News - Ballard Chalmers

Custom software that wins awards!

09/07/2018

Congratulations to our friends at The ID Register on winning a silver award at the Guernsey Financial Services Commission’s (GFSC) “Soundbox Sprint Innovation Challenge.”

The award was presented at the GFSC’s one-day event, where participants were challenged to develop digital solutions for one or more of three pre-set challenges showing how technology could be used to: Optimise efficient and effective client due diligence; improve administration; and help the financially excluded.

The ID Register was awarded in recognition of the solution it offers for continually changing regulatory requirements and the lengthy paper based processes associated with client due diligence.

The software behind The ID Register was custom developed by Ballard Chalmers. It is an online platform which makes client onboarding quicker, easier and more cost effective by allowing users to complete one profile of Subscription, KYC and FATCA information and connect it to each of their investments and service providers. To learn more about this software and its development process, you can read our case study here.

Announcing Azure Immutable Blob Storage

06/07/2018

Azure Immutable Blob Storage is now available in public preview. This feature enables organisations, particularly those in the finance sector, to store data in a manner compliant with strict regulations for information storage management.

Azure Immutable Blob Storage allows users to store business-critical data in Azure blob storage in a WORM (Write Once Read Many) state, making it non-erasable, and non-modifiable for a user-specified interval of time.

There is no additional cost for using this feature.

For details you can read the announcement in full on the official Microsoft Azure blog website here.

ML.NET v0.3 now available on Github

04/07/2018

The new ML.NET version 0.3 has been released on GitHub and as a NuGet package. This version introduces many enhancements including Field-Aware Factorization Machines, LightGBM, Ensembles, LightLDA transform, OVA and support for ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange Format).

For those new to it, ML.NET is a cross-platform open-source machine learning framework which makes machine learning accessible to developers. You can learn more about it via Microsoft here.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 3

27/06/2018

Available now is Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 3. This update to BizTalk Server 2016 contains new and improved capabilities for integrating BizTalk Server workloads with Office 365 Outlook Email, Calendar, and Contact resources.

Office 365 Adapters
Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud-based subscription service that brings together the best tools for the way people work today. By combining best-in-class apps like Excel and Outlook with powerful cloud services like OneDrive and Microsoft Teams, Office 365 lets anyone create and share anywhere on any device. Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapters for Office 365 enable IT professionals and enterprise developers to integrate Outlook mail, contacts, and schedules with new solutions based on BizTalk Server 2016.

Office 365 Mail Adapter
Using the BizTalk Adapter for Office 365 Mail, you can read, mark as read or delete, Outlook e-mail messages through one-way BizTalk Server receive locations. Using the Office 365 Mail Adapter, you can write e-mail message, including setting message priority, through one-way static or dynamic BizTalk Server send ports.

Office 365 Calendar Adapter
Using the BizTalk Adapter for Office 365 Calendar, you can get future calendar events through one-way BizTalk Server receive locations. Using the Office 365 Calendar Adapter, you can create calendar events, including specifying required and optional attendees, through one-way static or dynamic BizTalk Server send ports.

Office 365 Contact Adapter

Using the BizTalk Adapter for Office 365 Contact, you can create contacts, by specifying all settings, through one-way static or dynamic BizTalk Server send ports.

Licensing

Microsoft customers with Software Assurance or Azure Enterprise Agreements are licensed to use Feature Pack 3.
BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 3 can be installed on Enterprise and Developer editions only.

Software

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 3 contains all the functionality of Feature Packs 1 and 2, plus all the fixes in Cumulative Update 5.
You can install Feature Pack 3 on BizTalk Server 2016 Enterprise and Developer Edition (retail, CU1, CU2, CU3, CU4, FP1, FP2).
Download the software now from the Microsoft Download Center.

BizTalk Server 2016 Cumulative Update 5

26/06/2018

Yesterday, Microsoft released BizTalk Server 2016 Cumulative Update 5. For details visit the Microsoft Support website here.

For information about the version of the service packs and cumulative updates for BizTalk Server and Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Packs, Microsoft has also made this available on its Support website here.