HONORABLE MENTIONS Small Business
Alex Apodaca,
Database/Systems Administrator, BioFilm
sysadmin@biofilm.com
Although he's been a DBA and in his present position for only 2 years, Alex Apodaca brims with enthusiasm for the profession and Microsoft technology. "I've been learning like a machine," he says. When the marketing department of Alex's employer, a manufacturer of a well-known consumer healthcare product, needed a reporting application that would show product sales breakdowns for selected BioFilm customers, Alex jumped right in to meet the request.
"Marketing needed an application that could let a user choose one or more companies from our database," he explains. "The app would display an executive summary of monthly sales and units sold for every product class that we offer. Marketing needed sales and units totals and subtotals for each month, year, and product class for all the selected customers. The app also needed to subtotal each annual period and give the annual percent change, year-to-date percent change, and last-month-this-year versus last-monthlast-year percent change."
To meet these requirements, Alex used SQL Server Query Analyzer to create a TSQL query that calculates, subtotals, totals, and summarizes monthly product sales data for its customers. He also used ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) and Excel VBA to design an Excel interface that lets users run a query for the customers they select through a drop-down list box. "I used ADO to write the connection string and create the recordset," Alex says.
"Then I used Visual Basic and VBA to wrap up the SQL and send it to the SQL Server system," which runs the company's ERP application. "The recordset is created and displayed on an Excel worksheet, then formatted with Excel VBA."
Alex's solution automates a task that previously took two employees up to 2 weeks to perform. "Now one untrained person can get the reports done for all our brokers in about an hour," he says. Alex says that his solution shows that "with Microsoft technologies and a basic understanding of programming concepts, one can truly achieve amazing results!"
Bishoy Ghaly,
Software Developer, Business Network Communication
dev@bnetcom.com
Bishoy Ghaly, who's been a software developer for 3 years, admits that writing software is his passion. He recently needed to find a way to automatically apply security permissions changes to all clients on a LAN, to ensure a secure computing environment across the LAN boundary. Sounds simple enough, but the catch was that the solution couldn't run on a server because it was geared toward small businesses that didn't necessarily have an IT administrator to oversee permissions. "Managing permissions and security in a large computer environment without a centralized solution is really painful," says Bishoy. "We needed to manage permissions in a [Windows] XP LAN—for example, allowing/disallowing programs to run, hiding drives, and tweaking configurations— without using a server solution and also without requiring someone to manually apply configuration changes on each computer."
Bishoy's solution was to write an application that would run on one of the XP clients in the LAN and manage permissions on the other LAN clients. To do so, he used Windows' remote registry feature, which developers use in applications to manage permissions on multiple systems. The remote registry feature is available in both the Windows .NET Framework and Delphi, and a C++ remote registry API is available. You can find more information about the remote registry feature at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/ html/frlrfmicrosoftwin32registry keyclassopenremotebasekeytopic.asp.
When Bishoy's application is installed on a LAN client, a user who has Administrator privileges can apply configuration changes to any computer on the network. Bishoy says his solution "saves time and effort for network administrators and helps increase their productivity without depending on server technologies."
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Chet December 08, 2005 (Article Rating: