Software Outsourcing India| PHP .Net Web Design Development Seo News, Article

SEO tips to get targeted traffic for your site

2008-11-13T10:43:00.000+05:30

Unlike paid marketing, organic marketing or SEO is much more cost effective. The matter relies on how to do SEO effectively to get the most out of it, which means you can get massive targeted traffic within your time and money budget..

SEARCH ENGINE Optimisation (SEO) – is a process to optimise your website position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), which means your website should appear at the first ranking for specific keywords on the first page of any search engines.

Why to do SEO? First, it maximises your web traffic because it’s the most visible in surfers’ search. The more visitors your website has, the better your conversion rates and ROI are and thus the higher your profit.

Next, unlike paid marketing, organic marketing or SEO is much more cost effective. You won’t have to pay for the traffic or the clicks themselves. More than that if you have time and knowledge, you can generate traffic yourself so your organic traffic can be completely free.

The matter relies on how to do SEO effectively to get the most out of it, which means you can get massive targeted traffic within your time and money budget. Some webmasters will opt to do everything themselves. However, they often get stuck half way being hopeless to wait for their website to get high rankings and the traffic to come.

The reasons can be simply either they are not aware of the latest Internet marketing techniques, which are being developed day by day by professional Internet marketers, or they just aren’t doing them the correct ways. Another reason can be they don’t have that much time to manage and complete the SEO process and leave it undone without having any results yet.

For those reasons, most of online business owners nowadays choose to outsource to reliable Search Engine Optimisers (SEOs). Among the leading SEOs in the current market, traffic assistants can be considered the best with their core competency in exclusive Internet marketing services provided by professional Internet marketers.

Source:- merinews.com/

Very Helpful Search Engine Marketing Strategies

2008-11-13T10:14:00.002+05:30

Articles and press releases are two very helpful search engine marketing strategies that a lot of marketers still use today. But unlike in the past wherein the articles and press release can easily be found by the online community, the massive amount of articles and press releases today have made it more difficult for one to be singled out from the rest. It is now close to impossible that a press release about your new product or an article would be read by everyone.

Nevertheless, many companies still send out press releases and articles .Fact of the matter is there are some articles and some press releases that are read by customers. Despite the heavy competition, there is still a way to reach your customers through the articles and press releases .For more details visit to www.writing-fast-cash.com. The key is to create something that will capture their attention and will intrigue them enough to investigate and go to your website, user profile, or information center.

Here are some tips on how to make an article or press release that would stand among the thousands of other articles and press releases:

1. Get to Know Your Target Audience

Press releases and articles also have target audiences. We know that. We don‘t write and publish something just for ourselves; we do it for the benefit of others, too. When marketing, press release and articles are meant to be read by your target audience and you keep them in mind when creating that press release or article.

Knowing your target audience will enable you to write in a way as if you‘re “speaking in their language.” you would know ho to communicate to your target market and in the process capture their attention. You‘ll be able to include facts and information that you know would be beneficial for them and therefore will appeal to them. You will also be able to optimize your press release or article by defining the best keywords, knowing what keywords your target audience would be looking for.

2. Optimize Through Keywords

In knowing who your target audience is, you can research on what keywords to focus on to optimize your article or press release. Once you‘ve found the best keyword for the article or press release, make it as a basis when writing. Optimizing through the keywords will help with your rankings in the search engines as the crawlers can read the press releases and articles. If your article or press release is about a certain subject, and you‘ve honed on it very well, it can rank very high on the search engines.

3. Be Creative and Stand Out!

Stand out. You know there‘s a very fierce competition out there. Thousands of pres releases and articles are sent across the Web through the sites, emails, directories, and feeds. You need to do more than just write correctly... you need to write creatively! You need to think on how your article or press release can be of better help to the customers than the other articles or press releases. You need to give the audience a reason why they should pick your article or press release among the many thousand others.

4. Optimize On the Title

The title of the article or press release, not just the keywords, also counts in optimization. Each article or press release should have a title that revolves around the keywords you chose. This will help in the search engine rankings and for more visibility when the keywords are being searched. For more information logon to www.article-writing-secret.com.Of course, you should not forget to make the title interesting to hook the readers to read your article or press release. It will help to communicate easily with your customers and can drive traffic to your website.

5. Add an Image to Go With the Article or Press Release

An article or press release with an image or picture is much more enjoyable o read and look at than a plain one. Many readers usually don‘t read much at their first glance at an article or press release. Adding an image could lead them to read your article when it captures their attention. It‘s another way for your article or press release to stand out!

6. Choosing the Distribution Channels

Submitting your press release or article on big PR distribution sites and article directories may NOT always be the best course to take. While the services will work just fine, you might want to take a course wherein you know you‘ll get more exposure and quality coverage in your own market.

Source:- promotionworld.com/

Business column: Boost your marketing with online search tools

2008-11-12T15:57:00.000+05:30

Search-engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site. When SEO is done properly, it will place you high on search-engine result pages for certain key phrases and terms (i.e. real estate, law firms, doctor, etc.).

In today's online-driven world, the names Google, Yahoo and MSN are rapidly becoming more of a household name than the Yellow Pages. Most of us now have access to the Internet via work, home and mobile phone. According to research by Jupiter Media way back in 2004, more than 64 percent of people who are looking for information online use search engines. The number is closer to 80 percent today.

Low risk, high impact

In these tough economic times, business owners are becoming increasingly challenged and conservative with their marketing budgets. Most of us are seeking low-risk, high-impact marketing options in a down economy. When it comes to meeting these needs, search engines like Google provide a viable and cost effective solution.

So where should your advertising dollars be spent in today's market?

Consider the traditional advertising option of the yellow pages. For a prominent ad, your costs could be thousands of dollars per month Also, Yellow Page ads have limited flexibility, and you are usually locked in to a one-year commitment.

Optimize your Web site

How many times have you used the paper Yellow Pages this month?

How many times have you searched for a business or service on Google or Yahoo this month?

Now consider your Web site. You can further your business leads by making sure that more people are viewing it. You can optimize your Web site to rank in the main listings without any media spending at all. You can test multiple ads and list under multiple words or phrases all at the same time and get instant tracking on which ads are working for you.

The major search engines also can determine where the search is coming from. This means you can target ads all the way down to a city, or ZIP code.

If you are not currently utilizing this marketing channel, I recommend you take half of your local marketing this year and invest in search optimization or paid search ads. Work with a search-analytics professional to track the new program for 90 days. You likely will be surprised to see who's been searching for you, and see an immediate impact for your business.

Source:- recordonline.com/

SugarCRM wants to be the Linux of the CRM world

2008-11-12T15:35:00.002+05:30

SugarCRM seems to be doing quite well, at least well enough to rankle its larger competitor Salesforce. John Roberts, the CEO of SugarCRM says Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce wasn’t too pleased when he found out SugarCRM was hosting its user conference at the Marriott, just a few yards from the Salesforce Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

“When Marc Benioff found out we were at the Marriott he pressured the hotel to move us out. That’s how we ended up here at the St. Regis, and Marriott is paying for it.” The move might have backfired for Salesforce because the St. Regis is a lot nicer than the Marriott and just as close to the Moscone.

The reason SugarCRM might be irking Mr Benioff is that it’s growing very fast. “We now have more than four thousand customers, and more than half-a-million users, in 80 languages. That’s in just four years.”

While Mr Roberts credits Marc Benioff with educating the market about the benefits of software as a service, he says SugarCRM is winning business because there isn’t any customer lock-in as there is with Salesforce and its proprietary behavior. For example, application developers for the Salesforce Force.com platform have to use a programming language called Apex.

“What is the point of Apex? We built SugarCRM in PHP and we use Internet standard technologies. We are open source, our technologies are owned by the Internet. We view ourselves as the Linux of the CRM world.”

Much of the demand for SugarCRM comes from word of mouth, says Mr Roberts. “I don’t have to have a big sales force that needs to travel all over the place.” Daily downloads average 5,000 per day and recently exceeded 5 million total. Site licenses are $449 per user or customers can choose to the on-demand version for just $40 per month.

“The Internet has totally changed the software industry. We allow our customers to try before they buy.”

SugarCRM is home grown and developed in Cupertino from scratch. “We don’t off-shore development. I don’t believe that you can build innovative software that way,” Mr Roberts says.

The company has strong growth and money in the bank. “We raised $20m last year but we haven’t had to touch it. We were planning an IPO in 2008 and we needed to show we had $20m in cash.”

Mr Roberts says the company might have to wait until 2010 before it can IPO. SugarCRM was hoping that MySQL would be the first commercial open source company to have a successful IPO. But MySQL abandoned its IPO plans and agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1bn at the beginning of this year. Now SugarCRM could become the first commercial open source public company.

Until the IPO market reopens, Mr Roberts isn’t twiddling his thumbs. “There are five million businesses in the US, and only 10 per cent of them have CRM, the rest are using spreadsheets. That’s a huge opportunity for us.”

Source:- blogs.zdnet.com/

Microsoft "Not Against" Open Source

2008-11-12T15:30:00.000+05:30

The division between proprietary software vendors and open-source providers is not as clear as some industry players perceive it to be. As more enterprises consider adopting open source technologies, even traditional software vendors such as Microsoft have taken steps in responding to such customer needs.

"Open source is not a product but an approach to software development," said Matthew Hardman, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Singapore. "Microsoft does not compete with open source, just as Nike does not compete with running."

Hardman said the software giant seeks to provide the best possible platform' for open source applications to run. "We believe that enterprises and vendors should have a choice of software development methodology, and open source is one such choice."

The platform strategy manager noted however, that Microsoft will compete with open source-based providers, just as it also competes with other proprietary vendors.
Open-source contributions

According to Hardman, Microsoft has contributed to technologies that are deemed open source. "PHP, a technology used to build web pages, ran into multiple issues around performance and scalability on Windows Server 2003," he said. "With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 and host technology such as Fast CGI, we are now able to run PHP up to 200 per cent faster than Linux."

Hardman said the company has contributed code to PHP libraries for database support, making it easier for PHP developers to connect to Microsoft databases.

"Linux is open source, but open source is not Linux," Hardman noted. "PHP was designed to make it easy for people to build web pages, not specifically to run only on Linux."

As part of its open-source strategy, the company hosts a website called CodePlex, where Microsoft employees and the developer community work on some 6,000 open-source projects. "Examples of such projects include the AJAX Control Toolkit, SugarCRM, .Net, and code that can interact with the 'World of Warcraft,'" Hardman said.

CodePlex includes more than just projects that Microsoft has released, according to Hardman. "It's a hosting platform where people can create and share projects, and we have also used it to share some of our technology to encourage further innovation."

Some five million developers worldwide have created various applications using Microsoft platform technologies such as Windows, .Net, Windows Server and Microsoft Xbox, according to the software giant.

Different business models
Unlike Red Hat, Microsoft does not have a subscription-based model for open-source solutions. "When we want to share source code, we will share it for free," Hardman said. "For example, if someone took the AJAX Control Toolkit, embedded it into a project and commercialised it, that's fine with us."

"It's not so much an issue of opening up the source code," Hardman said. "Rather, it's about how to make open-source technology work for the enterprise, without it having to change its existing platform or infrastructure."

In short, interoperability among solutions, whether open source or not, is very important, Hardman noted.

Other open-source issues
Enterprises need to consider several other issues when deciding whether to adopt open-source technologies, according to Hardman. Knowledge about the level of support provided by the service provider, such as ready availability of security patches, is crucial.

"It's not enough to only have technical expertise in building the open-source solution," Hardman said. "Business knowledge is also essential to ensure the solution works for the enterprise."

Additionally, the open-source provider must be confident that the contributing community can ensure adequate information security. "There must be no weak links in security features," Hardman said.

Open source and SaaS
According to Gartner's State of Open Source report for 2008, software-as-a-service (SaaS) will eclipse open source as the preferred enterprise IT cost-cutting method by 2012.

The report stated that both the open source and SaaS business models price by subscription, operate on low profit margins and can reduce enterprise IT costs. Gartner contends however, that SaaS reduces enterprise requirements for IT technical skills, while open source tends to increase such requirements.

Gery Messer, president of Red Hat Asia Pacific, disagreed: "Open source does not increase the requirement for IT technical skills within the enterprise."

Messer said Red Hat's subscription model provides enterprises with a predictable cost structure and allows them to outsource IT development and support requirements.

"Open source is an infrastructure platform on which many enterprise applications run," Messer said. "Its community-based accelerated innovation approach multiplies software development capacity many times over, providing enterprises better, more innovative solutions."

Messer agreed however, that like open-source software (OSS), SaaS can also help enterprises, especially small- and medium-sized businesses, cut IT costs.
Defining open source

"While I agree with Red Hat's general definition of SaaS, I wouldn't agree with their definition of open source," said Brian Prentice, Gartner's research vice president for emerging trends and technologies. "Open source is not just an infrastructure platform, it can be a lot more than that and is."

According to Prentice, Gartner's definition of open source is software governed under a licence agreement recognised by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). OSI is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open-source software. "It is the licence agreement, and specifically the rights to modify and redistribute the code, which is the most important component of open source."

As a co-author of the Gartner Open Source report, Prentice explained that OSS tends to increase skills requirements because new technologies require new skills in an organisation.

"If, for example, my organisation uses Windows Server, the addition of Linux, regardless of distribution, would require new skills," Prentice said. "If I am currently using a mix of Oracle 11g and SQL Server, and then introduced MySQL, that needs a new set of skills."

Prentice said SaaS tends to avoid this problem because it is "run on someone else's infrastructure".

"I concede there is some nuance in this area particularly as we start looking at platform-as-a-service capabilities like Force.com from salesforce.com," he noted.

Source:- cio.com/

Microsoft Pushes Interoperability at ApacheCon

2008-11-08T15:11:00.002+05:30

Sam Ramji, Microsoft's open-source point man, promotes the company's efforts in the areas of interoperability and open-source software at the Apache Software Foundation's ApacheCon conference. In a keynote at the event, Ramji discusses various Microsoft interoperability efforts involving partnerships with WSO2, HBase, AMQP and the company's "Oslo" modeling technology.

In a keynote at the ApacheCon conference of open-source developers and users, Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, outlined a series of new moves the software giant has made regarding interoperability as it continues to make nice with the open-source community.

At the Apache Software Foundation's conference in New Orleans on Nov. 7, Ramji spoke of Microsoft's "greater participation and growth with open-source communities, and our strategy of 'architecting for participation,'" Ramji said in a blog post following his keynote.

Microsoft's strategy focuses on four themes: community, contribution, partnerships and choice, Ramji said. “Microsoft believes that the next 10 years of software will be a time of growth and change where both open-source and Microsoft communities will grow together," he added.

Among the many moves Microsoft has made, Ramji noted that the company recently joined the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group as a participant, with the goal of contributing to the development of the specification and to enable greater customer choice in the marketplace.

And, "at the request of community members, we have now committed to participate in the Apache Qpid project, a widely adopted open-source implementation of the AMQP specification that addresses the customer need for choice and improved messaging interoperability," Ramji said.

"Our customers are telling us that they would like to see the Apache Qpid project extended to interoperate with Windows, so the next few months of participation will be focused on understanding the community's effort to build Windows-based AMQP software. Participation will give us the opportunity to learn from other project participants, so that we can be in a position to consider making a valuable contribution. But it is important to note that the Apache Qpid project is just one of many AMQP specification implementations, and we are open to supporting additional projects."

Alexis Richardson, co-founder of CohesiveFT, told eWEEK: "Microsoft joining means validation of the 'mission' of AMQP to open up, massively grow and fundamentally simplify the AMQP market. What is needed is something that combines the open standard plug-and-go cheap-to-use nature of TCP with the richer features of smarter messaging protocols. There is no standard way to connect systems together. Currently, customers have to choose between expensive lock-in via the IBM monopoly or similar and hand-made systems. Web services are too complicated and general purpose. AMQP business messaging is the way out of this mess. So AMQP is an open Internet protocol for solving this pain, like TCP. Now the biggest software vendor has bought in.”

Ramji also said Microsoft has been working with open-source SOA (service-oriented architecture) infrastructure software provider WSO2 to demonstrate interoperability using Microsoft's StockTrader reference application. "Today, the WSO2 announced they would build an open-source version of the sample application under 'Project Stonehenge,' which is a new Apache incubation project," he said.

Moreover, WSO2 will use the project to set up sample applications that demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies, using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols, Ramji said.

Ramji said his team has been working closely with that of Jean Paoli, the general manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, whose team is driving much of this interoperability work.

In addition, Ramji said Microsoft has moved the development of protocol parsers for Microsoft Network Monitor—a free protocol analyzer and network sniffer known as "Netmon"—to an open-source model. Microsoft will host the effort on its CodePlex community development site. On CodePlex, Microsoft will host the development of parsers for public protocols and for protocols described in the company's Open Protocol Specifications for Windows, he said. An updated parser package has been released and a source tree created on CodePlex, Ramji said.

"We want Netmon to be the best-of-breed tool for network monitoring at Microsoft, not just for Windows," he said.

Ramji also told the ApacheCon audience that the company's "Oslo" software modeling technology will be included under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. "This will ensure that the 'Oslo' declarative modeling language, code-named 'M,' is interoperable with prominent industry standards such as WS* specifications, X M L formats, industry protocols and security standards," he said.

Source:- eweek.com

Open source opens doors for small businesses

2008-11-08T15:10:00.000+05:30

ActiveState and Bryght have helped Vancouver establish its reputation as an open-source software development centre.

Vancouver’s growing love affair with open source software (OSS) development is being manifested in a growing community of startups, scores of blogs and monthly events.

The city, which has played a prominent role in the OSS movement, is home to ActiveState and Bryght, the former being one of the first commercial OSS developers; the latter being the first company to use Drupal – a popular OSS – as its sole product development platform.

ActiveState was acquired for US$23 million in 2003 by U.K.-based Sophos, which then sold the company in 2006 for US$2.25 million to Vancouver’s Pender Financial Group Corp. (TSX-V: PDF).

Bryght was founded by Boris Mann, a leading OSS advocate who sold the company to Vancouver’s Raincity Studios last November.

OSS is free, and users don’t need to have programming savvy to develop websites, blogs or web applications.

As well, anyone can manipulate and change OSS and then distribute those changes without fear of licence infringement.

That freedom has allowed OSS users to develop software in step with the ever-changing Internet.

“Sharing those changes freely is what makes the whole thing grow,” said Mann who, after selling Bryght, co-founded Vancouver’s Bootup Labs, an incubator to help web startups develop and raise early stage financing.

According to Gartner Research, 90% of commercial software will, by 2012, contain significant amounts of open source code.

“[Drupal] started out as nothing more than a content management system, [and] evolved from there as more people started using it to become a really flexible system,” said Mann.

Mann started a wiki page to compile a list of Drupal-powered websites of B.C.-based organizations, governments, startups, consulting firms, independent consultants and schools.

At press time, the list had reached 50 websites, including citizen journalism site NowPublic.com, Vancity’s changeeverything.ca and the websites of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the Georgia Straight.

Mann doesn’t use Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint or EMC Corp.’s Documentum – two of the leading proprietary, pay-for-use content management platforms.

“With a lot of content management systems, people used to pay millions of dollars for [them],” said Mann, “and in some cases [people] still get suckered into paying that.”

Along with Drupal, the most widely used OSS platforms are Joomla and WordPress, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

According to OSS users, the three platforms combined have enough power to compete – if not outperform – proprietary platforms offered by Microsoft and the other big web developers.

“The reality is that if you have Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, you can solve most problems nowadays,” said Rastin Mehr, founder of Rastin Mehr Design Studio Inc. & Associates, a Yaletown-based web application development firm.

“An average small business can now afford to use more advanced technology than some corporations.”

His company was founded on the Joomla platform and is developing a custom OSS platform for content management and for building web-based social media.

“The Internet is becoming social,” said Mehr.

“Social anything goes hand in hand with open source.”

Mehr was an organizer of last June’s Vancouver Joomla! Day – one of many OSS user events that are held in Vancouver each year.

“For any healthy open-sourced project, you want to invest in growing the community around it,” said Mehr.

Mehr calls OOS events “unconferences,” because there’s no corporate involvement in organizing them.

“Open source is really the model of the village versus the pyramid – the pyramid being the corporation.”

Drupal and Joomla have developed the largest worldwide communities and, as a result, users debate which platform is superior.

Mehr said Drupal is ideal for publishers, webmasters and web designers with mid-level programming expertise, whereas Joomla serves inexperienced bloggers and software architects located at opposing ends of the expertise spectrum.

ActiveState released a report last July to debunk many of the “myths” surrounding OSS.

Source:- bivinteractive.com/

3 Great Apps to Help You Get Your Open Source Groove On

2008-11-07T13:07:00.002+05:30

If the state of the economy has got you down and you're ready to stop throwing money at commercial software vendors, you might be overwhelmed at the amount of open source options that exist. Buck up, IT soldier, here are three applications that let you dip your toes in the pool without jumping in all the way.

Mindtouch - I've written before about this dead-simple way to implement a collaborative environment in the workplace. Sure, you can always fall back on sharing files via Google Docs or keep employes connected through an in-house blog, but I don't recommend putting together a piecemeal system and hoping everything works well together.

Mindtouch is the Swiss Army Knife of collaboration platforms: it neatly blends your email system, customer account databases, and other enterprise apps with Web services like search and social networking -- and it's all open source, which means it can be customized to your companies unique needs. If Mindtouch works for big businesses like e-commerce company Bill Me Later and Baxter Healthcare, it's worth finding out what it can do for you.

SugarCRM - There's no shortage of customer relationship management (CRM) software, but even the most robust proprietary vendor offering will have a hard time measuring up to the open source alternative from SugarCRM. It's amazingly customizable, and scales well for both small and large businesses. As DaniWeb's Edward Correia points out, there's even a plugin available to integrate SugarCRM with a Gmail account.

The Oregon Department of Human Services used to manage its community outreach and education communication with sticky notes. CIO Bill Crowell says once the decision was made to try SugarCRM, his tech team had it downloaded and deployed within 24 hours.

Hyperic HQ - All the open source software in the world won't help your company's bottom line if you're company is offline. Hyperic HQ is a great tool for managing and monitoring your infrastructure. Use it to track metrics for more than 65 technologies across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix systems.

There are various versions of Hyperic HQ available, each with its own set of bells and whistles. If you're having trouble envisioning how the app would fit into your workflow, have a look at this terrific post by Redmonk analyst Michael Coté.

Of course, there are loads more apps you can try, but these three make a great starting point if you don't have a lot of experience with open source software. What apps would you recommend to someone just starting to dabble in enterprise open source apps? Let me know in the comments.

Source:- daniweb.com/

Ecommerce Solutions For Online Businesses

2008-11-07T12:35:00.001+05:30

Ecommerce solutions are designed to act as the interface between online businesses and the consumer. By providing a connection with the consumer, the ecommerce application within your website is a fundamental aspect of your online business, and it can really make or break your reputation. Finding the right ecommerce solution for your business is utterly essential, and it must be both easy to use and secure for customers to feel safe handing over their details. With identity theft and credit card fraud on the increase, it is crucial that your ecommerce solution is trustworthy and secure, which can make it quite difficult to find the right one that fits within your budget. Nevertheless, the emphasis should be placed more on the quality, usability and extent of features offered by any given package, and your decision should be based on finding the right application for your precise needs.

Ecommerce solutions are available in plentiful supply online, and it can often be a somewhat difficult task to figure which solution actually works best for you. In order to give yourself the best possible chance of selecting an appropriate application, it is important to weigh up and consider exactly what it is you require from your ecommerce application. If you are just starting out in business, or have very basic ecommerce needs, it might be a good idea to opt for an online payment processor. With these online programmes, you can implement code into your website and use free checkout services that could provide exactly what you’re looking for. On the downside, many of these services works as psuedo-banks and it can be quite difficult to resolve issues with them. Additionally, withdrawing money from your online merchant account can be both an expensive and lengthy process; hence the drawbacks of these free online programmes. If you require a basic solution, perhaps for accepting payments from one source for one type of product, one of these free-set up online solutions might be perfect for your needs. If, however, you’re requirements encompass an entire catalogue of products with variable shipping costs, and requiring a multitude of payment options, it is perhaps better to consider a more advanced solution for your website and your business.

Looking for an ecommerce solution for your business can be particularly difficult, given that most providers tend to offer subjective advice in favour of their own solutions. It is important to try to consider exactly what you require, and what you’re looking for, as well as to weigh up the options of each application you consider before committing yourself. Don’t let price guide you as to your selection, because in comparison to quality, price does not reflect what you get for your money. It is more important to find a solution that is fitted to your needs, regardless of price. So long as the ecommerce solution is within your price range, and provides the features that you require for your business, it is best to part with several hundred extra if it means finding the perfect solution for your business.

Source:- qifenglou.info/

BizTalk gets surprise reprieve

2008-11-03T17:17:00.000+05:30

Microsoft has reversed course on the fate of BizTalk Server, re-naming the next version and setting a roadmap that calls for a major releases of the middleware every two years.
The decision to continue developing the middleware came as a surprise to some, as BizTalk was to be a launching pad for Microsoft's forthcoming "Oslo" technologies that include messaging (Windows Communications Foundation), workflow (Windows Workflow Foundation) and modeling tools.

Rob Helm, an analyst with independent analyst firm Directions on Microsoft, says: "It is pretty surprising and I have not seen this big a reversal from Microsoft in a while.

"They might be reluctant to yank what is now a fairly successful product for an unproven technology platform."

Microsoft says what was supposed to be BizTalk Server 2006 R3 will now be called BizTalk Server 2009. The full release is slated to ship in the first half of next year. In addition, the company says it will provide details on another new version, code-named BizTalk 7, in the early part of next year.

"We will continue to enhance and extend enterprise activity scenarios" in BizTalk, says Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the connected systems division at Microsoft. "We will make it simpler, add new capabilities around [business-to-business], build in our new RFID work and expand it to more general purpose asset-tracking, like tracking laptops or servers in your company, and provide a complete end-to-end asset management view. There will also be enhancements around [business intelligence] and business activity monitoring."

Company officials say Oslo will be discussed further during Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October. "We will talk about linking composite applications you build with Oslo to the existing services you may have already built using BizTalk," Kawasaki says.

In essence, Microsoft plans for now not to isolate current BizTalk users, which would have been the case with a wholesale move to Oslo.

"Our commitment is you can use BizTalk today with R2 and 2009 with our Oslo modeling technology without needs to upgrade," Kawasaki says.

BizTalk 2009 will deliver support for platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Microsoft also has improved failover clustering so BizTalk can be deployed in multi-site clusters that eliminate the need for virtual LANs.

Source:- computerworld.co.nz/

Taking Open Source to the Limit: Geeks On The Way Case Study

2008-11-03T16:59:00.003+05:30

The Company:
Geeks On The Way provides computer services and technical support to customers across western Canada, and it was named as one of the fastest growing companies in Canada by Profit magazine.

The Challenge:
Geeks On The Way handles hundreds of client calls per day. So, when the company looked to meet its growing demand for its services with a CRM system, not just any system would do. With such strong technology expertise, the company knew it wanted a system that it could customize to fit its unique business process as well as grow with the system.

Additionally, the CRM system would need to fully automate its existing business process from end-to-end.
"We had already outgrown two previous customer management systems," says Geeks On The Way CEO John Leishman. "So, we needed a flexible system that could grow with our business and really scale."

The Solution:
Geeks On The Way was attracted to SugarCRM for various reasons. Since the company had already built out a telephony system on top of an open source phone system, called Asterisk, Geeks On The Way figured that it should look toward open source CRM for its client management needs. "SugarCRM simply had the largest following, the most downloads and provided the most security from a longevity of product development standpoint," Leishman notes, adding that his company felt that the standards-based design and open architecture of SugarCRM would complement the Asterisk implementation well.

The first task for Geeks On The Way after deploying SugarCRM was to integrate it with its Asterisk system, the popular open source telephony package.

Geeks On The Way also integrated Sugar with some back end databases to create efficiencies inside its service delivery model and customized the Meetings module to integrate a system that analyzes the service calls slated for the day.

The Results:
SugarCRM allowed Geeks On The Way to perform deep integrations at the data and application level, according to Leishman. With the integrated system, callers are recognized by their phone number or other identifiers. If a new client is calling, a "new contact screen" pops up to the agent and a tight integration with an external database of address and postal information populates most of the new contact record. This allows agents to process existing customers quickly, and also spend less time adding new customers in to the system. And since customers are well tracked using unique identification numbers, there is less duplication of customer records.

A deep integration to the accounting system also provided strong returns for Geeks On The Way. Since so much activity and data is tracked and captured in Sugar, Geeks On The Way can simply run that data into its accounting system and more efficiently compensate its employees, which range from phone agents to contractors to field technicians. "Accounting used to take us a full 24 hours every pay period," Leishman notes, "But now it takes five minutes with our Sugar integration to our accounting system."

Since it deployed Sugar, the company says it has seen lower marketing costs and improved customer support times. "With SugarCRM, we have reduced call handling times from two to three minutes down to as little as 20 seconds," says Leishman. And the company says simply knowing who an agent is talking to through its integrated system fosters closer relationships with customers and increases satisfaction levels.

Source:- salesandmarketing.com/

SEO long term strategy and lead generation mix

2008-11-03T16:56:00.001+05:30

Is search engine optimization in your long term strategy and lead generation mix?

Any business has two important channels: Production and Marketing, where marketing plays an important role; since many businesses have been cutting off on Production in-house. The business centers all on Marketing.

I know of a boy who used to write on communities and photocopy his articles and distribute them to the people residing near by. Then he wrote more and his write-ups took a form of monthly magazine which people started subscribing. And today it is a well-known magazine in different sectors with millions of readers online. When asked for the success, that boy (and the editor today) said: “Strategic Marketing”.

Today Businesses have Marketing Executives, Marketing Consultants and even big Marketing Departments with 100s of employees working specifically for building up the Company Brand. And today, as we know the Digital is transforming all Media! Websites have become an important tool for Marketing one’s Products and Services. Businesses today – small or big are sure to have a website (or a small online-presence –at least). These websites may vary from 3 to 1000s of pages.

But does your Online Business (or your website) really help you marketing your Company? Does your online presence get you leads enough to survive your business? These are some very important questions and your marketing strategies revolve around answering such questions.

Search engines play a dominant role in getting you more business. Search engine research takes place at least one to two months before the buying/final decision made by your customer and a research says “Organic SEO gets over 70 percent of the clicks”. In Search Engines, position is a factor: with over 60 percent clicking on the top 3 listings and moreover, most users decide which listing to click on in just seconds upon scanning the page.

Hence, it is very important to get your website a prime visibility in the Top SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The most economic and best tool to help your website rise in the organic searches is Search Engine Optimization. Many Businesses go with many strategies and plans like On-Page Optimization of website, Off-page Optimization of website, Link Building, Search Engine Marketing Services, using Social Media to Market Services, etc.

The most important point that lies at the base is Strategy- Strategy of Keywords/phrases, Strategy of the campaigns to be executed - in what substance at what time, Strategy on how to market the services in Social Media, etc.

I have seen Search Engine Optimization working so well with the businesses getting over 1000% increase in their website traffic. I have noted our clients getting rise of over 50% in leads and revenue generation through Search Engine Marketing Services. But this has to be in a very very strategic way as we at Semaphore-software do.

We at Semaphore offer Strategic SEO (Website Optimization) accompanied with Strategic Link-building because where Optimized Content is the King in the SEO Market, Link Building is the queen. A Strategic SEO plan definitely helps a business to rise up in the Search Engines; hence getting more traction, more leads and more business.

Now-days businesses have started understanding the importance of Search Engine Optimization and have SEO as one of the important strategies in their Long Term Marketing Plan. But now arises a million dollar question for you: “Is search engine optimization in your long term strategy and lead generation mix?”

Source:- semaphore-software.com/

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

2008-10-09T19:46:00.000+05:30

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

Manage content and processes

Simplify compliance efforts and keep business information more secure through a comprehensive set of tools to manage and control electronic content. Streamline the everyday business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity by using electronic forms and out-of-the-box workflow processes that users can initiate, track, and participate in through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or Web browsers.

* Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management. Define customized document management policies to control access rights at a per-item level, specify retention period and expiration actions, and track content through document-auditing settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Integration with Information Rights Management helps ensure that proprietary and confidential information is better protected even if it is not connected to a server.
* Centrally store, manage, and access documents across the enterprise. Organizations can store and organize all business documents and content in one central location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information. Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types.
* Simplify Web content management. Provide easy-to-use functionality to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. New functionality enables enterprises to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative site to a portal), or to cost-effectively manage multilingual delivery of content on multiple intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.
* Extend business processes across the organization. Forms Services–driven solutions make it possible to more securely and accurately collect information both inside and outside the organization without coding any custom applications. This information can then be integrated easily into line-of-business systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted to Web services, thus avoiding duplicate effort and costly errors resulting from manual data entry.
* Streamline everyday business activities. Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Organizations can easily modify the out-of-the-box processes or define their own processes using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.

source:- office.microsoft.com/

BizTalk Server 2006 on Vista RTM

2008-10-09T19:33:00.001+05:30

I had earlier blogged about my attempts to get BizTalk Server 2006 working on Vista RC1. I recently downloaded and upgraded to Vista RTM and after getting some other things out of the way, I finally found time to try out installing BizTalk Server 2006 on Vista RTM.

Having read in couple of posts about the "Run as Administrator" requirement to run certain software, I decided to run all setup programs and configurations wizards in that mode. Here is how it all went.

With Vista, VS 2005 Team Suite and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition all installed and configured properly, I then started with BizTalk Server 2006 Developer edition setup. During setup BizTalk offers to automatically download and install the pre-requisites from the CAB file. Since in my earlier attempt i had used the XP cab file, I decided to use the auto-download option this time to see what happens. The setup program tried to download some cab file. I waited for about 5 mins, but didn't see any activity happening. It didn't report any error nor did it show any progress update.

Deciding not to wait further, I cancelled the setup and restarted again and this time pointed to my pre-downloaded XP specific cab file. I didn't try the Windows2003 specific cab file, since that is a server platform. To keep things simple, I didn't select EDI Adapter, no portal components and no single sign-on features. I did select Business Rules Engine though. The setup proceeded normally and completed without any errors. During setup, it did show a dialog about VS 2005 compatibility issues on Vista, but I select "run program" option and went ahead.

But this much had happened last time also. Post this, I then started the Configuration wizard (with run as administrator). Again without attempting anything fancy, I selected the basic configuration and provided a local user ID/pwd that I had created earlier (and made part of Administrator group) and went ahead. To my delight the configuration also completed successfully and I started feeling more confident about a successful execution this time.

I ran the BizTalk Server Administration tool and was able to navigate to various items without issues. During my last attempt, when trying to access an adapter I had got WMI error. This time, I was able to access all adapters without any errors. Having disabled user access control (UAC) feature already, I then proceeded to pick a sample from SDK and configure it so that I could test a running application. I picked up CBRSample from \SDK\Samples\Messaging (no particular reason for using this application) and ran the setup.bat file.

If you have been reading my earlier blog, you would know that i had again faced some errors here related to UAC and also WMI. Since I had already disabled UAC, there was no errors for directory creation and the setup.bat file ran successfully. Like setup, I again got a compatibility warning for VS 2005, but again I went ahead with "run program" option. I was almost there. With the application successfully configured and started, I knew that it will work fine this time.

I picked up the sample files provided with the CBRSample and placed them in the IN folder. A small wait (typically required for the receive location to poll again) and the files disappeared. However more wait, but the files never appeared in the output folder. Was something wrong with the setup again !

Via BizTalk Adminstration console, I found out that two service instances in resumable state. So this was still good news. The error stated no active subscription was found and little more investigation showed that the send ports didn't had the filter set. This was pretty simple to resolve and I added the appropriate filter as below. This behavior is also documented in the BizTalk's documentation.

CBRSample.CountryCode == 100 (for US)
and
CBRSample.CountryCode == 200 (for CAN)

I then resumed the suspended services and the messages were picked up by appropriate send ports and the output files appeared in their respective locations. To ensure that all was well, I picked up another sample from SDK - \SDK\Samples\Orchestrations\CallOrchestration and ran setup for this. This again was installed and configured without issues. The sample file from the In folder was picked up and i saw a file in the Out folder as expected.

The only small issue was that this sample didn't create a custom Application in BizTalk and got added to BizTalk Application 1, the default application. I haven't checked all the samples, so not sure which others use or not use the application feature. It would be good if all samples use the new Application feature of BizTalk since it really makes working with the various artifacts related to an application simple.

source:- infosysblogs.com/

The spread of Open Source

2008-10-06T19:21:00.000+05:30

Technologies based on the open source platform are increasing in adoption today. Acceptance of open source has spread in varied areas such as web server, collaboration, messaging and virtualization to name a few. In India too, open source is growing rapidly and there are many enthusiasts who are coming out and embracing the technology. In an interview with CIOL, Santhosh D'Souza, Chief Technologist, Sun Microsystems, India, gives an insight on the growing trends of open source, Sun's involvement to promote open source and the latest offerings it has to offer based on the open source platform.

Excerpts of the interview.

CIOL: Is the attitude towards open source maturing rapidly? If yes, how is it taking place?

Santhosh D'Souza: The attitude towards open source is changing, maturing if you will in two ways. There is in India a rapidly growing enthusiasm to participate in open source communities and contribute to open source projects. There is a recognition that work done in communities is not entirely without compensation: one's professional and technical credentials can be honed and established through participation in open source projects.

Besides, there is increasing adoption of technologies based on open source development. Enterprises began with the desktop where proprietary products used for browsing, reading e-mail, sharing file and print services, etc., are replace by open source equivalents. We now have widespread acceptance of open source derived applications in areas like web server, collaboration, messaging, virtualization, etc.

There is also a gradual change in the notion of how software is paid for. Compensation for the value inherent in an application need not happen at the point of distribution - this is why Sun Microsystems makes available almost our entire software portfolio, free to download and to experiment. The policy allows developers and enterprises to try out thesoftware or build solutions on top of it. When the software is actually deployed in an environment that makes/saves money for the deployer, he/she will want the software to be supported, enhanced, fixed when problems crop up and so on. That is when Sun Microsystems will derive revenue from the use of the software.

CIOL: "Sun has made a huge commitment to open source software, contributing billions of dollars in developer time, sponsorships and donations, as well as releasing more code under open source licenses than any other organization in the public or private sector." Can you justify this statement?

D'Souza: In addition to participating in and leveraging many industry-wide open source projects, Sun has, uniquely if I might say so, opened fundamental software, hardware and storage technologies to free and open source communities. We believe this era to be that of the Participation Age, with unprecedented global communities contributing to developments around network computing. Our philosophy is therefore to build products through the preferred means of co-production. We believe that volume drives value, and therefore, growing developer communities around our core technologies as well as encouraging our customers to participate in shaping their directions. We continue to deliver products and services derived from these open source projects.

CIOL: Are we seeing acceleration in the application stage due to open source licensing security and maturity?

D'Souza: The momentum around an application, measured in terms of development enthusiasm and quantum of deployment, is not only determined by it's functionality but also how secure an enterprise and individuals view it to be. Indemnification and Intellectual Property protection are important criteria for enterprises that evaluate open source-based products. The maturity of an OSI approved license can largely be judged by how effectively it protects the rights of the user of products based on that license.

CIOL: What is the trend of the Industry today?

D'Souza: Industries in general have been far more receptive to Open Source than expected. We have technologies like Java, MySQL, VirtualBox, Grid Engine, Open Office and NetBeans showing up in the most unlikely of IT environments as well as in established enterprises. While academia, government and scientific establishments are natural stomping grounds, several financial services, telecommunication, energy and pharmaceutical giants are showing enormous interest in deploying open source derived infrastructure.

CIOL: Is Linux becoming a dominant super side platform out there along with other platforms such as MS Windows?

D'Souza: While the Linux kernel is one of the most successful open source projects on the planet and a great example of how a community can nurture long term participative development, it is commercial distributions based on the project that are actually installed on systems : most enterprises will never install the Linux kernel on their production systems. The distinction is important because it underlines the continued need for commercial suppliers. A few Linux distributions are certainly viable Operating Systems on x86 platforms for several horizontally scaled and some vertically scaled workloads. These distros compete with Solaris, an OS so feature-rich and cost effective that Marc Andressen (of Netscape and Ning fame) famously described Solaris as a better Linux than Linux itself.

A little known fact is that Sun Microsystems is the largest contributor of source code to common GNU/Linux distributions, and is very active in several communities around GNU/Linux. Most of our software portfolio is also available on popular Linux distros, and we certify our x86 platforms for them too. Even our enormously popular UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2 plus systems, are certified and work with Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distro.

CIOL: Can you give a little detail on the Sun xVM virtualization portfolio?

D'Souza: Sun xVM folds in various virtualization technologies and virtual/physical instance management into an open source based, integrated family of technologies.

The Sun xVM portfolio, a compelling set of internet scale virtualization solutions, provides a new level of choice for companies looking to simplify their IT infrastructure. Sun has combined a unique set of products and technologies to effectively manage both the physical and virtual infrastructure and enable virtualization of everything from the desktop to large-scale datacenters.

The complete xVM products and technologies include:

xVM Server 1.0: a pre-configured hypervisor for heterogeneous workload consolidation.

xVM Ops Center 2.0: a single console management for both physical and virtual environments.
Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): the only desktop solution that offers a choice of Windows, Linux and Solaris.

xVM VirtualBox 2.0: VirtualBox is the open and free hypervisor that supports all major operating systems, allowing users a way to run multiple operating systems on the same screen at the same time.

CIOL: What is Sun's role on the Software Freedom Day event?

D'Souza: Sun is one of the sponsors of Software Freedom Day, a celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). We are hosting around 150 events worldwide, including over 35 in India to raise awareness of FOSS. Sun employees from over 60 countries are expected to participate in events marking the day.

Sun constituted the Open Source Community Innovation Awards. We will be announcing the winners as part of the celebrations. We also announced a student contest promoting the Open Source MySQL and GlassFish projects.

Source:- ciol.com/

Offshore Outsourcing: What Role Will the Recession Play?

2008-10-06T18:18:00.001+05:30

The ongoing credit crisis is a concern for everyone in nearly every industry—fear of lost jobs, foreclosed homes and bankrupt businesses. But those lost jobs are likely to further bolster the booming offshore outsourcing market—so the experts predicted. (Also read How to Save Your Job During a Recession and 10 Secrets for Searching for a Job During a Recession.)

Fast-forward two months: it's time for them to eat their words. Neither are customers outsourcing more nor is the industry growing any faster. In fact each day service providers only revise their growth estimates in the downward direction.

Some brave analysts are finally coming out with the truth. Days after Wall Street's collapse, vice-president and principal analyst with US research firm Forrester, John McCarthy, said the scale of the crisis had rendered all previous studies including Forrester's own survey, released earlier this month, redundant, and that Indian IT providers should prepare for slower growth and lower profits. "It is naive to say an economic slowdown is good because cost-cutting will lead to higher offshoring. This is no longer a recession, it is fundamental restructuring of financial services that is taking place," says McCarthy.

What the hell happened in these two months?

Multiple factors are at play here—some recent developments and some historic issues that have been building over time.

About 20 percent to 40 percent of the revenues of offshore outsourcing firms are tied to the financial services industry. With its collapse, companies have been forced to look to other vertical markets. In normal circumstances, that should have been enough to offset the revenue erosion. But the problem is, that everyone is in the same boat and those other industries are also impacted by the crisis, fading consumer demand and reduction in spend.

For example, the travel vertical has started seeing a rise in ticket cancellations and refunds, which has led service providers like WNS to greater conservatism on revised guidance. Hexaware stated that delayed decision-making is spreading out from BFSI to travel, and it has now reduced its annual growth estimate from 24 percent to 7 or 9 percent. Sasken is now cautious about telecom handset segment as all the top-five handset customers are seeing a slowdown in sales (a u-turn from Sasken's bullish stand on this segment a couple of months ago).

So, suddenly all players are chasing a smaller market, in which there was little differentiation amongst players anyway, and it will lead to pricing pressure, reduced profitability and less growth.

It will also become difficult to generate new business (unless driven by price), which will result in generic and inefficient players rightfully getting wiped out of the market. Rather than getting upset about it, I think it's an exciting opportunity for service providers to innovate and build their differentiators. Customers, I would say, have never had it so good—they can finally be in the driver's seat.

It's also difficult to accurately quantify the business value of offshore outsourcing. At a theoretical level, it does make sense. At a headcount level, it also makes sense. But at a business outcome level, the real and hidden costs are often ignored and many companies are left thinking "hey wait a minute, I offshored hundreds of my staff...why isn't my profitability increasing?" And despite share of offshoring rising, why haven't we ever seen a reduction in IT spend? That's because offshore outsourcing has so far focused on headcount as the currency, not the business value generated. That is about to, thankfully, come to an end.

The more I think about the full value chain, the more intrigued, and sometimes scared, I get about the full impact. TCS has reduced its annual hiring estimate by about 30 percent, Wipro already reduced headcount in IT services last quarter, Polaris has resorted to just-in-time hiring, Infosys is visiting fewer campuses...what does it mean for the employment market in offshore outsourcing countries? Will wage inflations ease off? Will attritions finally come to manageable levels? Will being skilled come back in fashion compared to just having an IT diploma/degree? We'll have to wait and see...

It is the end of the golden age of offshore outsourcing, but it also heralds a new dawn—the age of truth and rationality. Where offshore outsourcing delivers real, tangible business value, and service providers are focused on making things work for customers in unique and innovative ways.

source:- cio.com/

Opening new doors with Open Source

2008-10-06T16:26:00.001+05:30

From consumer desktop software to enterprise-wide solutions, Open Source presents a significant opportunity for channel players prepared to stake a claim in this new frontier.

If your customers aren’t already asking you about Open Source, they soon will be.

Religious fervour is taking a back seat as Open Source comes of age.

It is also shaking off the “free’’ tag as more people come to appreciate Open Source is free as in ‘’free speech,’’ not as in “free beer’’.

There’s more to Open Source than just the Firefox browser and Linux operating system. There’s now a viable, business-ready Open Source alternative for practically every piece of software available today.

Open Source lets the channel build new business models around enhanced support and services, rather than merely lining the pockets of the proprietary software giants.

It also offers greater control over the underlying stack and allows you to build more tailored solutions to meet clients’ individual needs – thus strengthening the relationship.

The Open Source development model operates mostly under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Often referred to as “copy-left’’ as opposed to copyright, software covered by the GNU GPL is available free of charge to the general public.

Developers have access to the complete source code, making it easier to build customised solutions.

If a programmer modifies software covered by the GNU GPL, then those modifications must also be made freely available.

While the underlying code may be “free”, the profit for the channel lies in providing integration, training, support and other services.

In an industry where hardware and even software are becoming commodity items, such services are where the decent margins are to be found.

Although some Open Source applications are designed to run on proprietary foundations such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and SQL Server database, the beauty of using Open Source software is you can build a complete Open Source stack from the bare metal up.

This gives you complete control over your environment, letting you modify any part of the stack to develop a customised solution.

The vast majority of Open Source applications are designed to run on the LAMP stack of Open Source applications – Linux, Apache, MySQL and the PHP scripting language (see breakout).

A wide range of business-grade applications have been developed on top of this Open Source foundation, such as SugarCRM for customer relationship management, Compiere for enterprise resource planning, OrangeHRM for human relations management and Asterisk to replace the traditional PABX.

Middleware also gets a look in, with JBoss offering a Java-based Open Source applications platform.

The stack of Open Source applications allows channel players to expand their offerings whilst weaning themselves and their customers off reliance on the proprietary software giants, said Gartner research vice president Brian Prentice.

“In general, one of the things we see with Open Source is a move away from a software licensing type of structure, towards a service delivery type of structure. This creates opportunities for channel partners to link Open Source into the primary part of their business today, which is service delivery,” Prentice said.

“The question here is what is the value proposition to the end customer? We see that one of the reasons customers like to buy Open Source is it removes critical dependencies that they have on software suppliers.
Most channel partners should be looking to add some form of Open Source to their kit bag.
It’s a combination of being both an opportunity and a risk mitigation.
If I am a channel partner and I can’t accommodate the Open Source requirements of a customer then that may be a problem.
If I am a web developer and I don’t know how to do anything around Ruby or PHP that could be a problem. If I am focused on middleware and I don’t know anything about JBoss, that could be a problem.”

Forewarned is forearmed and, like any technological advancement, channel players need to keep abreast of how Open Source is impacting their market space.

The rise of Open Source is providing the channel with a wide variety of business opportunities, said Red Hat Australia general manager Max McLaren.

Red Hat provides commercial-grade support, service and training for the Red Hat distribution of Linux, as well as JBoss.

“With small to medium businesses, there is a lot of demand for Linux implementation and management,” McLaren said.

“We see lots of opportunities for system integrators and for hosting partners in that space. For the enterprise there is a requirement for organisations to do a reasonable amount of systems integration, especially with third-party applications, and that is where the whole middleware space is providing
a great opportunity for systems integrators.

“In the middleware space with JBoss we are probably a couple of years behind Linux in terms of maturity. The interesting thing is we are not just an application server in the JBoss space, we move right up through the stack into Service Oriented Architecture space so there is a lot of integration opportunity there for business partners.”

Open Source vendors such as Red Hat don’t expect the channel to venture into Open Source territory unassisted.

Red Hat Australia offers a three-tier partnership program.

Red Hat Ready partners gain access to Red Hat’s online portal as well as discounts in areas such as training.

The Advanced Business Partner program features a Red Hat stream and a JBoss stream.

To qualify, channel partners need to commit to a level of business with Red Hat and have a number of skills-certified engineers on staff.

Advanced Business Partners also receive preferential treatment in areas such as sales leads.

Red Hat Australia’s Certified Services Partner program allows channel players to work with Red Hat from a skills transfer perspective in their first engagements, to help them get up and running.

While working with Open Source can offer a range of new business opportunities, it can also be a form of risk mitigation.

Unlike proprietary software foundations, if channel players encounter a bug in the Open Source stack they’re not left at the mercy of one major software vendor, said Shane Owenby, Oracle Asia Pacific’s senior director of Linux and Open Source.

While Oracle’s offerings run on traditional operating systems such as Windows and Solaris, the software giant also offers customers its own Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution – derived from Red Hat Enterprise.

Customers can run Oracle and other applications on Oracle Enterprise Linux, which Oracle supports under its Unbreakable Linux program.

“Traditionally the Oracle channel has not cared about the operating system, but that is starting to change based on the interest my team is seeing all around Asia Pacific. The channel guys see now that we can provide a full stack solution,” Owenby said.

“If you are going to go out there and be the average Joe Blow flogger of software or hardware, you’ve got a thousand people to differentiate yourself from. From what I’ve seen, the partners that have been successful in Open Source have developed an angle. When you’re dealing with the flexibility of Open Source software, you can build on a base such as Oracle Enterprise Linux. You can easily add a special device driver or a special configuration for a file system, whatever it is that your customer needs.”

With Oracle software running on Oracle Enterprise Linux, the channel can now provide, customise and support the entire stack.

They can choose between supporting the software themselves, supporting it with Oracle’s backing or letting Oracle handle the support.

Channel players offering solutions that run on Windows, for example, are reliant on Microsoft’s support to solve the issue, whereas Open Source platforms allows channel players to turn to a number of sources – making them masters of their own destiny.

“While using Unbreakable Linux might broaden support options, one of the other interesting components Oracle offers is something called Premier Back Porting,” Owenby said.

“Imagine you’ve got a six-month project and three months into it you find a bug in the operating system. The normal solution for all Linux distribution is to upgrade to the latest version. Of course, upgrading to the latest version could introduce a whole new set of problems.

“Our Premier Back Porting program says that if you identify a bug, we will back port the fix to the version you’re using – not just to the latest version. It’s a subtle difference but I am talking to customers and they are just champing at the bit for that. It is exactly what they want as they don’t want to take the 30 changes that come with a new version, they just want the one change they know they need.”

Although Open Source projects may offer free access to the underlying code, software license fees generally only account for a small percentage of a major project’s overall costs.

Money not put into a software giants’ pocket can be invested back into the project, said Obol Software CEO Shannon Roy.

Obol Software is the developer of Fivedash, a fully featured, general-purpose Open Source accounting program.

While anyone can download a free copy of Fivedash, Obol Software makes its money through deployment, customisation and support.

“If your customers are not already asking about including an Open Source option in a proposal, then it is going to come in the next six months.

Resellers need to get out there and integrators need to get out there and find out what is available in the Open Source space. They really need to educate themselves because their customers are going to drive it if they don’t,” Roy said.

“In a financial accounting system rollout there are generally two costs.

There is the cost of the software, which is a license fee usually updated yearly. There is big hit at the start and then a yearly hit.

Then there is the set up and customisation, where the software will be modified for your particular usage.

Generally the split of those costs is around about 30/70, with 30 percent for licenses and 70 percent for services.

“Immediately Open Source gives you an advantage because there are no license fees.
Essentially you can take that 30 percent and put it in your back pocket, using it to develop your business in another way.
Spend a bit more money on the customisation part and, at the end of the day, you’ll have a piece of software that is far more attuned to your customer’s particular business model.
Too many businesses change their business to fit in with what their accounting software wants them to do. We feel that is completely wrong-headed.
People should have the freedom to change their accounting software so it does what they need it to do. It is really hard to do that with proprietary software, but that is what Open Source is really about, making the software do what you need it to do.”

Another strength of Open Source technologies is their general adherence to open standards.

Around the world customers are beginning to demand open standards, with government departments in particular mandating open standards as an essential part of any IT project.

Particular attention has been paid to Microsoft’s Office document formats.

While Microsoft’s document formats for Word and Excel have been de facto standards for many years, international concern is growing over such reliance on one vendor.

Many organisations are concerned about data sovereignty, considering it a business risk to lock their intellectual property away in proprietary formats.

Such concerns have seen the rise of OpenOffice, a free Open Source alternative to Microsoft Office comprising of a word processor, spreadsheet and database as well as presentation, vector drawing and mathematical function tools.

OpenOffice has the look and feel of Microsoft Office 2003 and is compatible with its file formats, so staff require little training to make the switch. It is available for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris.

OpenOffice is a spin-off of StarOffice, a German office suite acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

Sun released most of the StarOffice code base in 2000, dubbing the project OpenOffice.

Today Sun stlll sells StarOffice, a corporate version of OpenOffice based on the same code base, plus it also offers paid support for OpenOffice.

While OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft document formats, by default it uses Open Document Format – an open XML-based document format which was adopted as an ISO standard in 2006.

The global backlash against Microsoft proprietary formats has seen OpenOffice build a user base as diverse as the French parliament, the Israeli Ministry of Commerce and the Singapore military.

Massachusetts was the first US state to mandate the use of ODF as the standard format for all state agency documents.

The corporate world has been slower in coming to terms with the concept of open source, said OpenOffice’s Australian marketing person Jonathon Coombes.

Coombes is former secretary of the Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group and he also runs Newcastle-based Cybersite Consulting, specialising in Open Source.

‘’I think OpenOffice is certainly ready for business,’’ Coombes said.

‘’One of the classic arguments against moving to OpenOffice has been the need to retrain staff, but that becomes null and void if you’re considering upgrading to Office 2007. Microsoft has made some fairly substantial changes to the Office 2007 interface, so everyone will need to learn a new interface regardless.’’

To combat the attraction of OpenOffice and the Open Document Format, Microsoft put forward its own Office Open XML as an ISO format.

The format was accepted under controversial circumstances but appeals have been lodged against the decision. Microsoft has announced the next Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack will offer native ODF support, which is expected in early 2009.

Meanwhile native Office Open XML support isn’t expected until the next major release of Microsoft Office, which is several years away.

The advantage of using open standards extends far beyond document formats, said Marc Englaro, general manager of Open Source vendor Fonality.

Fonality is the developer of the business-grade TrixBox Professsional Range IP PABX solution, based on the Asterisk project, as well as the TrixBox Community Edition.

TrixBox’s adherence to open standards lets users choose from a range of certified handsets, rather than lock them in to one vendor, Englaro said.

“Open Source begets open standards. The community which works around Open Source software is more open to interoperability and I’d say that would be a big difference between ourselves and the likes of Cisco, Avaya and others – where everything is very, very proprietary,” he said.

“The choice that TrixBox and Open Source offer means you can select from a range of handsets from at least two different vendors for the TrixBox Professional Range and a dozen different vendors for the Community Edition. That choice means you can shop around and people recognise that choice means competition, both from a cost perspective and also a quality perspective.”

TrixBox Community Edition incorporates the latest cutting-edge features and can be considered TrixBox’s research and development arm.

The best features of Trixbox Community Edition are eventually incorporated into TrixBox Professsional Range to create a stable, business-grade PABX system.

This is a common development model amongst Open Source software developers. Fonality has four employees dedicated to the development of Trixbox Community Edition, along with the wider Open Source community, and this offers TrixBox Professsional Range users a clear view of the product roadmap.

While Open Source is traditionally associated with software, hardware vendors are also leveraging the flexibility of Open Source under the bonnet.

OpenGear designs and manufactures enterprise-grade infrastructure management equipment, built on embedded Linux firmware.

It counts Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade amongst its biggest customers, along with Australian embassies around the world.

The use of Open Source solutions lets OpenGear offer the channel an enhanced level of interoperability and customisation, said CEO Bob Waldie.

“Our catchcry is that we are vendor agnostic and we will connect to anything,” Waldie said.

“We have a Custom Development Kit that we happily give away.

We say to people “here you go, go and extend this and modify this – here are all the tools and utilities you need”.

This then gives channel partners the flexibility to do customisation to meet a client’s needs, rather than just pushing out someone else’s hardware.

“We specialise in managing multi-vendor environments, and we can only do that because we use Open Source tools to bring in a new area of expertise without having to develop it all ourselves. The Open Source community is important because it extends your development team way beyond the scope of your in-house team of geeks.”

Community is the key for channel players looking to explore the world of Open Source, said Gartner’s Brian Prentice.

“To make the most of Open Source you have to get connected into the community,” Prentice said.

“You have to get onto the appropriate discussion boards and blog sites, you have to see what contributions are being made and think about what contributions you are going to make.

“This requires the channel player to reevaluate their position in the greater scheme of things. In the Open Source world they’re becoming a node in a greater network, interconnected with everyone else, whereas in the proprietary world they were a spoke on a wheel and the vendor was the hub. This means in the Open Source world they have to make a commitment to participate in the community. If they are not going to be engaged in the community then their ability to execute effectively and deliver quality service to their customers is going to be hampered.

“Also, any customer who understands the Open Source world is going to question whether a channel player that isn’t participating in the community can really meet their needs. They’re going to ask serious questions about whether they want to engage with somebody who isn’t tapped into the community.”

source:- crn.com.au/

Open Source, Can You Afford Not Considering?

2008-10-03T15:03:00.000+05:30

There is a lot of talk recently about alternatives to Microsoft's desktop applications, see my recent posting “Pursuing An Open Desktop, Why Not!” as well as “P&G Flirts with Google Apps and Scares the Bejesus Out of Microsoft” posted by Tom Wailgum on October 1st, “Fighting Government Waste One Google Application At A Time”, and “Cost Savings Found When Microsoft Outlook Ousted for Gmail at British Construction Firm”.

The Open Office desktop and Google Apps are only the beginning of a readily growing availability of software alternatives. Compiere's ERP and CRM applications, SugarCRM's relationship management application, OpenWorkbench from Computer Associates, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Openbravo ERP and many other can be found on Wikipedia. The point is that many of the most sophisticated enterprise applications are now becoming available through an open source provider.

Why is this important? Let me share a personal experience. It was June and the Oregon Department of Human Services was going to implement the new HIPAA compliant codes for our Medicaid application in January of the coming year. This had a significant impact on our health care partners, since they had to modify their systems in order to be able to submit electronic invoices to the State. If our partners didn't update their systems before January they would have to file paper invoices, which we estimated would increase the States workload by around 60,000 paper invoices per month.

As we investigated the situation, we discovered that a number of different State employees were coordinating communications with various health care providers, there was no central repository of this information and follow up information was being kept on sticky notes. There was a clear need for a relation management application, but with only six months to get this job done there was no time to go through the traditional procurement process to procure and implement potential solutions such as Siebold or SalesForce.com.

One of our top system architects came to our rescue when he discovered SugarCRM's application on the Internet and since it was an open source application he was able to download and install it in a single day. Our customers loved it and since it was an open source application we were able to make some minor modifications (mostly to screen literals) and have it in production within days. We were also able to download contact information from our mainframes and create a comprehensive partner database.

The bottom line was that when we went live with the HIPAA compliant transactions and code sets almost every electronic filler was ready and there was almost no increase in paper invoice volumes. While the cost savings were substantial the speed in which we able to meet everyone's needs was the big payoff.

As a CIO you need to be investigating these open source and other alternative software options. Next posting will discuss what I see as the biggest payoff from the open source development model and that is collaborative development of none strategic applications.

source:- advice.cio.com/

Microsoft SharePoint gets search, file sharing features

2008-10-03T14:59:00.001+05:30

Data capture vendor Captaris and security software developer Epok have developed add-ons to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 that let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.

Captaris, best known for its RightFax software for distributing faxes, recently introduced the TIFF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The iFilter takes an image, scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and then stores it in SharePoint along with all its meta data. The resulting file is then available for discovery by SharePoint’s search engine.

IFilter components are used by Microsoft Indexing Service and other Microsoft Search-based products, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange Full Text Search and SQL Server FTS.

Captaris, which is in the process of being acquired by OpenText, thinks paper-centric industries benefit the most from its TIFF iFilter such as insurance, governments, health care and financial services.

The iFilter supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and works on both 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows OS, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.

The Captaris TIFF iFilter comes in three editions: Standard (for two core systems), Pro (four core systems) and Enterprise (unlimited cores).

Standard is priced starting at $299. Pro starts at $499, and Enterprise pricing will be announced before the end of the year.

SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest growing enterprise software in its history and the company counts 100 million licenses and more than a $1 billion in revenue, according to figures released this summer. The platform also is attracting third-party vendors driven to plug some of the gaps in the platform.

Earlier versions of SharePoint had support for TIFF images, but it was dropped in the 2007 version of SharePoint. Microsoft released a Filter Pack for SharePoint in Dec. 2007, and specifically made apologies for the absence of the TIFF filter in the release.

Experts have also said that SharePoint has gaps in its access control story.

Epok in particular is attacking that need with an update to its cross-organization access management software called Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4. The platform extends user authentication to a company’s partners.

The 2.4 version breaks the restriction that only a user within a SharePoint domain can use Microsoft Office to create, edit, and then save documents directly into SharePoint.

Epok extends that capability to any Office user in any domain as long as they have the needed access rights.

The upgrades also include a reporting system that can show such facts as who has access to a document and when the document expires. And a mouse over feature on user icons shows additional access details and expiration dates.

Epok can automatically enforce those expiration data on a user’s access to certain documents while maintaining the user’s overall access rights.

“SharePoint is creating a control problem and what we see is a huge demand wave for extranet access,” says Nigel Simmons, vice president of product management.

Epok also takes maintenance of permissions for access controls out of the hands of IT and put them in the hands of business users.

In addition, the system can be configured to require users to view and/or acknowledge certain contractual obligations related to data such as non-disclosure agreements.

The Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4 is priced at $25,000 per server.

Source:- networkworld.com/

Microsoft Announces BizTalk Server 2009

2008-10-03T14:37:00.001+05:30

Microsoft renames BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to BizTalk Server 2009. The new release will be available in the first half of 2009 and will feature support for Team Foundation Server (TFS), Visual Studio Team System, and the upcoming “Oslo” modeling platform.

Microsoft announced the renaming of the next version of its BizTalk business process management server as well as detailed what will be in that product and what to expect in future releases.

Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, said Microsoft has renamed what had initially been referred to as BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to BizTalk Server 2009. Microsoft will make the new version of the product available in the first half of 2009, Kawasaki said. Microsoft has released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of BizTalk 2009 to members of its Technology Adoption Program (TAP) members, and the company will deliver a public CTP by the end of the year, he said

Kawasaki also said BizTalk Server 2009 has new features in three core categories: updated platform support, enterprise connectivity, and developer and team productivity. Microsoft also set a roadmap for BizTalk, including plans to deliver releases every two years at most.

Under the developer and team productivity category, BizTalk Server 2009 delivers new Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) support including support for Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS support enables development teams to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild. Microsoft also has made improvements to the Visual Studio based BizTalk project system that enhances debugging support for artifacts such as BizTalk Maps, pipeline components and XLang orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing via Visual Studio Test.

Meanwhile updated platform support includes support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. BizTalk Server 2009 also takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. And the product also features improved failover clustering, Kawasaki said.

Regarding enterprise connectivity, BizTalk Server 2009 has a new Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) 3.0 registry, new line of business adapters for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server, as well as enhanced host systems integration. BizTalk Server 2009 adds a new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) WebSphere MQ channel by providing the transport, data formatter and encoder to integrate directly with WebSphere MQ via WCF and a new WCF Service for Host Applications has been added to expose the traditional Transaction Integrator to .NET Framework developers. In addition, BizTalk Server 2009 includes updated platform support for the most recent versions of CICS, IMS, CICS HTTP transport, DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database, and WebSphere MQ. BizTalk Server 2009 also features enhanced Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and enhanced Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance.

Moreover, BizTalk Server 2009 features enhanced support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Applicability Statement 2 (AS2), updated Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) support, new mobile RFID and device platform management, and new RFID standards support, Microsoft officials said.

Meanwhile, Kawasaki said future releases following BizTalk Server 2009 will address enterprise connectivity, enterprise visibility and support for the latest platform technologies. Future releases will feature developer productivity enhancements such as complex mapping, enhanced B2B support, complex trading partner management, expanded industry standards and schemas and low-latency messaging enhancements and ESB guidance. Future releases also will feature enhanced device support, business intelligence and BAM enhancements and will continue to take advantage of the latest advances in the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Windows Server, Kawasaki said.

In an interview on Microsoft's PressPass site, Oliver Sharp, general manager of Microsoft’s Connected Server team, said, "We’re beginning early planning on BizTalk Server '7' and will have more information to share about the specific scope of that release early next year."

Kawasaki also spoke on BizTalk Server 2009's relationship with Microsoft's yet-to-be-released modeling platform, code named "Oslo." In the PressPass interview, Sharp said: "Many of our BizTalk customers are running mission critical applications; they need choice and flexibility in adopting future technologies such as Oslo; therefore, it’s an important guiding principle to our planning efforts that we preserve our customers existing investments in their BizTalk Server infrastructure. Current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or BizTalk Server 2009 customers will be able to benefit from Oslo by being able to leverage and compose your services into new composite applications. "

Source:- eweek.com/

Magento's iPhone Theme: Mobile Commerce for the Masses?

2008-10-02T14:19:00.000+05:30

Magento Commerce, an open source ecommerce platform, has introduced an Apple iPhone specific theme that is potentially the first step toward leveling the playing field for small online retailers who want to compete in the lucrative and booming mobile ecommerce market.

Mobile eCommerce has massive potential

Mobile ecommerce (often call m-commerce) is coming; 9 million Americans have already made a purchase from a mobile device, and perhaps half of the United States' 250 million odd mobile handset users are willing to make a purchase in the near future, according to a recent study from The Nielsen Company, New York, N.Y. All of those U.S. users plus the billions of consumers in Asia, Africa, and India, where a mobile handset may serve as phone, mobile TV, and primary point of Internet access, make m-commerce very attractive to e-retailers large and small.

But mobile browsing experiences can be frustrating for customers, and developing ecommerce websites that are functional, legible, and compelling for mobile device users has been the realm of moneyed and massive e-retailers like Amazon.com.

The Apple iPhone actually does an excellent job of rendering websites already, but there are still problems. Most online stores are designed to look good on a modern, flat-panel monitor which may be 19 inches in diagonal. While these sites are rendered properly on the iPhone, they take on diminutive dimensions, requiring an iPhone owner to zoom in, zoom out, and scroll in all directions. Bandwidth can also be a problem. iPhones use WiFi connections (802.11n standard), Bluetooth (radio), fast 3G cellular networks, or older and slower cellular networks depending on what sort of connection is available at a given time. Browsing on WiFi or a speedy 3G network might be no problem, but uploading an online store over older cellular networks can be painfully slow.

To address this, Magento developed a special theme or combination of layout, template, and presentation files that are optimized for an iPhone's browser. This theme still offers great looking graphics, full functionality, and the same payment gateways, but in proportions and layouts that make a store attractive and easy to use on an iPhone's palm-sized LCD screen.

Equalizing m-Commerce

Magento's new iPhone theme is an important (if small) step, giving independent e-retailers an easy way to tap m-commerce's amazing potential. Varien, a Los Angeles, Calif.-based ecommerce developer and consultancy, created Magento Commerce and then unleashed the platform, turning it over to a vibrant community of perhaps 400,000 users (store owners and developers), while staying intimately involved in the platform's development and expansion. The new theme makes it easier for iPhone users to browse and shop Magento-powered sites with ease. Basically, Magento utilizes "the iPhone's inherent navigation methods and offer[s] quick catalog browsing, global site search, customer accounts, and a shopping cart with a complete checkout process," Varien said, "The iPhone extension delivers a user experience that supports the iPhone's touch-screen functionality, taking users on a clearly defined path from browsing to purchasing."

The iPhone is just a Drop in the Bucket

Unfortunately, as awesome, cool, and fantastic as the iPhone may or may not be, it represents a very tiny percentage of the total mobile handset universe. By some estimates, leading mobile phone makers Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony-Ericsson, BlackBerry, and the like, build between 700 million and 1 billion new mobile handsets each year. While something like 8 million to 10 million iPhones have sold worldwide based on Steve Jobs 2008 MacWorld keynote speech and estimates for the iPhone 3G. So the new Magento iPhone theme only scratches the m-commerce surface. On the other hand, what e-retailer wouldn't want to reach as many as 10 million or so potential customers all of whom represent the iPhone's decidedly upscale user base.

Using the iPhone Theme to gain a Competitive Advantage.

m-Commerce is here to stay, and retailers who implement a mobile solution like Magento's iPhone extension will gain a competitive advantage over other ecommerce sites that are slower to adopt a mobile-specific platform. And there is still hope that Varien or other ecommerce developers will address the mobile mass market soon.

“We are looking to expand the capabilities of Magento to target additional mobile browsers in the future, but the iPhone, with its smart usability, market share and passionate audience was a natural place to start,” said Chris Marshall, a Varien spokesman.

source:- practicalecommerce.com/

Microsoft Debuts 'Dublin' App Server in .NET 4.0

2008-10-02T13:45:00.002+05:30

Microsoft has announced new application server technology, codenamed “Dublin,” that will surface in Windows Server. The company also announced enhancements to its Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) technology. Microsoft’s Dynamics applications will be first to use the new technology, while independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Amberpoint also have pledged to use the new Microsoft technology that will be unveiled at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in late October.

As part of its release of the .NET Framework 4.0, Microsoft is enhancing its Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation technology as well as delivering new application server capabilities into Windows Server in an offering codenamed "Dublin."

Burley Kawasaki, director of Product Management, Connected Systems Division, said the enhancements were needed because the development of composite applications has become increasingly complex, particularly with the need to build, deploy and manage a variety of Web services. The enhancements to the core .NET technologies include new messaging and REST (Representational State Transfer) capabilities in WCF, new workflow models, seamless integration between WF and WCF to support stateful and conversational services, and a new visual designer, Microsoft officials said. In addition, Kawasaki said “Dublin” will offer greater scalability and easier manageability and provide a standard host for applications that use workflow or communications.

"WCF is the foundation for our service-oriented investments in .NET," Kawasaki said. "We're adding in pre-built templates inside Visual Studio to make it easier to build REST and Atom and POX [Plain Old XML] extensions and we'll be releasing that on Codeplex [Microsoft’s community development site] at the same time as the PDC [Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, which will be in Los Angeles in late October]."

Also at the PDC, Microsoft will deliver CTPs (Community Technology Previews) of the enhanced and new technology for building composite applications: WCF 4.0, WF 4.0 and "Dublin," Kawasaki said.

The WCF REST Starter Kit is an early preview of capabilities that will be shipped with WCF in the .NET Framework 4.0, Microsoft officials said. The Starter Kit provides Visual Studio project and item templates for common RESTful scenarios: REST Singleton Service, REST Collection Service, Atom Feed Service, Atom Publishing Protocol Service and HTTP Plain.

And in addition to the templates, the Starter Kit will include support and guidance around caching, security and error handling in REST servers and early ideas around a REST client as well.

"WCF 4.0 will tighten integration between WCF and WF, with a unified declarative model underneath it with XAML [the Extensible Application Markup Language]," Kawasaki said. "You can now build an entire application in XAML."

Meanwhile, Microsoft has improved the performance and scalability of WF, Kawasaki said.

"Providing a host process for WF applications, as Dublin does, together with the easier-to-use WF 4.0, should go a long way toward making WF a more widely used technology, said David Chappell, principal at Chappell & Associates and a software development expert familiar with Microsoft's plans.

Moreover, Kawasaki said part of Microsoft's goal with the new technology is to preserve customers' investment in skills and training in .NET technologies. The enhancements to the Windows Application Server will simplify the deployment, configuration, management and scalability of composite applications while allowing developers to use their existing skills with Visual Studio, the .NET Framework and Internet Information Services (IIS), Microsoft officials said.

Kawasaki also said "Dublin” will be the first Microsoft server product to deliver support for the company's “Oslo” modeling platform. “Dublin” does not require “Oslo” in order to operate and provide benefits of hosting .NET applications; however, administrators will be able to deploy applications from the “Oslo” repository directly to the “Dublin” application server, the company said. “Dublin” provides model-driven “Oslo” applications with a runtime environment, out of the box.

"Oslo--which now refers only to the modeling technologies--can be used to define WF-based applications that run in Dublin," Chappell said. "All three of these things [WF, WCF and Dublin] can be used together, which is perhaps why Microsoft originally put them all under the 'Oslo' banner. Still, they can be used separately, and so to me, narrowing the 'Oslo' name to refer just to the modeling technologies is a good thing. It makes the independence of these technologies clearer."

And Microsoft's internal teams already have begun using Dublin and the enhanced WCF and WF technologies, Kawasaki said.

Among the first products that have announced plans to support Dublin is Microsoft Dynamics, Kawasaki said. Microsoft has announced that future versions of both the Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM applications will leverage both .NET 4.0 and “Dublin.” In particular, the next version of Microsoft Dynamics AX is being specifically designed to take full advantage of the enhanced capability and scale delivered in Windows Server by the enhanced “Dublin” application server technologies, he said.

Also, Kawasaki said that among third-party ISVs (independent software vendors), line-of-business applications such as Dataract, Eclipsys, Epicor, Red Prairie and Telerik and software infrastructure providers such as Amberpoint, SOA Software, Frends Technology and Global360 have announced plans to leverage the .NET Framework 4.0 and “Dublin” technologies.

source:- eweek.com/

The sweet logic behind SugarCRM’s Tracker feature

2008-10-02T13:39:00.001+05:30

All it took was one new feature to see that SugerCRM has a handle on the future of enterprise business applications.

The company this week launched version 5.1 of its flagship open source customer relationship management system. This includes Tracker, which allows IT managers to review who in a company is actually making use of the product, and what specific features they are using most often. This information can be compiled statistically and presented to senior management so that the strategy, or perhaps the training, surrounding the technology can be fine-tuned.

It’s possible there are many other software platforms which have this kind of capability, but no vendor I know of has really bragged about it. Instead, they invest millions in marketing fancy extras to already-functional products that get ignored. A cynic might suggest this happens on purpose, because by not paying to new features users tend to have difficulty adjusting to system upgrades, which leads to more help desk issues, which leads (in many cases) to additional revenue to the vendor through support services.

If companies really see their employees as “assets,” however, it makes sense to provide the same kind of monitoring that you would to your inventory or the performance of your corporate network. Not only would such information make it easier to evaluate the return on your IT investments, it would possibly provide a useful guide to likely adoption of future applications, whether packaged or custom-built.

Although we’re talking about CRM here, the idea of monitoring usage is really like providing business intelligence about your internal software business. We all have such businesses, whether we are in the banking or grocery sectors. What it may not offer is the necessary analytics. SugerCRM might be able tell you how many salespeople pressed a particular button, but it might be harder to figure out why they bypassed others.

This brings up the question of who should be in charge of looking at this data and acting on it. Although IT would probably be interested, this is an example of where it might make more sense for the business owner of a particular department or process powered by an application – in this case, the director of sales – to take responsibility for studying usage patterns. Of course, in the end, sales people should be spending their time selling, not redesigning software, but only actual users will have the day-to-day understanding of what influences on-the-job behaviours.

We tend to say a software deployment is successful if no one complained about it, and provided it functions as it should. Forgotten features, however, can be as debilitating to achieving business objectives as any bugs. I really hope we’ll start to see more features like SugerCRM Tracker. If you’re not actively tracking, you’re losing track.

source:- blogs.itworldcanada.com/

Does inbound links really helps to come in ranking?

2008-09-26T15:30:00.001+05:30

Link Building is very famous and most important part of SEO, Search Engine optimization process. All web site owners who want to get top their web sites, pays for SEO to come in top ranking on major search engine ranking page. Many more search engine optimization services provider companies have added Directory Submission and Link Exchange process in their SEO Services menu.

Link building and link exchanger is a process which is very famous to get top ranking, here most of website owners are looking for one way link exchange, means get inbound links from other related site, without giving him back links, as some are getting paid links, it’s not as hard as free one way link. But how one way linking is effective is possible for top ranking in search engines? I think all inbound links will not be counted by search engines as back link. Than what is benefits of that link which has not been counted by search engine? Actually I have read many more time on web and specially in forums about one way link or back links from directory submission, but if this is very effective, than why we need to work on other seo activities like forum posting, bookmarking article submission.

source:- semaphore-software.com/

Joomla Content Management System For Your Business

2008-09-26T15:21:00.001+05:30

What is Joomla! ?

Joomla! is an award-winning, web based, Content Management System(CMS) that provides its users with the ability to add, edit and delete content. Content is the meat of a website, everything on the site, from page titles and images to text and placement on the page. It is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the vital data that makes your company run. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site. So what this means to the many non-programmers in the business World, is a freedom. The freedom to modify your website without need of hiring a html developer or web programmer just to update one image or change some text. So what is the catch? well, there really isn't one! Joomla! is open source and is released under the GPL/GNU Licence so that means its free for anyone to use as long as licenses within the code remain intact!

Currently Joomla powers millions of websites Worldwide, from the United Nations and Porsche Brazil to websites for smaller businesses with more modest design budgets. Joomla offers a versatility in how it can be used and who it can be used by. Of course for more complex jobs of modifying design and your own look and feel upholstery cleaning oakland might need to hire a designer, however this task is made easier because Joomla is so popular. To find qualified web designers who have used Joomla in the past, it is very easy, a simple search on one of the many freelance designer-for-hire websites on the Internet. You can even post your individual project and have designers bid on your project and you can make your selection from the bidders.

From my experience most people have no trouble understanding the basics necessary to edit content and pages and given that Joomla has such an active and growing community of more than 40,000 users and developers it is quite easy to find information home furniture cleaning Using the simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new news items, manage staff information, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your website.

From my web design experience I know that with very little configuration, Joomla! does a fantastic job of managing the web content needed to make a business website run. However for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in its ability to be modified with components and modules. There are literally hundreds & hundreds of component addons and plugins that add to the base Joomla website how to clean upholstery framework so that it can be molded into suiting your business processes better. For example, there are extensions to make the website an ecommerce website, to make the website a property management website or a complex download repository.

source:- corsavoo.com/