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We want to tell you how to take your process to the next level. 

Power platform is a combination of tools from the Microsoft ecosystem conform by Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agent, Power Pages, Data verse, and SharePoint; these last two support services for information management at a documental level and in a data level.

These tools will allow you to face challenges in your organization through the development of low-code or no-code apps, generate automatizations of internal processes with more agility, efficiency, and low costs, create reports in real-time that will give you a better understanding of your KPIs, among other benefits. You can create bots to carry on customer service support tasks. It also allows users with medium-advance knowledge or developers to build customized solutions depending on each business’s needs at an internal and commercial level.

This powerful tool is the perfect ally to take a typical company to a level of digital transformation, innovating on the solution customization for their users, allowing them to have a unique digital experience, and improving the workflow and processes inside the company. Remember that because this is a Microsoft Solution, you can use the Azure Cloud’s other services and integrate with tools like Dynamics. 

The companies can perceive benefits like: 

1. Providing access to better information that can be used in decision-making, customized and collaborative tools enhance the workforce’s abilities.
2. Save up to 70% on traditional development apps’ maintenance costs. 
3. Increase agility by up to 15%, replacing paper with digitalizing processes. 
4. The infrastructure area manages user permissions at the data and application level, thereby increasing the security levels.
5. Obtain more efficiency and productivity from the commercial team.  

Being at the forefront of the market is increasingly important to carry out the operation and increase the companies’ rentability by being more competitive. 

You can find different uses for these tools: on an organizational level, you can arrange an app for your employees to download all the documents they would need about their payments, vacation requests, purchase orders, reminders about taxes payments, HR Letters, inventory reports or real-time project management, sales indicators, you can have a bot managing documentation request or PQRS, among other functions. 

There are endless possibilities about what you can do based on your needs. ¿Do you want to start now? 

On AppinIT, we walk with you. Ask for a Demo and tell us how we can improve your business. 

App Modernization defines itself; just by reading the title, you can sense or deduct the meaning of this practice. Its definition is literal. 

Your company probably had a deal in the past with outdated software (ERP, CRM, WMS, SCM, etc.) that doesn’t allow integration with other tools due to its old technology or that you want to open it from your mobile device, and it is not possible.  

In the following article, we will explain a few details about this:  

App modernization consists of updating old software under new schemes and computer approaches, modern methodologies, robust computing strategies (cloud, on-premises, hybrid), platforms, languages, and more actual settings. 

This practice is also named legacy modernization or legacy application modernization. A legacy system refers to obsolete infrastructure, apps, and processes. 

Legacy systems are typically in tightly coupled monolithic environments. They often run in datacentres (on-premises environments) owned by the organization and also hosted, supported, and managed by the organization.  

Although these systems are functional, their maintenance generates essential costs, and their functionality requires aptitudes and high IT senioritis that are very hard to find. 

A clear example of app modernization is the equivalence to reforming an old house and taking advantage of efficiency updating, security, structural integrity, etc. Instead of taking out or replacing an existing system, this practice extends the useful life of the organization’s apps and, at the same time, takes advantage of technical innovations. 

Updating can imply high costs and time-consuming efforts for organizations when it is done without a strategic modernization plan. To achieve the goals, it is essential to focus on the problem you need to solve and do strict comparative benefits–costs analysis before making any decision. In theory, all apps can be modernized, but not always the help – costs make sense. 

Modernization strategies may vary, from the code restructuration, using refactoring tools (or not), migrating it to more modern infrastructures with minimum changes on the code (sometimes without modifications), up to doing a total redesign system replacement, especially the on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. 

There are common patterns for app modernization, which move based on ease of implementation. The easier it is, the lower the risk and impact, but also it will have less value, agility, and benefits (from the business perspective). The most common patterns for apps modernization are: 

Lift and shift or Rehosting: its concept consists of moving the obsolete app with minimum or zero changes in the code. It is perhaps the most straightforward strategy but also the one that comes least close to the expected results since it is unusual to find obsolete applications whose developments have been planned and implemented with enough portability to adapt quickly from one environment to another, requiring few or no code settings. 

Refactoring: Refactoring is essentially another form to say rewrite or restructuration. This pattern for app modernization needs to take a legacy app and redo significate code parts to execute it better in a new environment, generally on the cloud. This approach requires a rewrite of the entire code. The development team can choose this pattern, for example, if the goal is to separate a monolithic app into smaller, decoupled parts, to achieve an architectural option commonly known as microservices. Microservices can be used to maximize the infrastructure benefits, and native cloud tools, including containers and their respective orchestration. 

Replatforming: This pattern can be seen as a middle point between lift and shift and refactoring patterns. It does not require significant changes to the code or architecture, as it happens in the refactoring. Still, it needs complementary updates that allow the legacy app to take advantage of a modern cloud platform and its artifacts, like the app database (backend). 

So, why should organizations modernize their apps?  

The majority have essential financial and technical investments in their existing app ecosystems. Sometimes the term “legacy” can have a negative connotation regarding software. Still, these legacy apps can be the core and most essential apps for organizations.  

Few are willing or can discard these apps and start over again. Costs, productivity losses, and other problems can be too high. That is why app modernization is the most sensible way for many companies to realize the advantages of new software platforms, tools, architectures, frameworks, technologies, and frameworks.  

It is commonly known in the market that through Office 365, Microsoft offers SharePoint Online as a collaborative tool to create websites, manage metadata, content (CMS), store, organize, share information from any device safely, access it in a safe and orderly way, implement workflows, among other functions. However, we are unaware that SharePoint, in addition to all of the above, additionally offers an immersive platform that allows the creation, consumption, and sharing of 2D, 3D, and 360 ° content within virtual environments or spaces that allow the user to live new experiences through mixed reality. (virtual + augmented). This platform is known as SharePoint Spaces. 

At the beginning of 2018, during the SharePoint Virtual Summit event, Microsoft introduced SharePoint Spaces, a tool that allows becoming “real” the integration between virtual reality and mixed reality environments inside of SharePoint. Is an unusual and innovative feature by Microsoft that aspire the companies create and have their own interactive and dynamic spaces, which can be used as a communication, collaboration, and learning scenarios. 

Is not a recent feature, as it was developed more than 3 years ago, but the truth is it is not been used by companies as much as Microsoft expected. 

There are a few companies in Colombia that are taking a shot on the virtual reality world, and therefore using SharePoint Spaces. The reason behind this can be different obstacles as lack of resources (human and/or economics), lack of clarity in terms of products and customers. 

If we leave behind the reception problems that the tool faced on its introduction, thanks to the big changes and the industrial revolution 4.0 that have been occurring worldwide in the fields of communication, technology, and digital economy, there is a large number of companies interested in this type of tools as a helpful way of collaboration and learning alternatives, that allows them to propose to their customer’s immersive experiences, thought headsets or virtual reality appliances with the possibility to immerse them in alluring digital universes. 

Technically, the spaces are just SharePoint pages (.aspx) adapted and configured to show all the capacity of SharePoint Spaces. Is a very intuitive platform that allows that any user with basic knowledge of SharePoint, could learn to configure and use it quickly, considering that it is a no-code tool that facilitates its learning and adoption. 

Speaking of design, SharePoint spaces can be endowed with: 

• An initial “base” or “structure” is used to support other objects (images, videos, documents, etc). 
• 360° or 2D backgrounds 
• Audio or sound (Welcome message and ambient sound for chats and spaces) 
• Other spaces. You can improve the experience of interconnecting different spaces. 

• 360° images, tours, and videos.  
• 3D and 2D Objects. 
• Files. 
• Documents Library. 

In conclusion, SharePoint Spaces is a tool that allows maximizing the potency of SharePoint oriented to  

In conclusion, SharePoint Spaces is a tool that allows maximizing the potency of SharePoint, oriented to content management users (even without requiring high technical knowledge), to build innovative virtual reality spaces, quickly and easily, to offer collaborators different immersive experiences through which they can learn about new products, themes, releases and/or acquire new capabilities.