[Press Release] SoftArtisans Receives 2013 Best of Watertown Award

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Best of Watertown 2013

We are so honored (not to mention pumped) to be recognized in the Watertown Award Program this year. Thank you!

“The Watertown Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses that serve their local market. Each year, we identify companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.“

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Software Artisans Receives 2013 Best of Watertown Award

Watertown Award Program Honors the Achievement

WATERTOWN June 6, 2013 — Software Artisans has been selected for the 2013 Best of Watertown Award in the Retail Computer Software category by the Watertown Award Program.

Each year, the Watertown Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and our community. These exceptional companies help make the Watertown area a great place to live, work and play.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2013 Watertown Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the Watertown Award Program and data provided by third parties.

About Watertown Award Program Continue reading

Welcome Back, Privacy Concerns: Big Data, Healthcare, and PRISM

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Photo Credit: Mashable.com

I suppose I shouldn’t say, “Welcome back, privacy concerns,” as I’m sure they never left, just quietly assumed their position humming in the background and shadows of the internet noise. This week, however, they took center stage both in the healthcare space and in government news.

This week, The New York Times published an article on a significant announcement for the healthcare industry. A group of global partners spanning 41 countries and including 70 medical, research and advocacy organizations agreed to share a heap of genetic data. “Their aim is to put the vast and growing trove of data on genetic variations and health into databases that would open to researchers and doctors all over the world, not just to those who created them,” The New York Times wrote. Currently, research labs and facilities are very much siloed. Each institution has their own research within their own walls and with their own records and system of operations. There is no universal method for representing and sharing genetic data, which could lead to advanced findings in cures and other health-related research.

One reason for the lack of a central system is the sheer volume of data. There is just too much information being produced by the minute. Not only that, but it is often unstructured and not of quality (meaning information was entered or gathered incorrectly/differently, such as January being entered in as Jan, 1, 01, or January, making it difficult to analyze). While volume and quality of data is an issue, the overarching problem, or rather challenge, healthcare professionals face lies mostly in the security space. With all of that sensitive patient data, there need to be strict, infallible measures to protect that information. Along those same lines is the question of who will have access to that information.

This is especially significant as it comes at the same time of privacy concerns regarding the NSA’s reported access to granular consumer data. Continue reading

How to Download Files Containing Special or Non-ASCII Characters in the Filename Using ASP.NET

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Credit: http://lifehacker.com/5690522/how-to-enable-non+ascii-characters-on-linuxA couple months ago, I worked with file downloads that had filenames with non-ASCII Unicode characters, as well as special characters, such as semi-colons, commas, periods, and others (@, %, +, {, }, [, ], $, #, &, =). Here is an example of a filename that has all of those characters:  日本人 中國的 ~=[]()%+{}@;’#!$_&-  éè  ;∞¥₤€   .txt    

After a couple days of online research,  I finally found a solution that worked across different major browsers like IE8, IE9 and IE10, Firefox 21, Chrome 27, Safari 5 (on Windows). These are the most up-to-date versions as of this writing. Opera mostly works fine as well; however, I noticed that it doesn’t like the space and curly bracket characters.

Without going into detail about character encodings in the HTTP headers, I’d like to mention two major pieces of information you should know that I found regarding this issue:

1. According to the section 2.3 in RFC-2183 (Content-Disposition header field), the “filename” parameter in the Content-Disposition header can only use the US-ASCII characters.

2. However, as specified by RFC-5987 and RFC-2231, the correct encoding can be included right in the header field by using the filename* syntax and then by percent-encoding the non-ASCII characters in the filename. For example, for the filename ”test-€.txt,” the content-disposition header would look like the following:  attachment; filename*=utf-8”test-%E2%82%AC.txt. Here is the .NET code that I had for writing the response header:

Response.AddHeader(“Content-Disposition”, “attachment; filename*=utf-8”” + Server.UrlEncode(fileName);

However, when I tried that syntax with my test filename Continue reading

Internet Week New York 2013 in Review

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Joan Rivers

Digital Cities PanelA whirlwind week of panels, classroom discussions, and events is the only way to describe Internet Week NY. Bringing together masterminds behind the digital space, Internet Week NY covered how companies from startups to non-profits to corporations like MLB are harnessing the power of online personalities to market their brand and really integrate customers into their brand experience. Much like the internet itself (and was discussed by several panels), there was much “noise” or information to sift through. While valuable, it can be overwhelming. Thus, I wanted to provide a general guide with the most helpful info. While I’m tempted to talk about famous celebrities, Joan Rivers and Erica Oyama, I’ll save those and my favorite classes for later discussions. For now, I’ll attempt to boil down the overarching themes that wove the conference together and overlapped all of the different industries (from fashion to food to sports) taking over the digital arena. For all of the entrepreneurs, advertisers, and marketers out there, these are the key takeaways of which to make note.

Key Takeaways from Internet Week NY:

  • Humanize your brand - Social media and the internet in general allow for a more personalized customer experience. Not only that, they allow for customers to have an active involvement with your brand. People buy from people.
  • Encourage customer involvement with your brand – In other words, create experiences that involve people with your brand, such as holding contests, recognizing fans, and providing people the ability to vote on different elements of your brand. (Fun fact: People like their name and their voice. A representative from USA Mini Cooper and a panel speaker for a crowdfunding class both touched on this. USA Mini Cooper found out people liked to name their cars, so they had a contest where people could name the next Mini Cooper. Continue reading

How to open a report from SQL Server Reporting Services with the Application object

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Problem

You want to modify your reports with the WordApplication or ExcelApplication object after they’ve been populated with data by SQL Server Reporting Services. The ExcelApplication or WordApplication object’s Open method can’t pull a report from a report server, so how do you open a SSRS report with OfficeWriter?

Solution

For simplicity and ease of reading the code examples and text in this article refer to the ExcelApplication object exclusively. However, the exact same techniques can be used with the WordApplication object. The only strict requirement for opening reports from SSRS is for the Open method to have an overload that takes a Stream argument, which both objects have.

SQL Server Reporting Services exposes a web service that lets programs access and work with the reports on the server. The web service has a number of functions for interacting with a report server and in fact is the same API that the Report Manager tool is built on top of. One of its functions will let us retrieve a fully rendered report that we can then pass to the ExcelApplication object. Once the ExcelApplication object has opened the report, it can be used as if it were any other file.

Getting a Reference to the Report Server

There are a number of different ways to access a report server to manage your reports. The MSDN documentation has detailed instructions for all the different techniques. The most powerful way, and the one that the Report Manager application uses, is to use the report server’s web service, or SOAP API. The easiest way to use the web service is to add the report server as a web reference in Visual Studio. This will allow us to make web service calls to the report server as though it were any other object in a .NET project. I’ll provide a brief overview of the steps to add a report server as a web reference; details can be found at MSDN. Continue reading

Workbook colors are not displayed as expected in older versions of Excel

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Problem

When using ExcelWriter’s ExcelApplication object to generate a new workbook, custom colors that are assigned in code to fonts, charts, cell backgrounds, etc., display incorrectly on the client when the workbook is generated.

OR

When creating an Excel File or an Excel file to use as a template with the ExcelTemplate object using Excel 2007 and above, colors are not colors are not preserved in Excel 2003 or older.

Continue reading

Excel’s color palette explained

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Problem

Excel’s color palette contains 56 colors, all of which can be accessed and most of which can be replaced using ExcelWriter (v6 or later). This post describes the layout of the palette and enumerate the default palette colors.

This content is most pertinent to the Excel 2003 color palette, which only has 56 colors. In Excel 2007 and later, workbooks can support millions of colors, but there is still an underlying workbook palette that has 56 colors. For more information about colors in multiple versions of Excel, we have enough post about workbook colors that are not displayed properly in older versions of Excel.

Solution

The palette is split up into a few different sections: Continue reading

How to create hyperlinks between cells in an Excel spreadsheet

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Problem

Your application requires cells to contain hyperlinks to other cells in the same spreadsheet, but the Cell.CreateHyperlink function only makes links to URLs on the internet. This article discusses a workaround using Excel’s HYPERLINK function.

Solution

Excel has a function named hyperlink() that, with some special syntax, can create links to other cells in a spreadsheet.

Normally, the hyperlink function creates a link to a URL, much like the CreateHyperlink function. Simply passing the name of a cell to the function causes it to form a bad link; Excel will interpret it as a URL.

The solution is to enclose the name of the destination cell in quotes and preface it with a pound sign. For example, a cell with formula =HYPERLINK(“#Sheet2!C3″, “Link to C3″) will contain the text “Link to C3″, and function as a hyperlink to that cell in Sheet2. The formula can be set either by editing an Excel file directly, or through setting the Cell.Formula property in ExcelWriter.

When the user clicks on the link, Excel’s focus will move to Continue reading

Truth in Tech is now on iTunes

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Our weekly Truth in Tech series, where we cover the week’s wackiest, useful, and just downright interesting tech stories, is now available for download on itunes…for free. We sift through a ton of tech news on the daily. Usually we tweet about our findings, but 140 characters doesn’t leave room for much nuance. So buckle up, tune in, and join us as we uncover acquisitions, startups, apps and the ever-evolving tech landscape.

*If the above do not load, you can access the podcasts from the SoundCloud website: Truth in Tech Ep. 14: Hacked and Truth in Tech Ep. 15: The Path Less Taken.

Summary:

Truth in Tech Ep. 15: The Path Less Taken

Your plumber called. He wants to know about those photos you have to share. The capped social network beloved by designers and San Francisco technorati alike has come under a second round of fire for its spammy adoption practices. On Monday Continue reading