One central question in engineering, not only in software, is whether to reuse existing parts or to build your own. “Reinventing the wheel” is a recurring topic for heated arguments. Considering the much-revered minimalist tendencies of Nordic interior design, you might guess what our stance is. Our QualityFirst solution is no exception.
Yes, we’re going to make a case for how not to reinvent the wheel. Imagine asking a chic Nordic interior designer for an ideal living room setup. You’re unlikely to get a massive makeover with an electric fireplace. Instead, your comfy couch for your hygge or kalsarikänni sessions will just get new covering in a restrained colour, and a lot of cushions and blankets.
In IT support, custom built things few people use might be more work than a well-known platform. So, consider our approach a way to reuse what many businesses already have. This has allowed us to build a particularly important product that is easy for complex IT departments to adopt. Put your hands together for QualityFirst, our quality and management solution. So, how does it work?
The world according to Microsoft
Firstly, we need to take a look at Microsoft. What Microsoft does very well is understand what businesses need from IT. The world of big business largely runs on Microsoft products, because Microsoft has made it manageable to set up complex systems. SharePoint is no different, and among businesses large enough to have a Microsoft-based network of user accounts, the product is considered a cornerstone by analysts.
Current versions of SharePoint, either on-premise Server or Online, are scalable, that is, they offer room to grow. It’s an efficient platform on which to build internal or external web-based resources and documents management, with tight integration to Microsoft Office.
What some perceive as a problem with SharePoint is its tabula rasa state: it’s up to businesses to build the structure and tools they want on SharePoint. However, naming things and coming up with categories and taxonomies in a future-proof way is hard.
That’s where our expertise and QualityFirst comes in.
Choose a platform, not a trap
With QualityFirst, companies can use the whole animal that is Sharepoint, rather than sending their IT crew out to hunt for more meat in the cold winter.
SharePoint is bigger than us. It does a lot of things that are neither relevant to us or controlled by us. In fact, when we build QualityFirst, we use the same APIs, or interfaces, to talk to Sharepoint that anyone else would use for integrating it with their own apps. The result is simpler and more focused than SharePoint out of the box, and still, it works with everything SharePoint.
Yet, underneath, data is stored by Microsoft SQL Server, a widely used relational database, operated daily by hundreds of thousands of database experts, or by Microsoft cloud engineers. If you need more help, you can hire more of them.
Hence, unlike some solutions for storing documents, QualityFirst is not a black box of mystery code where support relies on one small company. QualityFirst rests upon a very familiar foundation.
There it is, an introduction to why QualityFirst is built as a puzzle piece for your business rather than a jigsaw puzzle for IT. In the Nordic countries, we have a reputation for making the complex simple through beautifully practical design. QualityFirst embodies this philosophy. To find out more, check our information page or give our experts a call.
