Categories: Ask A Developer

How to Write an Efficient RFP

By: OmniSpearPosted on
Ask A Developer Feature Article
A regular column featuring answers from the team at OmniSpear

The benefits of having a system customized to your business workflow are often motivating factors in deciding to hire a custom development team to reorganize your business workflow and improve operations. We often find that one of the biggest challenges of hiring a custom software development shop to build your application is ensuring the development team understands your business’s needs and how the application will be used by your team. 

To help bring each of the teams together to reach an end goal of developing a custom application that is functional and efficient, we recommend working with a good in-house business analyst or hiring a development shop that provides that service as a part of their process. A business analyst will capture your business requirements, clarify needs and expectations, and write practical use cases that represent the way your team will use the software. After your team agrees to the requirements and use cases, the business analyst will work collaboratively with the lead developer on your project to design the system architecture, database and technology stack that best serves your needs.

Without this critical step of translating the application design into terms familiar to the entire team, along with clear direction and team synergy the final application may not be exactly what your team was hoping for. Whether the project is fixed-bid or hourly, any good development team is committed to efficiently coding the application and without thoroughly defined use cases, their commitment to code-efficiency could motivate developers to streamline the application, often resulting in the loss of critical workflow features. While technically meeting functionality requirements, the overall usefulness of the application to your business is lost.

When scoping projects and putting together your next RFP it is critical to outline clear needs for your application, put together thorough use cases and be upfront with needs and expectations with your development team. Our development team has 100+ years of combined experience over 35 projects. We’d be happy to work with your team and are committed to supporting our clients through each phase of the development process.

Have a question? Email info@omnispear.com for answers from the OmniSpear team.

Ask A Developer: What can I do to keep my website secure?

By: OmniSpearPosted on

When your website is hacked or taken offline by a hacker, getting it cleaned up and running again can cost you time, money and your customers’ trust. We understand how painful the experience can be, and have helped many clients both prevent hacks and complete repairs when hackers get through.

As hackers get more sophisticated, it’s critical our defenses continue to evolve and stay ahead of them. Working with multiple clients in maintaining and developing open-sourced content management system websites on platforms like WordPress and Drupal led us to develop our own content management system: OmniCMS.

Open-source CMS platforms are so popular because they are often user friendly, intuitive and offer flexibility and easy-to-use design applications at little-to-no cost, offering an inexpensive way to boost functionality and user experience. However, users should beware that these cheap plug-ins can be poorly maintained or written and pose the biggest security risk to websites built on open-source CMS platforms. To help best protect our clients and bring security in house, while still offering fully customizable and user experienced focused websites we developed OmniCMS.

When we build client websites on OmniCMS, we develop with security in mind:

  • Any changes to code are code reviewed at the highest standards.
  • All code is closed-source.
  • We alert clients when security issues are found and work quickly and diligently to implement security updates to resolve the matter.
  • Each revision of the content management system and its modules are tested rigorously by our team to identify and mitigate security flaws.
  • OmniCMS includes personalized, expert care 24/7.

Unsure about your website’s security? Let’s talk about potential weaknesses and how to solve them.