For obvious reasons, working from home is something that is receiving a lot of attention at the moment. For those people who regularly use PCs at work, then a move to home working can be easy; a decent internet connection and a laptop and you’re done. Unfortunately, even when your desktop involves only web applications, things may not be so easy.
There are two scenarios where problems may arise:
1) The enterprise uses an in-house or legacy integration platform to get the web apps talking to each other
2) The lack of screen real-estate on a home PC/laptop makes work too difficult and error prone
In (1), many Financial Institutions are still running a variety of legacy integration platforms that are themselves entirely reliant upon a piece of software called a container. These containers have to be deployed to an end-user’s desktop where they perform the functions necessary to marshal data between these web applications. The issue is that the container must be deployed to potentially thousands of different machines and operating systems outside of the enterprise. Managing this and ensuring the security loop-holes are not created is simply too much effort and cost – even for a long-lived time stint away from the office. Oh, and if you are using one of the older integration platforms – then there will also be a licence fee associated with this deployment too.
Scenario (2) commonly occurs in trading institutions, wealth management firms, hedge funds etc Here, the end-users regularly navigate between 10 and 20 applications across multiple physical screens – keeping an eye on market movements requires lots of screen real-estate! Consolidating the entire application landscape onto a single screen, with applications hidden or obscured behind others makes my 13 email windows I’ve got open in Outlook right now look like a triviality.
Thankfully, there is a solution to both of these problems. In short, this comes via an unusual source – Google and Microsoft. These two mega-organizations have been collaborating on something called Progress Web Applications. Without getting too deep into the tech, this means that Chrome and Edge effectively become a light-weight operating system that can run common application services for the benefit of other web applications. At Glue42, we’ve wholeheartedly embraced this approach and have recently launched a PWA version of our platform that can do everything a container does. The only difference is that it is both FREE and does NOT require any software to be installed locally. Better still, it will also have the ability to orchestrate multiple application windows – ensuring that high-priority content is kept top-most with other apps just a click away in a tab.
So, if you are thinking that home-working will become the “new normal” then please reach out to us and learn more.
