As many of you may know, we used last week’s Oktoberfest party as an unofficial house warming party for our new office space. In addition to having a great turnout despite uncooperative weather, the Kinect Demo team from FedEx Day 2010 put in some extra hours to get our new display case setup to welcome guests. If you haven’t seen the display case, an early video is available here, and a detailed case study can be found in our case study section. In the new office, we were able ...

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I meet with a handful of business leaders every week, and I regularly get asked the question “What is SharePoint?”  Most people, especially busy executives, don’t have 60 minutes to hear a presentation and demonstration about SharePoint.  So here’s how the conversation usually goes: Busy Business Executive:  What is SharePoint? Me:  “SharePoint is an Enterprise Collaboration Portal” Busy Business Executive:  So, what does that mean? Me:  SharePoint enable...

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Greetings from DMC! My name is Jack Cosgrove, and this is my first blog post as a member of this awesome company. One of my roles at DMC is as an application developer for Microsoft SharePoint, and I hope the following blog post will be of value to both the SharePoint developer and user communities. Today I will walk through the process of integrating SharePoint with a Microsoft CRM database so that CRM data can be used within SharePoint. I was able to piece this together from se...

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A state forest is square and 6 miles on each side, and known to be home to a population of 1,000 deer.  A road runs straight through the forest (not diagonally) and is silently traveled by an electric car whose driver is oblivious to the deer.  Since it is mating season, the deer are constantly on the move.  They show no more or less affinity for the road than for any of the many deer paths through the forest, and won’t notice the car.  What is the probability of the car hit...

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DMC is celebrating Oktoberfest with an open house in our new office, and we hope you are able to join us! DMC's Oktoberfest Open House October 20, 2011 4pm - 10pm 2222 N. Elston Ave, Suite 200 Chicago, IL 60614 [Driving Directions] Stop by anytime throughout the evening for food, beer, and a look at our new home. There will be plenty of convenient parking available. Feel free to bring significant or insignificant others along (husbands, wives, girlfriends, old college roommates, etc.). ...

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Anjali Bharadwa, Senior Consultant What do you like best about working at DMC? The atmosphere. Everyone at DMC strives for excellence, not only in delivering our services, but also in going out of the way to run things well as a company.  It’s a unique feature of our company that makes DMC very refreshing. What has been your favorite project at DMC thus far? I’ve really enjoyed working on the M/R Systems SharePoint portal.  It has been interesting watching something that did ...

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Last month’s Geek Challenge asked where in line was the optimum place to stand such that your birthday matches the birthday of anyone in front of you, but that nobody in front of you has made the same match with someone in front of them.   The problem is an optimization based on two competing priorities:  The farther back you stand, the greater the chance of making a match for yourself.  The closer to the front you stand, the greater the chance that nobody else has already wo...

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Those who visit DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board." This is where we document the most infamous utterances of the moment.

A few times each year DMC holds an all-day company meeting. It's a chance for all of our team members to discuss our goals and have some fun together. Past meetings have taken us anywhere from Chicago's waterfront, to an improv session, to the Melrose Park Grand Prix. For our most recent all-day company we chartered a bus and took the entire to the treetop canopies of Wisconsin. On the trip to Wisconsin, I gave a presentation on DMC's Customer Service Fundamentals, with an improtu narrati...

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Recently DMC developed a high speed vision inspection system using LabVIEW. This system inspects many different parts and each part requires different inspection criteria, so we needed to develop a user interface (UI) that could be used to configure the current products, as well as be flexible enough to configure new products. The manufacturing machine was already running on a Windows CE device, so our UI would need to interface with the UI already on the system and run on Windows CE. For a f...

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Recruiting season is underway at DMC, and we are looking forward to meeting the bright students at some of the nation's top universities! DMC is looking for smart, creative people who enjoy working with other smart, creative people to join our growing team. We are proud of our high level of client interaction and customer service, so excellent verbal and written communication skills are a must. We regularly work with new technologies, so candidates should be excited to rapid...

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Ashely Enderlin, Systems Engineer Since you attended grad school at Stanford, how does living in Chicago compare with California? Palo Alto is not a typical college town, and although it has fantastic produce and cheap electronics, I love the Midwest. Ever since I watched The Blues Brothers as a kid, I’ve wanted to live in Chicago because of the wonderful music scene. There are so many festivals and cultural events, and it’s great seeing everyone out and about. My favorite place in Chicago ...

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A small movie theater has two movie screens.  One theater is showing a hit action movie, and has sold out for the evening.  The other screen is showing a comedy flop and has plenty of available seats.  A crowd has gathered outside the box office disappointed they can’t get tickets to the action movie.  Before they scatter, the theater manager quickly announces a contest to entice people to come in and see the comedy: “Whoever is the first person to buy a ticket whose birthday...

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Those who visit DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board." This is where we document the most infamous utterances of the moment.

DMC is proud to announce the launch of its new consulting services website: DMCconsultants.com  The goal of the new site is to better serve clients in professional services industries such as legal, property management & development, management consulting, and financial services, as well as non-profits and government agencies.  The service offerings highlighted on the new site include system integration, custom application development, and SharePoint cons...

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While we spend a lot of time together here at the office, we also try to organize fairly frequent DMC outings. Since we tend to be fairly active people, our summer events seem to skew in that direction as well. In the past few months we’ve entered a few races here in Chicago (Shamrock Shuffle, Chase Corporate Challenge, and the Terrapin 5k), played in a sand volleyball league at North Beach, had a few boat nights on the lake, and last week, went kayaking on the Chicago River.    A Te...

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8/23/2011 1:10 pm DMC Office I have just finished my first week among the peoples who populate a small corner of Chicago who are simply known as the DMC. While I am still trying to orient myself, I have made a few observations I would like to share with you: ·         This particular group seems to be particularly driven to document and codify their behaviors in a form they call a Standard Operating Procedure or “SOP”.   I have be...

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Microsoft has released their first service pack for SharePoint 2010 and it comes with several new features and upgrades. This blog post will guide you through the upgrade process and explain the steps you should take to deploy Service Pack 1 to your SharePoint server. Preparing for the Upgrade Before you start installing anything new on your SharePoint server always create a backup of your SharePoint database and a restore point for the server. Make sure that you are confident in your ability ...

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Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Office 2010, Project Server 2010, Fast Search, SharePoint 2010 Server, SharePoint 2010 Foundation, and SharePoint Designer 2010.  In order to ensure the continued stability of your SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Foundation platforms, I highly recommend that your organizatioin take the time to install Service Pack 1. Below is a summary of a few of the key SharePoint fixes and enhancements: A large number of fixes have been made...

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Our new deck isn't the only way we're expanding our ceiling here at DMC.  We're very proud to build on our technical dominance with new LabVIEW certifications! Congratulations to our newest LabVIEW Certified Architects, Jesse Batsche and Danny Budzinski! They join Leon Grossman, Jody Koplo, and me on DMC's team of experts.  The coveted LabVIEW Architect status is the highest possible level available from National Instruments. Congratulations to John Sullivan, who is DMC's newest...

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