As the globalization increases, recent figures show that more than half of the companies practice offshore outsourcing. The benefits of outsourcing is that it lets the company focus more on its core specializations, and the most important area of outsourcing is Information Technology, especially the development of new software. The main reason of this is that Information Technology uses skills and languages that go beyond national and cultural barriers. The potential expenditure in time and money which is spent in developing customized software that is fine tuned to your needs and requirements makes outsourcing the cheapest and best business strategy any company can implement.

But not many businesses understand the benefits of outsourcing. Yes it’s true that outsourcing can save you big bucks but that is not the only benefit of outsourcing. The main benefits of outsourcing are:

1. It reduces overheads and frees resources
2. It minimizes capital expenditure
3. Outsourcing eliminates investment in fixed infrastructure
4. It helps you redirect energy and personnel into the core business
5. It helps you get access to specialized skills
6. Reduce need for internal commitment of specialists
7. Not only you can save on manpower but you also save on training costs
8. It helps improve speed and service
9. Provide the best quality services, products and people
10. It helps you acquire access to best practices and proven methodologies
11. By reducing the risk of technological obsolescence it keeps your business up to date
12. It increases efficiency by centralizing functions
13. It reduces the overall management burden while retaining control of strategic decision making.

OutSourcing, Software, technology

When you plan to but a software solution for your organization you have two choices.

1)      Off-the shelf software

2)      Customized software

Off the shelf software solutions are generic software and they are run by millions of users while custom made software are developed especially made for your organization. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s look at the facts which can help you make a good decision:

Price

Off-the-shelf software solutions generally cost less than custom made software. The cost of development of off-the-shelf software is distributed over a number of buyers while the price of customized solutions is bore by you alone.

Generic Build

Off-the shelf software are made to be used by millions of users, thus various factors like performance, security, flexibility have to be leveled out. A standard design and a pre-defined framework is put forward and the software solution is built on that. This standardized software may not be best choice for someone who is looking for something extra as they might not fulfill all your requirements. On the other hand custom software development can be fine tuned to suit your specific need whether it be better performance or flexibility or security.

Updates

Off-the-shelf software needs you to pay for updates and the interval in which these updates are released could be very long making you use obsolete product for long which might have negative repercussion on your business while Custom made software solutions have updates done on requirement and budget.

Software

The benchmark of a good programmer, regardless of what language they work with, is their ability to apply well-known and accepted design techniques to any given situation. Design Patterns are generally recognized as an excellent set of tried-and-true solutions to common problems that developers face every day.

Design patterns are nothing more than streamlined solutions to common problems. In fact, design patterns are not really about code at all—they simply provide guidelines to developers so that they can translate it into code for any given specific language. Even though they can be implemented using nothing more than procedural code, design patterns are best illustrated using OOP (object oriented programming). They are represented as relationships between classes and objects with defined responsibilities that act together to give a solution.

The designing pattern can be divided into five types:

1. The singleton pattern
2. The factory patter
3. The registry pattern
4. The model-view controller pattern
5. The active record pattern

Design patterns help speed up the development process by providing a clear development strategy. Software designing requires issues to be considered which are visible until later phase of development and using design pattern not only helps prevent issues that cause major problem in later phase of development, they also improve code readability for people who are familiar with the pattern.

Software, technology

A Web application that you can run in any browser and an iPhone/iPod touch application are made up of same components— HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX. The main components may be same but the final products are not identical. There are four approaches to develop an application/website for iPhone and iPod touch:

1) Websites/Applications which are fully compatible with iPhone: The first approach is to develop a Web site/application that is “iPhone– friendly” and is fully compatible with the Apple devices. This type of website/application doesn’t use technology that the Apple mobile devices do not support, like Flash and Java. The basic structure of the presentation layer is made to maximize the use of blocks and columns to make it easy for users to navigate and zoom within the site.

2) Website/application which are optimized for Safari: The second approach is to not only provide a basic level of experience for the Mobile Safari users, but also to provide an optimized user experience, by utilizing the enhanced WebKit CSS properties supported by Safari.

3) Dedicated iPhone Website/application: The third level of application provides a Web site tailored to the viewport dimensions of the iPhone and iPod touch and provides a strong Web browsing experience. These applications/websites never emulate the Apple UI design and are mainly stripped down version of the main application.

4) Native iPhone/iPod touch application: These Web applications are designed exclusively for iPhone and iPod touch and closely emulate the UI design of native applications.  The design goal is to minimize user awareness that they are even inside of a browser environment.

apple, mobile

Web Content Management Systems are designed to allow users with little or no web design or programming experience to maintain and update content on a website. They often provide a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor for the content, along with security for granting access to update or delete content, and some kind of workflow management for the content. Workflow management may include entry, approval, and publishing steps so that a user can enter new content.

However, another level of security is required to approve and publish that content. Content is often dated, sometimes with an expiration date, and reusable on other pages of the site. The site itself is usually templated in some manner, separating content from the presentation layer of the CMS, and the coding for the site is hidden from the users. In this setup, a programmer would create the application and provide enhancements to it, a designer would create the look and feel, and content authors and editors would work solely with the content to be displayed.

In many cases, there may be restricted content, viewable by only a specific class of users, and there would be a user management system to handle the creation of users and assignment of permissions. For a Content Management System to be useful, content should be dynamic, and should be displayed to specific users, based on specific queries or navigation choices.

The languages which are suitable for building web2.0 CMS are PHP, ASP. Net, Ruby on Rails, and java.

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Cloud service providers are leveraging virtualization technologies combined with self-service capabilities for computing resources via the Internet. In this environment, virtual machines from multiple organizations are located on the same physical server in order to maximize the efficiency of virtualization.

Enterprises are looking toward cloud computing horizons to expand their infrastructure, but no one can afford the risk of compromising the security of their applications and data. According to survey conducted by IDC (a global premier marketing firm) on 214 IT executives, security came out as the as the greatest challenge of cloud computing. Some of the industry-standard security related topics which one should consider are:

Privileged user access: once a company decides to outsource its resources to cloud servers, they are not only bypassing the physical control but logical and personnel control over their data too because once the data is stored outside company’s infrastructure; administrators who have access to cloud servers can access your data too.

Location of Data: when data is stored in cloud we might not be aware of the location of our own data. Customers run the risk of being governed by country laws depending on the data location.

Regulatory Compliance: The security and integrity of data of clients lie in their own hands, even in the presence of service providers. Security certifications as well as external audits have to be dealt by most service providers.

cloud computing, Software, technology

Software architecture is a description of a software system in terms of its major components, their relationships, and the information that passes among them. It is a plan for building systems that meet well defined requirements that possess the characteristics needed to meet those requirements now and in the future. It is not only concerned with structure and behavior but also with usage, functionality, performance, resilience, reuse, comprehensibility, economic and technological constraints tradeoffs, and aesthetics.

A fundamental purpose of software architecture is to help manage the complexity of software systems and the modifications that may go through in response to changes in business, organizational and technical needs.

Software Architecture encompasses the significant decisions about:

• The organization of a software system.
• The selection of the structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is composed.
• The composition of these elements into progressively larger subsystems.
• The architectural style, the elements and their interfaces, their collaborations, and their composition.

Software, technology

Although the Facebook API is primarily used for retrieving Facebook data, Facebook Markup Language (FBML) is the tool that allows you to fully embed your app within the Facebook environment. FBML allows you to render content onto the Facebook canvas, conditionally display info to different users depending on their permissions, and tap into several Facebook staples, such as Wall, Board, and profile box. In short, FBML is the developer’s primary tool for building applications that deeply integrate into the Facebook Platform.

FBML is a combination of Facebook-specific elements (tags) and a subset of HTML elements that are appropriate for use in the Facebook environment. When the Facebook server processes FBML (which can be sent as a parameter from many of the Facebook API calls), it processes the markup and displays the output in HTML for rendering in a browser.

Facebook Markup Language can be divided into six types:

1)      Facebook place holders: These are used to display Facebook related data.

2)      Conditional programming elements: FBML contains several elements used for adding conditional logic to your code.

3)      Presentation elements: A third group of elements is used for presenting text and media content. The fb:photo element, for example, displays a Facebook photo based on its photo ID.

4)      Facebook widgets: A fourth group of elements is used to insert a familiar Facebook UI element, such as a Wall, a Board, or the Dashboard. Using these elements, one can take advantage of these Facebook UI elements without having to code and format them themselves.

5)      General markup elements: Exposes a wide variety of general functionality in the Facebook Platform that is needed for developing robust applications like the fb:error tag.

6)      HTML subset of elements: FBML also includes a subset of HTML elements that can be used to work inside the Facebook environment

facebook, technology

October 2009 witnessed some mindboggling developments, Nokia suing Apple, for instance. Nokia had filed a lawsuit against Apple on grounds that Apple’s iPhone had ‘infringement’ issues. Apple, in return, attacked Nokia saying that the User Interface of iPhone had been hacked by the Finnish giant.

The United States International Trade Commission (ITC) was approached by Nokia with the allegation that Apple infringes Nokia patents in almost all of its cell phones, music players, and even computers. Seven Nokia patents have been brought to notice to the Trade Commission. All these technologies (patents) are important for Nokia as they pave way for better usability, reduces manufacturing costs, portability, and longer battery life.

Paul Melin, General Manager, Patent Licensing, Nokia supports the lawsuit saying “This action is about protecting the results of such pioneering development. While our litigation in Delaware is about Apple’s attempt to free-ride on the back of Nokia investment in wireless standards, the ITC case filed today is about Apple’s practice of building its business on Nokia’s proprietary innovation.”

It would be rather interesting to see who among the two wins this battle. Meanwhile, let us enjoy the making products of both the entities. How about making a call from a user friendly Nokia phone and listening to some amazing music on an iPOD?

mobile, technology

2009, as predicted my millions of technology experts, were to be the Linux Desktop Year. The year has finally come to an end. And speculations are there that 2010 would be the year of the Linux Desktop.

Linux, by far, has shown that it has the capabilities to rule the desktop world. Desktop environments like GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3 arrived in 2009. Though one cannot claim for the perfection of these, rival Windows is still not desktop perfect.

Cloud Computing and Virtualization are in news today. Marriage of Open Source technologies with Cloud Computing is another aspect that seems to be popular in recent times. Kernel-based virtual machines like KVM have shown amazing progress as far as usability is concerned.

The technology world had predictions and rumors about the possible acquisition of Sun by Oracle. At present, Sun boasts of Java, Solaris, OpenSolaris, MySQL and ZFS under its belt. The question Sun is acquired by Oracle, which technologies would be left out, and which would be employed.

2009 was not a very promising year as far as economic conditions go. Still, it saw the growth of Open Source technologies. Without argument, tech experts would agree that Linux dominates the Open Source world. Add to this the growing usage and popularity of open source, and emphasis on virtualization. With all these, Linux surely claims of having a secure future.

Increased use of Open Source in not only the desktop world, but the entire computing domain would be profitable for everyone. Though I am not much of a person who can foresee the future, I would surely watch out for Oracle acquiring Sun, GNOME 3, and MySQL’s fate.

linux, microsoft