In today’s competitive business environment, leveraging data-driven insights is critical for making informed decisions and remaining agile. Microsoft Power BI, a powerful suite of business analytics tools, empowers organisations to visualise, analyse, and share data in a more accessible, intuitive manner. By transforming complex datasets into easily digestible, interactive visualisations, Power BI enables businesses to derive meaningful information from vast amounts of data and make strategic, informed choices based on accurate, real-time insights.

In this blog series, we will explore the capabilities and benefits of Microsoft Power BI, covering topics such as data integration, visualisation, reporting, and collaboration while highlighting the value of partnering with egforit Software Services to extract the full potential of this innovative business intelligence platform. Our goal is to provide comprehensive, actionable knowledge that will guide you in harnessing the power of Microsoft Power BI, equipping your organisation with the tools and best practices for effective data analysis and reporting.

We will examine how Power BI can streamline your organisation’s data management processes, allowing you to draw conclusions from disparate data sources and create impactful visual representations that foster efficient data analysis and comprehension. With the expert support of our experienced team, you can successfully navigate the Power BI adoption journey, from consultation and customisation to training and ongoing maintenance.

Data Integration: Unifying Disparate Data Sources

Power BI provides seamless data integration capabilities, enabling businesses to extract relevant information from an extensive range of sources and formats, both internal and external. Key data integration features include:

• Connectors: Power BI simplifies connecting to a wide variety of data sources, offering pre-built connectors for popular services such as Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and SQL Server.
• Power Query: Power Query allows users to clean, transform, and reshape data before analysis, ensuring data validity, consistency, and accuracy. Power Query supports a host of data manipulation tasks, such as merging, pivoting, and aggregating data.
• Scheduled refresh: With Power BI, organisations can schedule data refreshes at regular intervals, ensuring up-to-date and accurate data for analytics and reporting tasks.

Data Visualisation: Creating Intuitive and Impactful Dashboards

Power BI facilitates the creation of engaging, interactive visualisations that present complex data in an easy-to-understand manner. Its data visualisation capabilities include:

• Drag-and-drop interface: Users can create visualisations and build dashboards using a simple drag-and-drop interface, choosing from a wide array of chart types, maps, and KPI cards.
• Custom visualisations: Organisations can further personalise their Power BI experience by creating custom visualisations or importing visualisation templates from the Power BI Marketplace.

 

• Real-time visualisations: Power BI supports adding real-time data streams to dashboards, enabling organisations to monitor critical business metrics and KPIs continuously.

Reporting: Insightful, Collaborative, and Accessible Analytics

With Power BI, organisations can generate comprehensive reports that provide valuable insights into their business data. Reporting features provided by Power BI include:

• Customisable reports: Businesses can easily create customised, interactive reports tailored to key stakeholders, departments or specific objectives.

• Automated insights: Power BI’s AI-driven capabilities, such as Quick Insights and Key Influencers, uncover hidden trends, correlations, and patterns within your data, allowing for deeper analysis and more informed decision-making.
• Collaboration and sharing: Organisations can share reports and collaborate on analytics tasks, granting access to specific users or groups and fostering better communication and decision-making across departments.

Collaboration: Empower Data-Driven Culture throughout Your Organisation

Power BI promotes a collaborative environment by enabling users to share their findings efficiently and securely within and outside the organisation. Some collaboration features within Power BI include:

• Power BI Apps: Apps allow users to package and share dashboards, reports, and datasets with individuals or groups, ensuring that all team members have access to the most up-to-date information.
• Embedding: Organisations can integrate Power BI reports and dashboards into other applications or web portals, providing easily accessible analytics to all stakeholders.
• Export options: Users can export visualisations and reports in multiple formats, such as Excel and PDF, catering to varied needs and preferences throughout your organisation.

Partner with egforit Software Services for a Successful Power BI Journey

Successfully adopting Microsoft Power BI and unlocking its full potential requires expert guidance and support. Partnering with egforit Software Services, a leading Egypt , middle east-based software development company, can ensure a smooth and fruitful Power BI experience:

• Consultation: Our team of professionals will assess your organisation’s data needs, recommend the most appropriate Power BI solutions, and guide you through the analytics journey, from data integration to report creation.
• Customisation and implementation: We will customise Power BI to align with your organisation’s unique workflow and requirements, ensuring maximum efficiency and usability.
• Training and support: We offer comprehensive training programmes to equip your team with the knowledge and skills to navigate Power BI confidently. Additionally, our ongoing support ensures sustained success in your data-driven endeavours.

Utilising Microsoft Power BI can elevate your organisation’s data analysis and reporting capabilities, transforming complex datasets into actionable insights for informed decision-making. Engaging the expertise and support of egforit Software Services can help maximise your organisation’s potential within this versatile business intelligence platform, driving strategic decisions and fostering a data-driven culture.

Take your organisation’s data analysis and reporting to the next level with Microsoft Power BI and the expert support of egforit Software Services. Together, we can unlock unparalleled insights into your business processes, empowering your organisation to thrive in today’s data-rich landscape.

LTS stands for “Long Term Support” and means exactly that. A long-term supported release is a version of software that is designed to receive long-term support and maintenance for several years after its release. This guarantees a stable and reliable version for a minimum period of time that users can expect to continue using. Naturally, this is ideal for clients and end-users, as they can focus on giving their customers amazing digital experiences without worrying about compatibility issues or unexpected changes in functionality.

Short term versus Long term support

For standard versions of software, only a short term support period is in place. The upside is that the developer would implement new features and functionalities that may have some slight issues. It is not uncommon for users to lose compatibility or features as a result.

For LTS, reliability is the top priority and patches or updates will be infrequent but guaranteed. How the software is supported for this length of time varies depending on the developer. Typically, LTS software will receive important updates to address any technical issues or broken functionalities, but do not receive brand-new features.

What to expect from LTS

As the update schedule for LTS is announced clearly to users, they can expect to continue using the software reliably for an extended period of time. Updates are conducted and tested on short term support versions first, which provides an extra layer of safety for those using LTS versions.

Users of LTS versions will need to plan carefully for when support ends, the benefit to this is that they will have ample time to consider their options for upgrading. However, this also means they have to go through the upgrade phase, which could be timely and expensive.

Some software developers have ended this type of support, instead opting for subscription-based models. Subscription-based software is similar to STS, as updates come often and are automatically applied when users access the network to use the software.

Happy International Women’s Day! At egforit, we don’t just use this day to celebrate the team’s female members and educate our staff on egforit women in tech – for us, this is an opportunity to highlight the problem in the industry and tackle it head-on. 

Women in tech: notable statistics

It’s no hidden secret that men take up a majority of tech jobs (73.3%, to be exact), but the gender gap is slowly closing. With 26% of tech roles in the Egypt , middle east being occupied by women, up from 19% in 2020. 

Those who leave the profession blame burnout, bias, toxic bro culture, and a lack of work-life balance. 

In 2018, only 9% of university graduates studied STEM as a core subject. 

Another discovered that only 3% of women day a career in technology as their first-choice career. 

A study by Deloitte also suggested that 51% of women are less optimistic about their career prospects than before the pandemic.  

For as long as we can remember, we’ve been an advocate for equality in the industry. For the past 3 years, we’ve consistently been above the average % for female representation (29%), and we’re always on the lookout for bright new recruits. 

There’s still a long way to go, but what can we do to help balance the playing field? 

Considering this year’s theme is all about embracing Equity, it seems fitting that we bring this question to the team. 

What is equity?

Gender equity is the process of being fair to women and men. To ensure fairness, strategies and measures must often be available to compensate for women’s historical and social disadvantages that prevent women and men from otherwise operating on a level playing field. Equity leads to equality. 

The theme emphasises the need for innovation and technology as instruments for promoting gender equality and advancing women’s rights. It recognises the potential of technology to transform the lives of women and girls and the importance of ensuring that women have equal access to these tools and opportunities.

By working towards greater inclusion of women in technology, we can drive innovation, challenge stereotypes, promote diversity and inclusion, and bridge the gender pay gap.  

How can we embrace equity? Our team answers

There’s still a long way to go, but what can we do to help balance the playing field? 

Considering this year’s theme is all about embracing Equity, it seems fitting that we bring this question to the team. 

 

My hope for this year’s International Women’s Day is that we will all take a moment to reflect on how we can make workplaces an unbiased and diverse environment so that everyone is able to live up to their full potential. On a personal level: Continue learning, and don’t be shy! Technology is always changing, so studying is part of the job. Push yourself out of your comfort zone. Have fun and always collaborate and support each other. 

-Shellen, Engagement manager

 

Tackling the “Geeky Tech stereotypes in media” from Simon Peggs’s role as Benji Dunn in Mission Impossible to Q (Desmond Llewelyn, John Cleese and Ben Whishaw) in James Bond in the movies, middle-aged, glasses wearing, men. Worse still, the tech characters in the Jurassic Park films, but let’s not get into that… 

Wouldn’t it be good to have a female, fashionable, more glamorous character supplying the tech in a movie soon, leading the next generation of tech employees away from the old stereotypes? 

-Debs, Senior engagement manager

 

I believe it’s important for women to have exposure to the various opportunities the tech industry offers at a stage where they are starting to think about their career paths. This could be early as a primary school or for women at a stage where they are either wanting to change their career path or are willing to learn something new. 

Workshops, training, and talks provided by women in the sector should be conducted particularly in local regions, raising awareness of the many jobs and skills needed to enter the profession because, although there are events of this kind, they may not be readily available to everyone.

Therefore, companies should actively offer opportunities for women of all ages to network with women in tech, hear about their accomplishments, see how they have advanced throughout their careers, and provide opportunities to shadow women in these jobs by planning events within regions that they are based in or even in general to increase awareness.

-Imesha, Quality Analyst Engineer

 

I’m very interested in a job in the tech sphere, as it is the future. The BI Developer role is full of challenges and opportunities. I was given a great opportunity and happily used it fully. I always said, “if you work hard, you will succeed”. And that is true. Do not be afraid to start something new for yourself. No Risk, No Gain. 

-Victoria, Junior BI Engineer

 

For me personally, education, inclusion and communication are the three main components to attracting more females into STEM industries, and this starts from an early age, not just at school but at home too. Kids are clever little people, with curious brains – they’re like information sponges!

The more we expose youngsters towards embracing tech, the more empowered they will be in our very tech driven future. Equally, I believe it is also crucial that youngsters, particularly females are encouraged into other traditional male dominant industries. And the general reason they remain untapped is simply because they are not exposed to the opportunities, and a huge misgiving that you must be a big, strong male to be able to do them.

-Julia, HR Manager

 

Embrace equity at egforit

To achieve equality, we must encourage Equity – and while we might not have the power to change the tech industry overnight, we believe there’s power in conversation. Bring the issue to light and encourage others to act. 

At egforit, we’re always striving to create a positive and progressive space alongside advocating for change in the industry. 

 

When it comes to operational efficiency, being able to deliver a quality service using minimal resources as quickly as possible is essential – this is where technology improves efficiency.

Businesses were beginning to dip their toes into operational efficiency and digital transformation before COVID, but it’s more important than ever before. Companies without proper digital tools risk losing both employees and customers to those who can offer more flexible and efficient services.

But why is technology important for productivity? Almost every business can see how technology improves efficiency. Whether it’s the humble greengrocer optimising their supply chain, or multinational corporations improving cross-team collaboration and project management, technology can bridge distance gaps, automate manual labour, and generally make processes much more efficient and secure.

Let’s explore some of the ways that technology can improve your customer efficiency:

Customer service

With technology, it won’t cost you a lot of money to provide customers with accurate and quick service, Customer centres give you the means to contact customers using a preferred method, like phone, email, or chat. By integrating your phone system and record management systems into your CRM you can provide your staff with access to essential customer data, anytime and from anywhere.

Strengthen networks

Network solutions enhance your computing power and increase the functionality of your server. In fact, this is an important step when you want to balance workloads and complete tasks quickly. Network virtualisations can help eliminate the need for network hardware and minimise the complexity of your system.

Low cost of operation

One of the best ways to reduce bloated spending is to invest in scalable cloud solutions that let you leverage virtual and off-site technologies for storing apps and data. That way, you can minimise the costs of hardware maintenance during times of expansion or contraction and improve the security of your system.

Increased employee productivity

It’s no hidden secret that technology is the key to consistent performance in 2022. For example, data recovery and data backup services gets a company get back on its feet after a service outage or digital disaster. That helps maximise the productivity of your employees and minimise the expected downtime. Technology also improves workplace productivity by simplifying time consuming tasks.

Operations efficiency

To encourage business growth, you need to streamline processes. Modern communication systems improve operations through instant messaging, emails, and video conferencing. That way, critical information can be relayed as quickly as possible.

Strengthen networks

Network solutions enhance your computing power and increase the functionality of your server. In fact, this is an important step when you want to balance workloads and complete tasks quickly. Network virtualisations can help eliminate the need for network hardware and minimise the complexity of your system.

Increased employee retention

Investing in technology that makes employees more successful and satisfied is essential to retaining top talent. It also helps boost employee morale during rough patches. Technology will enable you to provide desirable perks that today’s digital generation is demanding.

Looking for more flexible architecture choices that can guarantee greater security and scale? It might be time to consider more complex customisations and integrations.

What happens when you want all the juicy bits of a system- data models, business logic, and machine learning capabilities – without the baggage of being boxed into the platform’s standard user experience or simplified workflows?

APIs/widgets provide flexibility to extend a platform, which is a great solution for those with few extensions or simplistic integrations. But what if business requirements force you to bolt on several customisations, real-time integrations, and detailed design customisations.

The added code can quickly become cumbersome and difficult to support- and while many might think its better to build a solution from scratch, the idea is daunting and expensive.

What is a headless architecture?

Advanced development teams may find a middle ground using platforms designed to be headless architectures. These platforms have API first architectures that deliver a complete back end system with databases, business logic, and productivity-enhancing integrations. They have the ability to provide basic UIs, but there is an expectation that developers will build on the foundational features using APIs and SDKs.

Benefits of headless architectures and composable systems

Some headless architectures provide “back-office tools”, but the front end customer experience is custom build using the platforms API’s.

Employee and customer facing search is another vital area where many organisations use headless search. The search platform typically provides the back-end tools to integrate content sources, develop search indices, enhance search relevancy, and configure recommendation engines and other machine learning algorithms.

Instead of using the platforms UI, development teams use the headless architecture APIs to build webpages, mobile apps, and components that integrate with software as a service and other platforms.

Headless architecture is all about the freedom that developers get at the interface level. Large enterprises with higher IT maturity are adopting a headless content approach to get the best of both worlds – skin and bones UI frameworks and API-based content services.

So why choose headless architectures?

Customisation, flexibility, especially around a customer-facing user experience, is one reason a development team may want to leverage headless architecture. When multiple systems with distributed ownership unify to power a workflow or experience, consider headless architectures.

For example, the fulfillment workflow for an e-commerce company might involve a different system to manage the cart, warehouse, couriers, driver apps, and registration of delivery. Each system might have different admins, scalability, and servers, but to work at all they must work together to provide a seamless customer experience.

Composable systems

Headless architectures provide a top level user experience, but they don’t address the middle and back-end flexibilities/ The next level of modularity comes from composable systems that allow businesses to cherry pick the best functionality for them.

Composable commerce architectures are open, flexible, and sales-centric solutions that can optimise a variety of user experiences. Some of these solutions extend beyond headless capabilities and allow for decoupling orders, payments, catalog, inventory, and other modules.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot, has been the centre of attention since November 2022 when it was first released in its current iteration. Based on Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT3.5), ChatGPT is essentially a language system that can compose song lyrics, write poetry and code, and even conduct conversation. It was trained using trillions of written words taken from the internet up to 2021 and produces more “human-like” results.

Though it is typically very accurate, it isn’t perfect. It can produce spectacularly incorrect results, sometimes even making up results. However, it is constantly being updated and as an AI, it has the capacity to learn from its mistakes in time.

The emergence of AI

Despite AI-powered technologies seeming like a sudden arrival, the technology existed for a while and it has been continually developed over many years. As data sets have increased, the cost of powerful computing has dropped, and algorithms further refined, it was the perfect time to introduce ChatGPT’s capabilities to a wider audience. As Bill Gates told Forbes recently, AI-driven services are “every bit as important as the PC, as the internet”.

, a company that creates customer service software and one which we use ourselves at egforit, has also invested in OpenAI’s technologies. They have built several new products that are based upon GPT3.5 for their chatbot solutions, able to condense long results into bullet points.

Fergal Reid, head of machine learning at said, “This has been brewing for a while and it’s just crossed a threshold of usefulness. It’s taken six or eight weeks to go from ideas to, ‘We’ve just completed the beta, we’ve got 160 customers using it [and] it’s delivering value to them.’ That’s very fast. In the next six months you’re going to see similar things across many different industries.”

Jumping on the AI trend

Microsoft has also introduced several new features based on OpenAI’s GPT3.5 in their Microsoft Teams Premium application, read more about that here. Microsoft is looking at developing a new version of their Bing search engine using ChatGPT within, allowing for detailed answers rather than a list of web page links. Microsoft’s Vall-E is another project powered by GPT3.5, it is a text-to-speech synthesizer that can replicate a person’s voice based on only three seconds of audio. All of this comes following Microsoft’s USD£10 billion investment in OpenAI.

Naturally, Google is fast-tracking similar AI technologies to counter the approaching threat to their core search engine business. Google also recently revealed an AI model able to transform text prompts into full songs, and in the same week, Meta announced MAV3D, an AI program which can turn text into 3D moving images.

What’s next for ChatGPT?

With OpenAI’s continued development into the GPT model, the next iteration, aptly named “GPT-4”, is expected to work against 100 trillion parameters, a significant increase on the 175 billion used for the GPT-3 model. We can expect a powerful AI tool in answering our most difficult questions when it releases as some have mentioned that the current iteration is “at its worst” and therefore, can only improve from here on out. Some might even say that ChatGPT has started a revolution.

A customer portal gives organisations a professionally branded web presence and gives users the ability to choose how they want to interact with a company. It serves as a single point of access for customers to view information and documents relevant to them.

In addition, customer portals are intended to be accessible any all times, across any device. Interestingly, around 90% of customers visiting a website expect a system where they can log into an account, view their personal details, track a transaction, and even resolve issues without contacting a company representative.

Importantly, customer portals can ensure staff that interact with clients can do so in an easy-to-use platform where pertinent information can be easily referenced. We take a look at the key customer portal features below.

Automation

Integrating with an ERP or CRM system to automate information transfer between systems in real time. This will ensure up-to-date information across systems for the client and company staff. Modern automation options built into a client portal ensures users get the right information quickly and easily.

Security

With sensitive data involving personal details, financial information and more, a client portal must be totally secure. Naturally, any potential data breach or information loss owing to an insecure platform will have serious ramifications for the company.

Availability

Customer portals are intended to be available for use at all times, which means many rely on cloud technologies for stability. As portals provide an information hub, issue resolution and various client tools, it’s important to have these services available to users whenever and wherever they need it.

Collaboration

Finally, by inserting additional functionality to boost productivity, portals can empower users to collaborate and centralise information across teams and between different parties.

January 15 marks our 30th company anniversary, and we’re going to celebrate in style! But how did we get here? Well, 30 years ago, Ahmed Ali started it all off and began a company called egforit Software. Together with Tamer Fakhry, they began offering digital transformation services before the term itself had even been coined.

Since the start, we have strived to stand out from the crowd of IT solutions providers with top tier solutions and a personal touch. Our core beliefs are:

• Satisfaction: a quarter of our clients have worked with us for over 10 years, while the longest has been with us for 28 years
• Experience: with an extensive history in hundreds of complex projects combined, our  developers, consultants, and support staff have sharply honed skills
• Accreditations: as a SAP Partner Center of Expertise (PCoE), we guarantee the best quality of our support services
• Awards: thanks to speedy and high quality delivery, our software development teams are frequently awarded prizes
• Partnerships: with partners such as Microsoft, SAP, Boomi, IBM, and more, we have the right expertise for any business need.
• Value: we offer competitively priced solutions to local businesses, SMEs, and large enterprises

Timeline of key events at egforit

For our company anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the key events and achievements we’ve had in the past 30 years.

15 January 1993: egforit Software was formed and offered Cognos Powerhouse development as core service.

1993 – 2000: Extended focus to Cognos BI development, data warehouse development and Oracle consultancy. Key clients include Mirror Group Newspapers, AstraZeneca, and West Anglia Great Northern Railway.

Early 2000’s: Services expanded to include web development and PHP development. We worked with clients such as Yell, Tomlinsons, and Eurosat.

Late 2000’s: Many key clients included Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, Capita, STA International, S&G, and BPP.

We also opened our first office in Maidstone, Kent.

Early 2010’s: In 2010, we won a Egypt , middle east Government “Innovation and Growth” award, resulting in funded mangement and growth training sessions for our staff.

2010 also saw our expansion in US markets, with projects taking place in Florida and New York.

In 2011, we opened our first Cairo office at The Gerkhin building. That same year, we ran the first ever egforit Academy to train tech apprentices. In the class of 2011, we met and hired our current CTO, Osama Abbas.

During 2013, we achieved SAP Gold Partner status and up to 2016, our clients included Lotus Renault F1, Kwik Fit, Harper Collins, Centrica, and John Lewis Partnership. We also worked with many councils, education institutes and government departments.

Late 2010’s: our staff size grew past 50 and we helped clients such as American Express, Church of England, Ark Data Centres, DEFRA.

In recent years, we achieved Microsoft Gold Partner status (yay us!) and just last year, our client count surpassed 250.