All under one umbrella hood, but making most from the Enterprise Collaboration and Document Management, Microsoft has been quite successful in making the SharePoint 2007 as the choice of 17,000 customers all over the world. For those, who actually realized the importance and the need of such a cohesive environment, the next generation platform for SharePoint, is focusing even more on making it a Unified Infrastructure – from Community & Business Collaboration, to Web Content Management, to Enterprise Search.
“Office Suite”, being a personal and close affair for the Information workers, it becomes even better as we see a very tight integration of Microsoft office 2010 products, acting as a client for SharePoint. If the “Ribbon Style” over the web has still not excited you enough, there is a great enhancement from the Core Platform Services to APIs to developer tools. Tight Integration with Visual Studio 2010 which comes as a part of SharePoint tools available out Of the Box is something I am sure the developer community will really cherish.
“LINQ provider for SharePoint Silverlight Webpart, Client Object model for building Rich Internet Applications, REST support, Sandbox solution support, which allows the developers to deploy without being administrators are few to make developers happy. On the other hand, enhancements like Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Designer, Visio Workflow Visualization and Integration, Word Services, Access Services and few more to add to the list.”
Needless to say, those who are thinking to upgrade from previous version to the SharePoint 2010, there is a seamless upgrade path available for all of us. Since the Service Pack 2 – SharePoint 2007, we had a neat utility – Upgrade Checker, which identify issues and can be taken care of. If you have fall in love with SharePoint 2007 user interface and what to still upgrade – use Visual Upgrade, which allows you to use 2010 features.
What’s store for you in the SharePoint 2010 bag:
Developers
• Visual Studio 2010 ships with SharePoint
• LINQ Provider
• Silverlight Webpart
• Business Connectivity Services
Administrators
• Visual upgrade allows 2007 interface to be maintained
• Upgrade Checker
• Backward Compatibility
End Users
• SharePoint Workspace Client
• Ribbon user interface
• Cross-browser capability
• Support for mobile devices
If you think you were in the SharePoint Lifecycle already and want to be part of it in this Generation release, then welcome to SharePoint 2010.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Why choose a CMMI Certified Company as your IT services partner?
The Standish Group just released the summary version of their 2009 CHAOS Report that tracks project failure rates across a broad range of companies and industries. From their press release:
“This year’s results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions” says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, “44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.”
When are companies going to stop wasting billions of dollars on failed projects? The vast majority of this waste is completely avoidable; simply get the right business needs (requirements) understood early in the process.
In tough times, it is all the more necessary not to lose money on project failure. With a CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Certified company, it all starts with the proper requirement gathering and requirement specifications documents, which makes a strong platform to build upon and compare the project progress.
A CMMI certified company has standard processes (defined as per CMMI Guidelines) for all types of projects, and a long experience in following processes. They ensure high quality products within committed schedule and budget. CMMI guidelines help in maintaining consistency of the quality and services.
Non CMMI certified companies can also make good quality commitments but their processes are usually ad hoc and chaotic. The organization usually does not provide a stable environment to support the processes. In spite of this chaos, if organizations often produce products and services that work; however, they frequently exceed their budgets and do not meet their schedules. Also such organizations are characterized by a tendency to over commit, abandonment of processes in a time of crisis, and an inability to repeat their successes.
Lets look at the key benefits of outsourcing to CMMI certified company:
• Higher quality of a product due to constant quality control on each of the development steps
• Lower costs due to a more productive and efficient way of creating a product /providing services
• Better communication between client and development team along with all stakeholders due to established rules and procedures
• Better visibility of the product life cycle and development activities due to better organized documentation
• Higher quality and lower costs due to use of the newest technologies and tools
A CMMI company adopts an institutionalized quality management system, confirmed by an accredited CMMI Certifier, to ensure that they provide quality at any phase of product, service delivery.
Complete client involvement requires applying quality assured methods – including (but not limited to) Proper project planning, requirements traceability, risk management, scientific project management approach (based on historical and current project data collected and analyzed), quality control during the entire project lifecycle (in the form of peer reviews, testing, and work product validation, regular process audits.), Complete visibility to all stakeholders during all phase of the development.
So whenever you or your company is looking for an IT Partner then take their process standardization as the first consideration to qualify.
“This year’s results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions” says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, “44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.”
When are companies going to stop wasting billions of dollars on failed projects? The vast majority of this waste is completely avoidable; simply get the right business needs (requirements) understood early in the process.
In tough times, it is all the more necessary not to lose money on project failure. With a CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Certified company, it all starts with the proper requirement gathering and requirement specifications documents, which makes a strong platform to build upon and compare the project progress.
A CMMI certified company has standard processes (defined as per CMMI Guidelines) for all types of projects, and a long experience in following processes. They ensure high quality products within committed schedule and budget. CMMI guidelines help in maintaining consistency of the quality and services.
Non CMMI certified companies can also make good quality commitments but their processes are usually ad hoc and chaotic. The organization usually does not provide a stable environment to support the processes. In spite of this chaos, if organizations often produce products and services that work; however, they frequently exceed their budgets and do not meet their schedules. Also such organizations are characterized by a tendency to over commit, abandonment of processes in a time of crisis, and an inability to repeat their successes.
Lets look at the key benefits of outsourcing to CMMI certified company:
• Higher quality of a product due to constant quality control on each of the development steps
• Lower costs due to a more productive and efficient way of creating a product /providing services
• Better communication between client and development team along with all stakeholders due to established rules and procedures
• Better visibility of the product life cycle and development activities due to better organized documentation
• Higher quality and lower costs due to use of the newest technologies and tools
A CMMI company adopts an institutionalized quality management system, confirmed by an accredited CMMI Certifier, to ensure that they provide quality at any phase of product, service delivery.
Complete client involvement requires applying quality assured methods – including (but not limited to) Proper project planning, requirements traceability, risk management, scientific project management approach (based on historical and current project data collected and analyzed), quality control during the entire project lifecycle (in the form of peer reviews, testing, and work product validation, regular process audits.), Complete visibility to all stakeholders during all phase of the development.
So whenever you or your company is looking for an IT Partner then take their process standardization as the first consideration to qualify.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Hard Workers or Smart Information Workers
Technologies have evolved, and so did the techniques, to work with tons and tons of information and extract critical, meaningful and useful data out of it using the tools available with the workers. They did the mining manually and presented the data in the desired format. Today CIOs, Product Managers, Quality In charge, Marketing Head, Sales Executive or anyone in the business who in some or the other way responsible for generating either more business or cutting down the cost prefers to know about the “Numbers – Sales Crossed, Clients Met, Products Sold, Revenue Earned or Lost, New Clients etc. Thanks to the competition, that at least people started capturing their day to day happenings (data).
“A Worker, from a leading Health Care Industry, claimed that with the entire arrangement of information flowing around and documents moving with a prescribed and scheduled workflow, Now I can concentrate more on the outcome of the result from the data and not only invest my maximum time in collecting the data. I saved 35% of my time every week now.”
People within the organizations have deployed and got accustomed to their own way of capturing information. Various tools and techniques have been introduced over the years and even a medium to large sized organization land up extracting information from more than 2-3 LOB applications, or sometimes it is just couple of Worksheets and Documents or may be dozen of Emails. So What? At least we have the scattered data – it’s only a matter of collecting it at one place – re organizing it and then making a final presentable report.
The point I am trying to bring here is that we tend to become the hard workers instead of smart workers. We work around the Management Information System (MIS) only instead of making it a Functional and Operational System or Portal. The shortcoming could be clearly seen in the making of a single sharable and interactive platform based system itself.
One of the major reasons I think is the behavioral aspect in adopting new things. An information collector has been using the same format (almost that the column and rows keep changing) over the years and now suddenly if he is asked to enter data in a List Library running over the extranet SharePoint portal – will surely show a reluctance. But the designer and the manager understands that if all the 70 people from different locations enter the data on the portal, the real time information is available to the concerned people immediately and reports can be presented, modified, printed etc.
Most of our efforts while creating a LOB application go in organizing the Database, Designing the Roles & Security and Permissions, writing a file upload, check in-out, mechanism, creating a Document Management system, Generating a Content Management System for our own Website, Exposing our application to the partners – Clients, managing Internal as well as external milestones etc. Fortunately for an Information Worker, it does take very less time to achieve all this mentioned above and do more.
This is possible because the Information Worker has adapted to the new and innovative way of working with Microsoft Office System. For a layman, it won’t be very wrong to state that – you still get to work with your choice of tools like word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, PDF etc but you get all these over the web and now it can be shared very conveniently.
“A Worker, from a leading Health Care Industry, claimed that with the entire arrangement of information flowing around and documents moving with a prescribed and scheduled workflow, Now I can concentrate more on the outcome of the result from the data and not only invest my maximum time in collecting the data. I saved 35% of my time every week now.”
People within the organizations have deployed and got accustomed to their own way of capturing information. Various tools and techniques have been introduced over the years and even a medium to large sized organization land up extracting information from more than 2-3 LOB applications, or sometimes it is just couple of Worksheets and Documents or may be dozen of Emails. So What? At least we have the scattered data – it’s only a matter of collecting it at one place – re organizing it and then making a final presentable report.
The point I am trying to bring here is that we tend to become the hard workers instead of smart workers. We work around the Management Information System (MIS) only instead of making it a Functional and Operational System or Portal. The shortcoming could be clearly seen in the making of a single sharable and interactive platform based system itself.
One of the major reasons I think is the behavioral aspect in adopting new things. An information collector has been using the same format (almost that the column and rows keep changing) over the years and now suddenly if he is asked to enter data in a List Library running over the extranet SharePoint portal – will surely show a reluctance. But the designer and the manager understands that if all the 70 people from different locations enter the data on the portal, the real time information is available to the concerned people immediately and reports can be presented, modified, printed etc.
Most of our efforts while creating a LOB application go in organizing the Database, Designing the Roles & Security and Permissions, writing a file upload, check in-out, mechanism, creating a Document Management system, Generating a Content Management System for our own Website, Exposing our application to the partners – Clients, managing Internal as well as external milestones etc. Fortunately for an Information Worker, it does take very less time to achieve all this mentioned above and do more.
This is possible because the Information Worker has adapted to the new and innovative way of working with Microsoft Office System. For a layman, it won’t be very wrong to state that – you still get to work with your choice of tools like word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, PDF etc but you get all these over the web and now it can be shared very conveniently.
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