The purpose of enterprise software is to automate and optimize operations for a given business, so that the business can grow efficiently and achieve its goals. It stands to reason that the ideal enterprise software for any business would be custom-made for its unique situation, requirements and plans.
Naturally this is a costly and time-consuming process that not all businesses are ready for. In fact, most businesses make do with mixing and matching off-the-shelf tools or SaaS products to meet their needs.
If you’ve been contracted for an EAS (Enterprise Application Software) project, you have to do the necessary preparation to determine what the client wants and needs, plan implementation and delivery, and reach an agreement on every detail of the project – a long list of specs needs to be drafted before you and your team write a single line of code.
This guide contains the 132 most important questions you need to ask to develop the specifications and plan for your enterprise project. They cover 11 core categories that form the backbone of EAS systems, and create a picture of the client’s expectations you will have to address:
- Customer Profile: The customer’s profile as a business
- Business Operations: How a company operates in the marketplace
- Corporate Processes: How the company makes decisions
- Strategic Goals: What targets has the customer set?
- Project Limits: What are the desired tools and functionality?
- Information Management: How will data be stored, processed and accessed?
- Task Management, Teamwork & Collaboration: How will departments and teams work together?
- Interoperability: How will the system connect to third-party tools or data?
- Data Security: What safety methods need to be introduced across the system?
- Scalability, Update and Migration: How will the system adjust to positive or negative changes in operations, and be updated or modernized?
- After-Sales Support & Maintenance: What forms of after-sales service will be provided to the customer?
These questions will help you create spreadsheets with requirements, deliverables and timelines, answer the key questions, and create a timeline and cost allocation schedule that you can implement and track.
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It’s been over a decade since I’ve seen new desktop projects being created where I work. All new projects are, necessarily, web. I would love to have Delphi back there but, year after year, unfortunately, I don´t see any investments by Embarcadero on simple, good and flexible native Delphi web frameworks.
Every workplace is different, of course, although I think it’s fair to say the application development landscape nowadays is a far more diverse and richer environment than it was even five years ago let alone a decade. Enterprise development has come to mean, as you say, a hybrid amalgamation of all sorts of application types in order to meet any enterprise’s customer needs (internal or external) on a variety of devices. RAD Studio caters for much of that and has evolved to be extremely capable for producing apps which work on a much broader spectrum than even a short few years back, encompassing not just Windows for the desktop but also macOS and Linux – GUI and server-side. That extends out to mobile devices running iOS and Android too, even Amazon’s FireOS. Still keeping maximum backward compatibility while embracing those more varied targets with screens that do multi-screen gigapixel densities that we would have thought unimaginable (and slightly insane) back ten years ago, or even more recently.
When it comes to web frameworks though, you’re right, it’s a fair criticism to say that currently we don’t have something built-in which is as comprehensive as the desktop and mobile support. There are many complicated reasons for that, but to acknowledge this we also have to look to the availability of RAD Studio / C++ Builder / Delphi’s broad range of third-party components. UniGUI, Thinfinity, Ethea Kitto2, Sencha Ext JS, Intraweb, TMS WEB Core and their accompanying suite of FNC components too – just some of the solutions for targetting the web. Plus, the ability to include Python scripts in Delphi apps and use VCL and FMX in Python apps.
Now, the trouble is, which framework, or frameworks, could be the right solution for everyone or at least a maximal number of users? Many of us Delphi developers have used Intraweb thanks to it being bundled for several years with Delphi – but it does things very much in its own way. Embarcadero *do* listen to feedback from users like yourself. Corporate layers of intercommunication and the binding legal constraints put on companies to avoid misleading promises of future features that flounder, even for good reasons, can sometimes make it seem like the company is not paying attention – this is absolutely not the case. For my part I’d love to see a WASM compiler target but even my limited knowledge of how compilers and linkers work means I realize it’s not as simple as saying “yes, let’s do it”.
So, a briefer answer is yes, thanks for the suggestion, it’s noted, but right now the best options are a quite rich selection of third-party offerings which cater for pretty much any scenario you can think of. The longer answer is the one above.
Here are some links:
Web frameworks list and blog post
Another blog post about web frameworks
Python4Delphi
Embarcadero Python tools landing page