Texting is one of the most used forms of communication. In the United States alone, 5.5 billion text messages are sent daily. So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that your customers want to be able to text your business when they need support. Few things are more frustrating than when you’re trying to solve a problem and just end up sitting on hold. And texting offers an alternative for you and your customers.

Sometime last year, we found the opportunity to optimize one of our critical API endpoints that was served using Ruby on Rails. This led to a series of investigations before we identified the right long-term solution for our particular use case. It required us not only to leverage a new JSON serializer, but also challenged us to build efficient caching and deployment strategies to go with it. This is the tale of how we embarked on that compelling journey and what we learned as a result.

For businesses of any size, consulting firms can help fill in gaps in the organization without having to build out a team or department themselves. The challenge for these firms is keeping track of all of their work across all of their clients. While it may be useful at times to have an overarching view of all work, the details can get lost easily. It is nearly always the case that certain clients will have requests that take precedence over others.

This quarter our Teamwork Desk engineers are very focused on the soon to be launched business hours feature. But as we work on this high value-add feature we also released other functionality throughout October and November.

Technician scheduling is one of the most crucial factors in the success of any business involving offsite technicians. Despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the quality of the technician’s work on a machine when done right, effective scheduling can drive revenue. Done poorly, scheduling can cause your whole organization to come to a standstill.

Storing and processing of large volumes of transactional data in a real-time application is always a challenge in software development. Choosing the right database is always crucial since decisions taken in that initial phase might look fine but affect the application’s performance as the feature adoption and customer base grows. This blog is about one such problem we faced and how we solved it.