-assured when communicating with others without being aggressive. Here are some strategic points on how to develop this useful soft-skill:

Most applications use data, information to work e.g. user information, financial data, weather data and so on. Any useful application consumes or generates data of any kind.

Carlos Montemayor, Inflection Point’s founder & CEO, has been named a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2016 Maryland Award.

Today, we are celebrating Mother’s Day, and it’s a great excuse to share a brief personal experience on being a working one.

Today as Business Analysts we are experiencing a huge change on our role in the organization, our main role has been characterized as tactical (strictly follow the process) but now the organizations are also using the Business Analyst role to align and drive organizational strategy.

Sometimes, when people find out that Inflection Point is in the top 50 GPTW in Latin America, they often ask: what the “recipe” is? The answer is simple and complex at the same time. For me, the key to be a GPTW is: The values.

At the end of the day there is something to be learnt from this, probably the most important lesson we can extract from it, is the dangers of crowd learning.

New technologies must be evaluated not only for what they promise they will do, but for the operation tasks they will change, tasks old technologies already know by heart.

QA & Testing is no longer just a technical issue, it is a Business issue that every QAT Engineer must have in mind!

The traditional marketing era is moving into the digital and experience marketing and I’m glad I get to be in this challenging industry.

Assertiveness is a personal quality of being confident, direct and self-assured when communicating with others without being aggressive.

No game is the same. No matter if you play with the same person all your life, each game has a different balance and rhythm, it feels different. Placing the first stone will have a consequence 100 moves later.

This was the key hardware custom made piece of this quest. Not only did it had to hold all the components in place, like the GPS transmitter or the antenna, it had to be just ideal for the camera to be able to shoot great video and the cell phone to take cool pictures from below. All of this while allowing the power bank to energize both of them.

In the world and today’s society there are many clichés; I think clichés can be some of the most hurtful things as they prevent us from knowing a new person with different nationality, religion, skin color, or different musical taste. At the end of the day, we are just people who do the same things, eat the same things, think the same things, and feel the same things.

Whoever works in a team must know how to listen to others, be generous, sometimes defend the indefensible and every now and then let go even when you are right all to achieve harmony and focus into the same objective.

Sending a weather balloon to stratosphere is not as hard as it sounds.

Last August Microsoft released the preview of the latest version of its collaboration tool SharePoint 2016.

Did you know that "stress at work” is the number one occupational health treatments? So what can we do to control it?

A good recommendation for implementing scrum for teams and organizations.

Today we proudly present Inflection Point's brand new website. This initiative is of tremendous importance since it showcases the culture and capabilities of Inflection Point Systems.

A new and very promising technology that might be the end of Wi-Fi.

We are a very diverse group of people at IPS, but some of us share the taste for adrenaline and others have acquired it.

Learn how to address the risks of the mobile environment to make stronger and more secure applications.

Understanding big balls of mud, a common Object Oriented world software problem, and how to defeat and avoid them.

May this be only the beginning of a long and prosper path that will keep amazing us.

Understanding big balls of mud, a common Object Oriented world software problem, and how to defeat and avoid them.

When testing there are 7 main principles that should be followed.

It’s easy to share when you have the attitude: listening and encouraging people to contribute is basic in our culture. Seasoned fellows coach new members about code quality, architecture, best practices, user experience as well as code versioning, task tracking and other tools. At the same time, those seasoned peers learn from younger guys, form their impetus and fresh wisdom.

Learn how to use the JAXB tool to facilitate the usage of XMl in Java.

Learn how to use the JAXB tool to facilitate the usage of XMl in Java.

The main things to pay attention when designing a Mobile app for a customer.

Get an interesting insight about the jQuery conference talk on Next Generation JavaScript Testing.

A constant debate for both workers and industries, which is the best approach? is there a balance between both?

A review about the ES6 Right now conference by John Paul.

A very complete review on the fundamentals of how is JavaScript built and executed by web browsers.

Explains how this conference helps you to better analyze the decisions made regarding frameworks during software development.

An overview of the video by Lon Ingram, which walks us through the process of performance optimization and why should we do it.

The challenges of mobile application usability are several, but numerous best practices can be applied across all platforms, here are some of them.

We'll go through some of Android Studio's highlights and new features.

A quick review of the most relevant technologies that ceased to exist this 2014

Understanding requirements concepts that will be useful and applicable for BAs, Developers and QAs.

Understanding requirements concepts that will be useful and applicable for BAs, Developers and QAs.

Jenkins is a free Continuous Integration tool which can be very useful for writing quality code.

Understanding requirements concepts that will be useful and applicable for BAs, Developers and QAs.

Understanding requirements concepts that will be useful and applicable for BAs, Developers and QAs.

A brief summary and some handy links and information to get started on .Net best practices for all development stages.

Review Minification and Bundling of resources like CSS and Javascript and the tools that are available at the moment for doing it.

Chronicle about the trip of some of our team members to the highest peak of Mexico.

Check out the last part of the Decision and Risk Analysis techniques for planning.

Learn more about the Decision and Risk Analysis techniques for planning.

Review the Work Breakdown Structure and Estimation techniques for planning.

Learn what planning is from a BA point of view, pick up some keyconcepts and review the advantages of it.

Learn how Unit testing can improve your code and how they can help you afterwards in the maintenance of the app.

Find out what to expect and explore from the evolving mobile application development industry from a business perspective.

Learn about the experience of working in a GPTW and discover some of its main features.

Hints and tips about where to find resourceful information to learn about iOS development.

In this article we give you advice on Technical Inteviews for developers. Learn to show your technical skills with confidence.

Get that extra push with these tips to make your simple video games something awesome.

Learn the basics of Video game development, know how they work and check out our favorite making tools.

The mission was to successfully re-design Notigape news app for iOS (iPhone and iPad).

Testing, a power so great that I began to concern those around me, fortunately I discovered that I was not alone, there were others like me, “Software Testers”.

In this article, we will see the details regarding constraints on type parameters at method definition.

As the name indicates, extension methods is the mechanism to add (or extend) methods to existing types without having to inherit or recompile the assembly/project where the type resides.

The ref and out keywords are often used to change the behavior of parameters in a method. However, there’s a keyword that is much less known, but which is quite helpful: params. When using params, before any parameter declaration, it will allow us to provide a variable number of arguments when calling the method. The parameter using the params keyword contains the restriction that it has to be declared as an array.

The .NET framework offers a lot of functionality in the definition and handling of methods. Besides the typical behavior of methods/functions in any programming language, .NET provides extra features when creating and using functions. This article is intended to describe and explain some of the possibilities around method signatures.

Combres is a tool that lets you minify, compress and set some useful headers to JavaScript and CSS files. This improves performance by creating smaller pages and making use of browser cache, when available.

In these days, user experience (UX) is very important. We could have a cool website, but if it is slow, people will go away and never come back to our site. Performance is a main component of UX, so it is imperative that your website is as fast as it can be.

In any cases, duplicate code should be avoided, because code reuse, encapsulation and maintainability are not accomplished. If encapsulation/code reuse is made properly, then we know for sure that we won't revisit that working code (unless we need to extend it). Writing good code and following best practices avoid technical debt.

A couple of weeks ago a coworker experienced a serious issue while working with Sitecore Query. He spent a lot of time trying to run a query for an easy search but it was not working. My friend was pretty sure the syntax was well formed but when the query was executed the result was an error: End of string expected at position ##

The Standard Software Development Process of Inflection Point (SSDP of IP) fits using methodologies such as CxOne and Six Sigma, simplifying operation and project management in a way that will allow us to respond quickly to our customers without sacrificing quality into the development of our products and services.

One night, I was watching TV and saw an ad that I found quite interesting. It’s called “Disconnect to Connect” which was produced by DTAC, a mobile phone provider in Thailand.

When the .Net Framework is uninstalled - in my case the .NET framework 4.0 was removed after I uninstalled VS 2012 -, the Application Pools for the Sitecore instances are change to map to .NET Framework version. v2.0.

Inflection Point Systems ranks among the top 10 companies to work for in Mexico in the category of IT and Telecom in 2013.

Why a CMS? Well, because your CMS is the key to move a great deal of operational complexity out of your day by day making your department a more strategic player to ease the collaboration between all these people.

Probably your site is going crazy, it’s wrongly displaying multi-line text fields and you’re asking yourself, who stole my new lines?

Inflection Point was hired by an International company to develop a solution for managing their employees iPhones using configuration profiles to make them work with their enterprise system.

This time, I want for current post to summarize some field name escaping recommendations for Sitecore Query.

Inflection Point Systems is proud to announce its 26th place in the ranking of the Best Companies to Work For in Latin America in 2013, in the category of 50 to 500 employees.

Now its time to cover the access of customized fields using the Sitecore’s API; we will see how a couple of classes help to set, read or even remove the fields in user profile.

If you invest some of your time researching at Sitecore documentation, you would find there is a pretty easy way to handle custom fields for Sitecore’s users... and if the situation is favorable you could achieve the goal without a single line of code.

Inflection Point Systems was ranked 4th among the Best Companies to Work For in in the category of 50 to 500 employees by Great Place to Work Institute. The company also was granted the top award in the category of Respect among more than 100 certified companies that competed in this ranking.

When developing an app of any kind, there are many decisions to be made. One of the first and most important of those decisions is which technology or technologies to use when implementing the app. In the case of the mobile market, that particular decision forces us to decide whether we should go with a native app, or whether we should go for a more generic approach.

We founded Inflection Point with the dream of creating a software company with strong emphasis on developing quality technology solutions that had an impact on our client's business performance.

A content audit is pretty much as any other audit – “is an evaluation of a person, organization, system, process, enterprise, project or product” (Wikipedia, Audit, Last checked on March, 2013) – but only focused on your organization’s content.

Among other things, Sitecore 7 has been rewritten to leverage .NET 4.5 API. It has also updated third party libraries to the latest version and it has a new implementation of the Item class. But the biggest improvement IMHO is in their search. The refactored search and index architecture allows you to:

My experience taking the Sitecore Advanced .NET training was like learning the tricks behind a magic performance. Sitecore Rocks provides a useful set of tools to edit content, templates, logs and even pipelines; so it was not a surprise that we quickly stopped worrying about Sitecore Desktop and started to love Sitecore Rocks.

As the first post of a series regarding the concepts around software security, I have compiled a list of common terms you will typically find in literature related to software security

Content Strategy is relatively new in the digital media. Is definitively not for the faint of heart since it requires effort – and a very big one – from it’s planning up to its execution and measurement, but the payback is huge and very rewarding. In this article, I tried to go back to the very beginnings of the discipline and went all the way to the current state by highlighting the need to implement a strategy for organizations.

Coveo has connectors for seamless integration with Sitecore (our CMS partner), as well as Salesforce, and many other data sources. We are very excited to be working closely with Coveo and look forward to offer this revolutionary enterprise search solution to our clients.

DO RESEARCH, RESEARCH and DO EVEN MORE RESEARCH!: All great ideas have a basis, it´s very cool to be able to be creative but we also aim to be effective. Research about what you are thinking, about if it has been done before, if someone already worked on it or if there is something else that can help you to be on the right direction.

Content is king! Probably we’ve heard this phrase quite a lot in the last months or even within the last couple of years – can’t be more than three years because 2009 was the year when the definition was originally coined. For me, it was actually around six or seven months ago, after downloading the September 2011 edition of .NET Magazine.

A Sitecore Website can be any website you can think of with the particularity that is developed using sitecore technology, which gives the developer some nice tools to build content, templates and layouts - sometimes in a much easier way - that bind together to create the site.

We already had the chance to see the fundamental part of Sitecore as a Content Management System; we’ll now see what’s so special about Sitecore and what are the advantages of developing websites using a CMS such as Sitecore. Also, I’ll cover a little bit about the certification exam.

During this session, it was the turn to take my role as a developer and focus on how to create the already mentioned content using the .NET environment. This second session highlight was - in my opinion - the different layers that are involved in the development of a Sitecore Website: Content, Presentation and the Binding of those two. Let’s see how it went...

For those of you who don't know, Sitecore is a Web Content Management System software company that provides all the necessary tools to enterprises and developers to build proper content management systems (CMS).

Well, first things first, what is this "box" anyway? The box is the square and methodical thinking that we always follow to reach a goal, from which we already know the result and well, if we already know that it works and that someone many years ago integrated this system and it worked; I mean, why fix something that is not even broken?

"Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" is a very interesting book, since it contains a lot of best practices and advices for programmers. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve his/her code. Here’s a fragment from the book which I find very compelling:

I will talk about the basic terms that are used by digital marketing people regarding e-commerce and in general, web applications.

Every beginning of a year there are thousands of lists trying to put together the highlights of the previous. This 2013 is no exception, and I’d like to use this space to highlight a New York Times article that came across my reading a few days ago.

Congratulations to our client, VidSys, which has been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in North America on 2012 Deloitte's Technology Fast 500.

Dec 17th was a different day at Inflection Point Monterrey. It was 10 AM and some of the employees of our company started to move to their cars to pack them up with all the presents that were accumulated during weeks.

We are now presenting a holidays animated comic that was produced by employees from different areas of Inflection Point.

November 20th is a reminder of a milestone in Mexico’s history: The commemoration of “La Revolución Mexicana” (Mexican Revolution).

Business opportunities for Mexico and the American manufacturing.