It's the final episode of the year and Liv & Anthony are talking to ANS traditional-dev turned low-code-dev-extraordinaire, Simon Cobb. Simon recently made the move from the App Dev team at ANS to the Business Applications team and has never looked back. This year, Simon challenged himself to recreate the classic arcade game, Pacman, unlocking so much potential in his own skills as a low-code developer. Find out what challenges he came across building the game and why he made the leap of faith into business applications.

Simon also built Pacman using Javascript and you can play it here https://www.simoncobb.co.uk/pacman/

Anthony and Olivia chat with ANS Women in Tech Ambassador and Development Delivery Manager, Helen Crowther on this years' WIT campaign. Helen shares her own journey into tech before taking a look back at some of her own highlights from the WIT campaign this year, including the countless events we've done, the connections we've made and the amazing women we've hired this year. And no, Covid19 was never going to stop us.

During our second women in tech campaign at ANS, we've realised how important mentoring can be since there's a serious lack of female representation in the tech industry. We recently held a virtual event for our women in tech community to talk about how to get started with mentoring, how to find the right mentor for you, the differences between mentoring and coaching and why it's ok to put yourself out there to find someone.

The chat was run by our panel of mentoring professionals and enthusiasts:

🔘 Yvonne Matck - Founder of Coachere, a coaching, consulting and mentoring practise

🔘 Caroline Whyatt - Head of Digtial Innovation and Experimentation at PRS for Music

🔘 Helen Stansfield - Communications Manager at ANS

🔘 Helen Crowther - Development Delivery Manager at ANS and ANS Women in Tech Ambassador 2020

This week Anthony and Olivia welcome ANS CTO, Andy Barrow onto the podcast. Andy is joining the team as our 'roaming reporter' (from his home of course) to find out what is going on with our customers and partners right now. But first, we thought you should get to know Andy. In this episode, find out how he joined ANS, what his role as a CTO entails and what his predictions for the world of tech are going forward. 

Episode 7 sees Anthony and Olivia catching up with ANS' Head of Strategic Alliances, Leah Stiff. Leah tells us what happened when she tuned into Microsoft Envision this year, talking about why she found the event so refreshing, why we're leaving the old normal behind and how ANS can work closely with Microsoft to help build a positive future post-covid.

This week we're talking to Head of Digital Connectivity at ANS, Mark Johnson. Mark oversees all our digital connectivity services and has been instrumental in developing our connectivity offerings to align with the latest and emerging cloud technologies. In this episode, Anthony and Olivia find out how Mark got into tech during his military days and how connectivity has come to the forefront of organisations digital strategies during the recent pandemic.

It's been 365 days since we became a #Microsoft Dynamics 365 specialist after the acquisition of an important Dynamics 365 player, Alithya UK. On 2nd October 2019, we welcomed Adam Spurr and his team to ANS to begin an incredible year providing Dynamics 365 solutions to our customers.

Listen as Liv and Anthony interview Adam and our CTO, Andy Barrow, all about why Alithya and ANS were the right fit, how the team found it becoming part of a bigger company and what the next 12 months look like for ANS as we expand our digital services post-Covid. 

In episode 4, Anthony and Liv catch up on what it's been like returning to the office before we listen to our latest webinar with leading accountancy and business firm, BDO.

Mark Sykes, Partner at BDO joined us to discuss how they have leveraged Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM to keep current clients content and engaged, attract more clients and win more work.  Since implementing Dynamics, the organisation has been able to improve the client experience though improved insight, promote cross stream working and reduced waste and improve leveragability.

We turned to Microsoft Power Apps to help us make our office a safe space for everyone to work. We’ve developed an app which employees can use to book a space in the office, managers can use to track office occupancy and housekeepers can use to track office hygiene.

We spoke to Head of Business Assurance, Danny Johns and Chief Engineer, Nathan Gaskill on how the app works, why it was important and how other organisations can leverage the app also. 

To find out more about the app works and how your organisation can use it, head to our hub. 

And if you just can't wait to get started, download the app for free from GitHub right here. 

Episode 2 sees us hear how Essex and Southend-on-Sea Councils are tackling Covid-19 in the local community with a case management system for coronavirus contact tracing at a regional level.  

Our guest, Paul Aldred, IT Business Partner at Essex County Council explains how the councils have leveraged ANS’ pre-built Microsoft Dynamics Case Management Accelerator to create, triage and action complex cases which are passed to them from the national Track and Trace system.  

Using this Accelerator, the councils are now able to contain potential Covid-19 outbreaks in locations such as workplaces, housing complexes, care homes and schools.

If you're interested in finding out more about our Case Management Accelerator, head here.