Mercury New Media Brings Convienience and Insight to Firm Information Management with Labor Tracking Application

Mercury New Media announced the release of their custom Labor Tracking Application on February 2, 2015. The new application streamlines time entry, integrates with existing workflow, improves visibility of company operations, provides automated reporting and offers data access for customized analysis.

The labor tracking application is integrated with Mercury New Media’s key operational systems Visual Studio Online (VSO)Office 365 and Zendesk to prepopulate time entries for editing based on user stories, Outlook calendar appointments and support tickets. With the utilization of hashtags, time entries are automatically categorized into the appropriate time groupings for improved consistency across the team and ease of use.

The Labor Tracking application uses .NET MVC and Entity Framework for lightweight agile development. Knockout JS was utilized to deliver an optimal user experience and performance. Authentication and security are handled with Azure Active Directory integration with Mercury’s on-premise Active Directory to achieve single sign-on for user convenience. Insightful data is surfaced to the application using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The application uses VSO to run a Continuous Integration build on code check-in, and to deploy a development instance of the site nightly with the ability to deploy production changes using VSO via a single-click.

Christopher Karlo, partner at Mercury New Media indicates, “Gone are the days of manual queries and spreadsheets. Insightful information needed for our teams to effectively run our business is now at their fingertips.”

The application comes with powerful reporting options that leverage the SSRS Report Viewer control to empower users to easily convert data into actionable information. The Dashboard displays a summary of each team member’s sprint progress and provides insights needed for them to effectively self-manage their teams and projects. In addition, managers can better proactively address business needs.

The new reporting solutions dramatically reduce the number of hours required to prepare reports. It is now easy to print and share reports in just a couple clicks with simple exporting options included in the new system. Reports can also be scheduled to send automatically based on preferred scheduling (e.g., daily, weekly, or monthly).

The new application is a cloud-based solution hosted on an Azure web site and SQL Azure for maximum flexibility and scalability. The browser based interface allows employees, managers and administrators to easily access the application through any web-browser. The application is fully responsive and looks great on the desktop on a wide screen, down to mobile devices and even smart phones.

Time is a crucial part of operations at Mercury New Media with project success measured in terms of deadlines and labor resources invested. By replacing former time management practices, Mercury has been able to dramatically improve overall team efficiency and productivity. Daily time entry can now be accomplished in seconds.

The Labor Tracking Application provides Mercury New Media the tools to propel the company forward to the next level.

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