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Three Pillars of Application Design

Crow Canyon’s unique approach to developing applications that engage users, streamline processes, and provide reporting that drives service delivery optimization.


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About

The “Three Pillars of Application Design” is Crow Canyon’s unique approach to developing applications that engage users, streamline processes, and provide reporting that drives service delivery optimization. This Three Pillar approach is the foundation of NITRO Studio, our application service layer, that powers up SharePoint and Office 365 to become true business application platforms.

We have developed numerous applications and custom development projects powered by NITRO Studio. We also offer NITRO Studio as a stand alone product with customizable features.

Check out the information below to see how Crow Canyon can deliver robust SharePoint and Office 365 applications that drive efficiency and productivity at your company or organization.

Three Pillars of Application Design

View “Three Pillars of Application Design” Infographic 

First Pillar

The First Pillar
User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX)

“UI/UX” forms the first pillar of our unique NITRO application service layer. With NITRO as the foundation of all our applications and custom development projects, we are able to provide highly capable, full-featured applications for SharePoint or Office 365 as well as quick development and deployment, with lower costs.

SharePoint and Office 365 offer great potential as collaboration platforms. But how do you realize the possibilities? The first step is getting people to use it.

At Crow Canyon, our focus is on creating a user experience that drives engagement and interaction. To do that, we incorporate these “UI/UX” design goals into all of our applications:

  • Ease-of-use
  • Simplicity
  • Information at your fingertips
  • Attractive, engaging visual displays

How Do We Actually Do This?

Here are just some of the many elements we use to drive SharePoint and Office 365 user adoption:

Forms

Flexible, interactive, dynamic forms that gather and present data in multiple ways to different audiences. These forms can be simple or complex, depending on need, but are always geared to “who is using them” and how to make them easy and intuitive for end users and staff.

Highly engaging, customizable application portals for end users. Makes it simple and easy to enter in requests and issues, and to view status or search KB. With our portals, users are in a friendly “Digital Workspace” where they can get work done!

Relevant information is presented to technicians and managers in easy-to-view and easy-to-customize pages, with visual elements that “tell the story” and emphasize who needs to do what and when.

Conditional formatting, filtering, color indicators, KPI’s, and custom columns highlight the requests and tickets that need attention and give a quick, easily sorted view of all outstanding issues and their statuses.

The overall look-and-feel of the application — the colors, the fonts, the images, the Quick Launch, and more — can be given a friendly, familiar interface that makes users comfortable using the applications.

Workers are no longer tied to their desks and need access on a variety of devices while away from the office or in the field. Our applications are built from the start with mobile in mind.

Second Pillar

The Second Pillar
Workflows & Business Process Automation

“Workflows & Business Process Automation” forms the second pillar of our unique NITRO application service layer. With NITRO as the foundation of all our applications and custom development projects, we are able to provide highly capable, full-featured applications for SharePoint or Office 365 as well as quick development and deployment, with lower costs.

Workflows and Business Process Automation are the heart of any application. They are what streamline the work and power up efficiency and productivity.

At Crow Canyon, our focus is on optimizing business processes with workflows that help you provide better service and quicker resolutions. We want to make your job easier! Our workflow components provide these benefits in all of our SharePoint and Office 365 applications:

  • Automation
  • Visibility
  • Accountability
  • Communication
  • Full Lifecycle Tracking

Workflows

View Visual Workflow Designer

What Tools Do We Use?

Here are just some of the many elements that power the “Workflows & Business Process Automation” component of our SharePoint and Office 365 applications:

Workflow Manager

A powerful tool used to build and tune workflows to meet just about any business need. Do you need to route a request based on certain conditions? Do you need to manage a set of tasks that depend on each other, such as in Onboarding or Purchasing? What about managing IT Tickets, Hardware Requests, Change Requests, and more? The Workflow Manager is an easily configurable tool that allows you to set up simple or complex condition-based workflows — without any coding!

Everyone wants to know what’s going on. Keep all parties informed automatically with built-in alerting and notification tools. The alerts can be triggered on just about any event, action, and condition, as well as on a time-basis. The alerting tools give you a high degree of control of who gets alerted on what and when.

Many requests require approval, and these approvals can be based on any number of factors — what is requested, who is requesting, cost, department, location, etc. The request may require multiple approvals, whether in series or parallel. With the approval tools, the approval process is automated and tracked so that the request is managed and resolved quickly and without fuss.

Workflow Manager, Alerts, Approvals — these are work together to automate ticket and issue routing. Items can be auto-assigned, escalated, re-assigned, updated, marked complete, and more, streamlining operations and keeping requests moving to completion as smoothly and quickly as possible. Not only Help Desk, but also asset management, equipment tracking, purchasing, onboarding, access requests, contract renewals — all these and more benefit from the automation and routing built into our NITRO™ application service layer.

“The legbone is connected to the hipbone” — just like in the body, things are linked together in our applications. That means a ticket could be about a printer, computer, or other asset; a ticket could have sub-tasks; a purchasing request has multiple line items; etc. The capability to link related items together brings a coherence to the workflows and processes. You need to know what is linked to what else and how things are related for faster and more complete processing and resolution.

Periodic support tasks can be auto-generated and assigned. Regular maintenance events can be created, helping to keep assets and equipment in top working order. Repeat purchases can be automated, whether for re-stocking inventory or regular supplies. The ability to automatically generate recurring tasks or work orders keeps operations running smoothly.

Our applications are in SharePoint (whether on-premises or in Office 365), but email (especially Outlook) is a critical component and a strong player in the business process world. We employ email converters, parsers, and processors as well as generate emails from within SharePoint. We track the Email History of items to give a complete view of email interactions associated with any ticket, request, asset, contract, document, or other item in SharePoint.

More and more, SharePoint applications are a central hub that pulls in information from other databases to give staff a full picture of the incident, request, or issue. That means interactions such as pulling user info from Active Directory, working with employee/HR databases, synchronizing with network discovery tools, reading membership databases, pushing info to financial systems, interacting with ERP systems, and more. Business processes don’t necessarily stop at the SharePoint border and our tools can manage data and information going back and forth between SharePoint/Office 365 and line-of-business systems and databases.

Third Pillar

The Third Pillar
Reporting & Analytics to Optimize Service Delivery

“Reporting & Analytics” forms the third pillar of our unique NITRO application service layer. With NITRO as the foundation of all our applications and custom development projects, we are able to provide highly capable, full-featured applications for SharePoint or Office 365 as well as quick development and deployment, with lower costs.

Reporting & Analytics are crucial to know both the immediate status of work in-progress and the longer-term trends. This important information identifies stuck points and bottlenecks and guides decision-making that drives continuous service improvement.

At Crow Canyon, we want our applications to provide the data and results you need so you can make good decisions and see how to provide better service and faster resolutions to your customers and employees. As the saying goes, “good data = good decisions”. The reporting tools in our SharePoint and Office 365 applications aim to do the following:

  • Answer key performance questions
  • Identify root causes and issues
  • Guide staff performance optimization
  • Monitor Service Level Agreements
  • Provide immediate real-time reports
  • Provide historical and trend reports

How Can NITRO Benefit My Organization?

We have a set of tools that deliver “Reporting & Analytics” capabilities to our SharePoint and Office 365 applications:

Report Center

Central to reporting in both SharePoint on-premises and Office 365 is the Crow Canyon Report Center. This tools provides a variety of reports on any data set in our various applications. Charts, tables, and graphs can all be generated. The reports can be saved, emailed, printed, or displayed on the screen; they can be scheduled; they can be changed and edited in real-time; and they can be used in dashboards and workspaces. The reports are easily configured, both in the data sets used in the report and how they results are displayed. The reports can show immediate, real-time views for staff and technicians working the application, and historical trends for managers and admins.

Dashboards display current, real-time information in visually attractive displays that include counters, gauges, meters, and drill-down. Dashboard pages are highly customizable with no coding to delivery the stats and detail you need so you know what actions need to be taken to keep operations running smoothly.

SharePoint workspace pages are highly configurable to show a collection of data — reports, list views, visual displays, Tiles & Dials, and more — so that you have a comprehensive summary of the application. These workspaces can be role-based so that staff, managers, and admins have different sets of information, appropriate to their jobs. Many web parts and add-ins are available to create unique pages that adapt to your working style and needs, not the other way around.

Filtering, grouping, sorting and a multiplicity of views are used to present just the information you need at the time you need it. The list views are enhanced with highlighting, color indicators, KPIs, and bolding to further emphasize and communicate information about each ticket and the status of the queue.

Tiles & Dials provides gauges, meters, and number boxes to present an instantaneous snapshot of the critical information in each application — for example, new, overdue, open, closed or whatever for any of these (depending on which application is in use): tickets, work orders, employee requests, change orders, onboarding tasks, purchase requests, contract renewal, equipment needing maintenance, assets needing replacement, and more.

Power BI is a tool provided by Microsoft that can be used in conjunction with our applications to generate reports. It consists of Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, and Power BI Mobile. These components can be used to read data from SharePoint and Office 365 lists in our applications and produce a variety of reports for an overview and analysis of application performance.

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