Mark Friedgan, Jonathan Ozeran, Chris McKeever, and Jason Shah did a great job of “pushing back” and providing ideas for Steve to focus in on his niche offering. There was great crowd Q&A as well.

If you need help with your company’s new project or have a vetted startup idea, we’d love to talk to you. Join us, Sphere Consulting, at 1871 next time!

It was great to hear how Walgreens combined with IDEO to transform the way Walgreens approaches the consumer now. With their set focus on the Pharmacy, Heather Kingsbury Hill, Director of Healthcare Consumer Insights at Walgreens and Mark Jones, Service Design Lead at IDEO, showed us the redesign of the Walgreens pharmacy experience. It was refreshing to see the pharmacist being brought to the front of the store / more accessable areas for the consumer to speak to. They covered the following points below were well covered.

• The process and methods used in approaching this redesign
• How they meshed the flow of the customer experience, and flow with the actual physical store space
• New roles they discovered and created
• How they identified unmet needs from their research and surfaced the vision for the new “Well Experience”

Sphere has a solid vertical practice in Healthcare so this was a real plus to attend. Great attendance overall and networking as well. Call us with any Healthcare startup or enterprise data or programming needs and join us next time!

These days, complex platforms should be well audited before getting to the market. Microsoft states that the amount of vulnerabilities in MS SQL Server decreased drastically after full codebase rework in 2000-2005. Since then, they have kept the bar really high.

Both uptime and performance are important for business critical solutions. That’s why we are really inspire to dive deeper into Always On, ColumnStore Indexes and Contained Databases features discussed yesterday.

We at Sphere are proven software vendors well versed in providing critical solutions. We provide software of the highest quality with 24/7 uptime. This is why our aim is to know more on new technologies made by Microsoft. Join us and give us a call if you have any questions!

The Sphere Team was at Refresh Chicago’s meetup last night with Russ Unger as the speaker. It was very enlightening as to the thoughts of UX professional, newbies, and the “in-betweeners”. Russ talked about Unicorns and the impossible job description/expectations often placed on the UX role. Hence the Unicorn skilled person who just doesn’t exist to fill such unrealistic job requests. Talking about the “ (DTDT) = definition debates of what we do”, he shared why the debates are healthy and that in the end, we’re problem solvers/Hackers. Not frauds or “fakin’ it till we make it.” It was a great discussion and Sphere will be at the next one. Come join us!

Sphere’s Microsoft practice and our Microsoft development capabilities include delivery of complex web and mobile software projects using Microsoft technologies, custom software development with hybrid delivery model. (on client site or from Sphere Chicago office + offshore development centers in Ukraine and Russia) We’re experienced and ready to help you succeed so give us a call.

The Sphere Team will definitely be going to visit ongoing .Net Ninja meetups. Come join us!