Enterprise Level Applications for Small Businesses

What are Enterprise Applications?

EA or Enterprise Applications are business applications that are built to serve multiple purposes. These applications are deployed on different platforms across corporate networks, intranets, or the Internet and are expected to meet stringent requirements of security, administration, and maintenance. They are data-centric, user-friendly applications that are purpose-programmed, complex, component-based, scalable, distributed, and mission-critical. Its purpose is to meet specific business requirements. It encodes business policies, processes, rules, and entities.

The EA software incorporates a group of different programs that are pooled business applications and structural modeling efficacies designed for consummate functionalities that may include:

• Online shopping
• Payment processing
• Interactive product catalogs
• Computerized billing systems
• Security
• Content management
• IT service management
• Content switching modules
• Resource planning
• Business intelligence
• Human resource management
• Manufacturing
• Application integration
• Forms automation
• Sales force automation
• Enterprise resource planning
• Business process management

Do small businesses need EA?

No business is too small in today’s business landscape to not need EA solution.

While, EA is definitely a vital necessity in big high-growth and expanded businesses, it has always been confusion whether to incorporate it in small businesses. Many small businesses think that they are too small for Enterprise Resource Planning. This mindset stems from the belief that the requirement for ERP solution is driven by the number of users.

However, the truth is that smaller businesses too require Enterprise Application to survive the throat-cutting competition. EA enables small businesses to appear, act and operate like a big established, enterprise-scale business.

Small companies usually incorporate limited resources and have restricted time to process multiple spreadsheets and separate mountains of data manually. With continuous expansion, it becomes even more difficult to engage limited resources in tedious and time-consuming processing of larger volume of data. Therefore, for them, EA becomes essential in order to blend and automate key business functions like order production, processing, and finances.

If your business requires a lot of time for inputting sales and purchasing orders from numerous clients, updating inventory, manual stock checks, processing invoices, billing and keeping track of client interactions, then it requires Enterprise Resource Planning.

ERP can mechanize these manual processes, giving more company time to sales and business development in place of administrative tasks. Besides, ERP software enables synchronous workflow from inquiry to invoice and then payment.

What is the best approach to build an Enterprise level Application?

EA is a complex software that requires methodical approaches for functionality. Designing and developing Enterprise Applications means fulfilling numerous individual requirements. Keeping in mind that it will directly affect many other requirements in complex and unpredictable ways and the failure to meet any of these requirements can mean the failure of the entire project; it becomes essential to take the right approach.

The layered architecture is a widely used way of structuring .NET projects. They include the following steps:

• Presentation Layer
• Business Layer
• Data access Layer
• Business Entities

Tools for Enterprise Application design

Enterprise Application Model is a design tool that is most prevalent among .NET Enterprise Application projects.

(Source: Microsoft)

The most significant advantage of using this model to develop EA is that you can start anywhere. This model guides you systematically through the process of designing and building a large-scale commercial application, by organizing the hundreds or thousands of design requirements into a small number of sub-models. The correct sequence for navigating through these sub-models is chiefly based on the context and priorities of the project, rather than an arbitrary linear sequence. This lets you build up the application with the confidence that every design choice integrates with the overall application architecture.

The sections that present the individual sub-models are:

Business model - Defines the role of business requirements in the design and development of enterprise applications.

User model - Shows how the user requirements of an enterprise application are identified, along with their impact on design and development.

Logical model - Detects the elements of logical design in building the application, including the creation of abstract business objects and the services they provide.

Technology model - Presents the scope of technology decisions that enter into enterprise development, and discusses building or reusing components, deployment platforms, and other technology options.

Physical model - Shows how the application's physical architecture evolves from the successive inputs of each sub-model.

Development model - Presents the team and process models for enterprise development, and shows how they iteratively interact with each of the other sub-models.

Career as an EA Developer

With wide-ranging advantages of Enterprise Applications, companies and organizations around the world are seeking for engineers that are proficient in Microsoft Server installation, storage, and computing. While the demand is higher than ever, the supply of MS engineers is considerably low. Therefore, the salaries of EA developers remain high. According to Glassdoor, the average Enterprise Applications Developer salary is $89,496 and can grow more than $103,264.

With several offline and online institutions providing training programs for Microsoft Server, it is easier than ever to become a money-spinning EA developer.

Learn it with QuickStart – A Professional Guide

QuickStart is an online IT skill learning marketplace that helps engineers transform IT project performance and career growth through comprehensive learning and multi-mode training.

It offers a broad training course in Microsoft Windows Server 2016 (MS-20740) that trains apprentices, installations, storage, computing, upgrading, migration, management, and activation models. QS Microsoft Windows Server course outline also includes learning how to implement enterprise storage solutions, storage spaces, and data deduplication.

The course is intended for IT professionals who have some experiencing working with Windows Servers such as Windows Server administrators, IT professionals with general IT knowledge, and professionals looking to take the Microsoft 70-740 certification exam.

Prerequisites to enroll for the course are:

• Basic understanding of networking fundamentals and server hardware
• Awareness and understanding of best security practices
• Understanding of basic AD DS concepts

Experience supporting and configuring Windows client OS like Windows 8 or 10