Deparalyser

Archive for the ‘Internet Software Resources’ Category

Project Management Software

There are so many roles and applications for web based project management software. First of all, you want to settle whether you want project management software that is based online or whether you want to purchase a application that you install on your computer. An Internet application will give you extra flexibility since you will be able to log on from any computer that is connected to the Internet, and you will not have to be in the office to check up on how a project is progressing.

Another thing to consider is who you want to have access to the project management solutions. If everyone involved has access to the software program at some level, it will be easier to keep the information on the program up to date, meaning that you will be more likely to always have the latest information at your fingertips. Each individual can be responsible for updating the software after they have completed pertinent tasks, and you will be able to keep an accurate account of who worked on what part of the project and for how long. This can help you determine how many employee hours various tasks are taking to complete. You will have a lot more free time for management tasks if other people are involved in updating data and you do not have to do it all yourself.

Given today’s economic state, saving money and getting the best from your assets is the most effective way to increase profitability. One concept often omitted, however, is quality employee performance management software and all of its benefits.

Visit and go to this #1 source for writing performance reviews products!

It’s common knowledge that a smart business will adapt its systems to the specialties of each staff member in order to get the best out of them. While this data is highly useful, it’s not always painless to obtain. Simply keeping track of employee evaluation and identifying advancement in their performance rapidly becomes a significant hassle. First, you set up employee performance appraisal systems to assess and keep track of the work carried out by each staff member. Should you be using established approaches, your next step is the manual assessment of all the raw information you will have gathered simply to be able to track further progress and set goals.

Employing performance appraisal software you’ll find that this assessment is done for you and you only need to examine the various analyses and factors to find what an appropriate set of targets for this employee would be. It also makes keeping track of the employee’s advancement much easier. In this way you ease a major demand on your time and probably also find yourself with more precise information. It’s also possible, of course, simply to use the system to keep track of raw data like performance reviews and to analyze these items yourself. Performance appraisal software doesn’t just work for employees. Both clients and suppliers can be analyzed using such software programs, giving you more performance appraisal tools. Identifying which suppliers offer the higher grade and lowest priced products can be a great help.

When it comes to clients performance management software can still provide a clearer picture there telling you just who sells the most of your products, any loss percentage and any similar fallout, and acting as a reminder of any payment issues. Then, you can customize your ordering and move products around to boost your profits while cutting spending. Who wouldn’t take advantage of that? As well as all this, marketing campaigns become much more effective because you’ll have a clearer understanding of your market and the location of your biggest audience. Keeping an eye on both your market and your sources is simple with performance management software. In addition it streamlines the employee evaluation and helps set clearly defined targets for your employees. What can be achieved with this software is truly remarkable!

Outsourcing is when you hire outside professionals or services to take on part of your business workload.You may want to outsource part of your work because you don’t have the room, you need an expert, you have periodic busy periods, or you need more production to get orders out on time etc. You could outsource accounting, secretarial tasks , factory help, computer training, web design etc. Below are ways to use outsoursing to beat your competition.

By outsourcing part of your workload you can save time and spend more time concentrating on beating your competition.

-you won’t have to take time training new employees

-you won’t have to do time consuming tasks like adding on new equipment

-you won’t have to learn a new software program or other equipment

-you won’t have to interview employee candidates

-you won’t have to fill out all the complicated employee paper work like tax forms, scheduling, retirement plans etc.

By outsourcing part of your workload you can save money and spend more money on marketing or advertising to beat your competition.

-you won’t have to buy extra office and other equipment

-you won’t have to buy extra office or work space

-you won’t have spend money on employee costs like; taxes, medical, vacation time, holidays, workers comp., unemployment costs etc. (these may vary by which country you do business)

There are many other ways outsourcing can help you beat your competition. Here are a few more:

-the extra help can help you complete and deliver orders faster

-you could expand your market share by becoming the middleman and offering your subcontractors services or products

-you could end up getting orders from your subcontractors

-it will allow your business to take on extra or large orders

———————————————————
Julia Tang publishes “Smart Online Business Tips”, a fresh
and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people
like you. To find out the best online business opportunities,
to discover hundreds more proven and practical internet
marketing secrets, plus FREE internet marketing products
worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-internet-businesses.com
———————————————————-

When a Software product has to be developed, one of the first tasks in the Project Manager’s schedule book is Requirements Analysis.

What is Requirements Analysis?

Simply put, Requirements Analysis process aims to identify and document the customer’s requirements for a proposed system.
A trained software practitioner called the Requirements Analyst(RA) communicates with knowledgeable user(s) to understand what the requirements are. Most times, the client will have a brief idea of what they need in the proposed system.

The Analyst’s job is to flesh it out, add implied requirements and mandatory or regulatory requirements the client may not be aware of and create a document called the Software Requirements Specification or SRS.

At the end of the process, the SRS turns out to be the blue print of the product. A reference point for the client, the project manager, the tester and the designer. The SRS should ideally restrict itself to specifying “what” the product should do rather than “how” to do it. Never include implementation details such as database structure, architecture and so on.

What should the Software Requirement Specification include?

Ideally, an SRS should include at the least the following information.

Functional requirements

Functional requirements are the “features” a software has. Example Requirements for a shopping cart are Browse Shop, Detailed product view, checkout, View cart, My Account.

The analyst should also identify requirements that the customer has missed or those that are required to support the main features. These requirements are called Implied Requirements. For example, if the client has asked for a Shopping site, the analyst includes requirements for the Shopping cart such as the View cart, Checkout and Delete from Cart.

Non functional requirements

How efficient is the Software product? Is it high performance, is it reliable, how fast is it, does it consume a lot of system resources. These are aspects dealt with in the non functional requirements. Novice programmers generally fail to address these requirements. These requirements directly affect the quality of the product.

Regulatory requirements

In many industries, there may be regulations within which the software product should comply. For example, the tax laws of the country in which an accounting product has to be deployed. Language preferences, password encryption laws, URL standards, email standards. These are some of the regulatory requirements which the client may not be aware of. The analyst has to include these requirements if applicable to the industry or country in which the software product is to be deployed.

External Interface Requirements

Will this product interact with other software or hardwares? The analyst need to list the minimum requirements of these interfaces.

Acceptance criteria

Finally, the acceptance criteria has to be stated. What criteria will confirm that the software is working as per the client specification. Usually, the tested specifications will be the functional and non-functional requirements stated in the SRS.

It is important that all requirements should include the Feature Number. This improves traceability of each feature throughout the project lifecycle. At the design, construction and at the testing phases, the project members know that they are designing, coding or testing Feature No. FE-2 or FE-45.

Prioritizing Requirements

The SRS should include priorities for each feature. Clients may ask for some features to be completed early on. A carefully Prioritized requirements document leads to quicker development of the more important features.

Isn’t the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) a waste of time. Who benefits?

Thats a fallacy. The SRS is useful to everyone who has anything to do with the project. The project manager knows what to plan for. The designers know what to design. The testers know how the product is expected to work. All with the SRS.

Finally, the SRS helps the customer the most. The customer knows what he will get in the end. Generally, development starts only after the client reads and approves the SRS. For example, if the customer wants the Shopping site system to include a Wishlist, he can quickly scan the SRS and ask for the Wishlist to be added if it is already not there. Increased customer input so early on in the project, helps everyone know what is to be developed and what needs to be developed first.

Review Software Requirements

Getting the requirements right in the first place costs 50 to 200 times less than correcting code. It is important to review the SRS before it goes into the next stage.

Typically, a review session will include at least 3-4 experts and will be held for a maximum of 2 hours per session. The attendees will read the doc prior to attending the meeting. A good review will unearth about 60-90% of the defects in the product.

Some software development companies ignore this crucial meeting leading to disastrous consequences. A simple requirements review will result in a Net Schedule savings of 10-30% . And yes, these inspections are about 20 times as effective as testing the product. It comes as no surprise that each hour spent on review avoids an average of 33 hours of maintenance.

Managing requirements change

No project is static. Requirements may change and a good Project Leader should learn to anticipate that. However, each change in requirements costs time and money, especially if crucial changes come up during Coding or testing and worse if it comes in after development.

The Analyst “has” to try to minimise late changes as far as possible. The best way to do that is to show the customer what he is going to get using small prototypes and the SRS. Customers can easily see what they are going to get and ask for changes much before any development has begun. This way the analyst manages to reduce cost for the customer.

In case changes do occur, during or after coding, the Project leader has to ensure that these changes are controlled. All changes in the specification should be approved by the customer and should be reviewed by team members. All team members should get copies of the latest specification.

Most projects generally experience a 25% change in requirements. Good requirements methodlogies will reduce the No. of changes and cost per change. For example, if the RA could reduce number of changes to 10% and the cost of change by a factor of 5 or 10, the combined effect would be really huge.

Can’t you code without requirements analysis.

You can code without any analysis, design or even testing. This is what most programmers do.

Customers, project leaders and coders generally under-estimate the value of good requirements analysis and give it the go by because a software product “can” be developed without proper requirements, design or testing.

But problems start surfacing in several unrelated incidents.

For instance, tester claim they have completed testing and submit the project to the customer. The customer says “Hey this is not what I wanted. I wanted the shopping cart to be stored in case the shopper decides to complete the ordering process after 2 days?” The tester may not even have known of this requirement, the coder wouldn’t have known, the project leader wouldn’t have known. Finally everyone works overtime to develop this new feature. The coder will claim that it is impossible to develop this feature with the existing design. Then the designer has to twist the design to somehow include the new feature. Will it be optimum design? Well who knows? No one has the time to find that out. Eventually after all that confusion, the customer is given the new feature which is poorly designed and executed.

Is requirements analysis important in smaller projects.

In smaller projects, the same person could analyse, design and code. As the project size increases, all that happens is that the roles are taken over by different people. What is small project? Any project over 2 weeks duration should necessarily include the requirements analysis process.

Internet addresses that are tainted by crime and are practically like ghost towns now – totally deserted and are haunted forever. It’s a case of gothic high tech.

A year ago, the internet community witnessed the unplugging of McColo, a web host based in Northern California. For the longest time, the facility controlled a huge part of the spamming operations in the world. McColo’s main ISPs abruptly pulled the plug on them after Security Fix came out with evidence that tied massive amounts of spam and other illicit online activity to the network run by McColo.

Of course, this led to the reduction of spam traffic in cyberspace. But it also meant that a huge part of the virtual real estate that once used by McColo is now eerily quiet – like cyberspace ghost town. Empty domains without hosting services.
More than 3,000 internet addresses are now practically empty and are unable to attract new occupants. It’s as if some sort of toxic sludge has been thrown over the address blocks that no one would dare use them anymore.

This could be true. After all, the online community frowns on networks that harbour spammers as well as on organizations that host malware and other bad things, listing their numeric internet addresses in block lists. A lot of organizations usually configure their email servers to keep away communications coming from addresses on block lists and a heavily blocked network becomes an unattractive prospect to legitimate businesses because there’s no way that they can send email from those addresses and get favourable reception.
To make matters worse, once an address gets onto a block list, it’s next to impossible to get it off on all those lists because of the absence of a central blocking authority. While the space wouldn’t be tainted forever, it will carry the stigma of illicit activity.

Every day millions of new web documents emerge on the Internet, and the amount of web management tools is growing simultaneously. These tools are usually referred to as Content Management Systems, CMS for short. If you have a web site and still do not use any CMS, you will definitely face a choice to buy or to develop an enterprise content management solution in the near future. What would you do if you wanted to develop a CMS, your own software that has a WYSIWYG editor and perfectly meets all your requirements and security standards? Can this task be fulfilled? Which ROI should you expect? You will have to answer all those questions all by yourself. Your chance to success can be increased if you gain an understanding of basics of a web content management system.

There are two models of any Content Management System. For visitors, the CMS displays web site content. Let us call it a site presentation mode. In admin mode a web master or a site administrator can update content and manage structure and templates. Here we speak about the insides of the website, i.e. the web site’s admin mode.

Every page of the site is a web document that has its own address. The web site is a set of such hyperlinked documents. To make the web site user-friendly links to other documents and web services are displayed in various navigation bars and menus according to their logical interconnection. That is how the site structure is created. The document structure presupposes some categories of documents, identical by their logical architecture and presentation.

So, in admin mode the CMS presents the interface with categorized documents and the interface for document structure. The former will contain web document templates determining their logical architecture and presentation. The latter, structure interface, enables to update content and add, edit and delete documents, as well as set related pages. The way your CMS assigns the document structure of your web site is up to you. The simplest and the most common way is to make a hierarchical structure tree. We all saw it in site maps. However, we should keep in mind that the web site may require another language version in the future. Accordingly, the site will lie as the root, and language versions will be its branches.

The document structure interface allows managing web document attributes (name, URI, pointer to template, etc.). An attentive reader shall ask “And what about the document contents?”

As said above, the document template determines document presentation and its architecture. So, the document is not the data. In order to get some data and then put it as content into a web document, the system needs a template. As a result, a next interface for content query can be generated for example, name field, summary field, and WYSIWYG editor for the text body and image upload field.

It is clear that presentation can be done not only in HTML, but XML also. If you use XML in templates, you can manipulate Flash documents and update Flash sites.

This article can’t cover all the questions that can arise during Content Management System’s implementation. When assembling

a programming core for your web solution, you should be certain to think of template pointers syntax and development of other

Internet services and modules. However, XML Sapiens Specification, developed by Red Graphic Systems, gives a detailed explanation how it works. This XML Specification is available in English and Russian at www.XMLSapiens.org. To study the example of a web content management system visit http://sapid.sf.net, SAPID Open Source CMS available under GNU license. You can also use it to create your own web site, all for free.

About The Author

Anastacia Davidenko

If you have a web site and still do not use any CMS, you will definitely face a choice to buy or to develop an enterprise content management solution in the near future. Your chance to success can be increased if you gain an understanding of basics of a web content management system.