Apps, inward or outward facing, are business must-haves

Business applications have numerous important roles today. These are the tools that make your company function, discrete units of technology with specific purposes. It's possible to draw a line between two broad types of applications: the external portals that connect you with outside organizations and those that enable your employees to communicate with one another. Both types are important, for similar reasons.

External lifelines
Creating transactional applications to process business dealings with partners and clients is an important job for a development team. If these offerings are weak or difficult to use, valuable information could end up becoming lost or compromised. A weak framework here could be the cause of a serious incident, whereas efficient and powerful technology could improve relations with business partners.

If development teams have the right tools at their command, they can create powerful apps that simplify processes such as auditing, keeping transactions orderly and efficient. If a firm does a good job developing apps, it can use these programs as the primary method of communication between itself and the outside world.

Productivity boosters
Inside the company, there are ample use cases for Web apps that fit the needs of various departments. Working with an internal app store, employees can download tools that suit their own job functions, and provided these pieces of software are easy to use, they can become excellent shortcuts in daily processes, streamlining certain functions and opening up lines of interdepartmental communication to break silos.

While in some ways, internal and external apps are separate areas of design and development, there are some common threads. In both cases, keeping the architecture secure, developing a highly effective user interface and ensuring the intended audience embraces the app are vital considerations. The goal is the improvement of a few communication-based tasks, which will help users take in data and do something with it.

The right framework
It's important that developers have the right tools to create their own Web apps, whether they are for internal or external consumption. With a Platform-as-a-Service deployment such as Progress® Pacific™, the team can gain access to powerful capabilities with little need for detailed coding. This means they can deploy strong offerings both for their own coworkers and for clients outside the business. Managing this new grouping of applications can prove simpler on a cloud-based framework, with all instances of the software updated as one. This can keep all users up-to-date and connected to one another, sharing their information.

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