Web Design Firm

19May 2010

Open source development is a buzzword in present market. There are some obvious advantages of opens ource software development over the proprietary software development. In this series we have analyze and depict the advantages in logical manner.

Opensource always favors quality as they do not see the marketing advantages by giving visible features. Generally open source developer is motivated by peer reviews therefore it has approval tendency from their peers. In compare to their counter parts in commercial software open source community attracts very bright and motivated developers, who are frequently unpaid yet very disciplined one. They are not part of corporate culture and do not always targeted higher salaries and wanted to move into management, so they are most experienced one in their respective industries.

Stability

In business environment users never think any changes in software until the job changes or more efficient process is discovered. They need some sort of stability to keep their operations
continue. Opensource provides this stability as there upgrades are optional not compulsory as in case of proprietary software where commercial vendors exerts pressure to frequently upgrade the software. They often use the tactics to move towards the new file format or withdraw the support of bug fixing in older versions. In use of open source, users are saved from isolation and victimization. Users are free to take upgrade or not. No indirect tactics force them to do it. In real world every business is changing and open source has to change to meet the changing requirement of the business so it changes but slowly and in favor of business not the vendors. There are less issues of version compatibility or the file format issues in open source.

Auditability

Commercial vendors often claim their quality, security, freedom from backdoors, adherence to standards and flexibility in case of future changes. But who will audit their claims? Their paid auditors? Since there is no availability of source code these claims remains mere words only. In case of opensource there is complete Audit ability. Any one can conduct rigorous checking over the claims made by developers. In future there would be a standard practice to gauge the claims means complete auditability due to excessive use of open source. You can discover backdoor accounts, security threats, etc. with open source not in proprietary software.

Cost
It is free software means free from Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). We can say that:
· It has possibly zero purchase price
· Opensource potentially no need to account for copies in use, reducing administrative overhead
· There is almost no or reduced need for regular upgrades so lower/nil upgrade fees and lower management costs
· It claims longer uptimes and reduced need for expensive systems administrators
· It has near-zero vulnerability to viruses eliminating need for virus checking, data loss and downtime
· Opensource has lower vulnerability to security breaches and hack attacks reducing systems administration load
· It has ability to prolong life of older hardware while retaining performance
· Better adherence to standards permits competition in the market, reducing vendor lock-in and consequent monopoly pricing
· Availability of source code provides greater continuity and security against o Financial collapse of vendors of key products

Flexibility and Freedom

Open source software offers flexibility for business at architectural level. You can do any changes to make it suitable for your business. There is no vendor lock constraint your attempt to work with other related products. No compatibility issue arises with open source web development. You can do freely internal data exchanges with other products. Open source offer freedom from single vendors you need not to worry if software vendors go out of business or decide to withdraw support of the particular product. You have source code in case of open source so you can mange your affairs by yourself. You can modify your software as per your need there is no need to ask the company to do it. You can allocate any developer to work on your software no body will bother it with open source development.

Support and Accountability

There are many companies which provide the support for a negligible amount in case of opensource and you can hire them for that reasons. However, no body is responsible when your software fails but your can get developer at reasonable cost for that purpose. There are big legal team is present for proprietary software vendors who saves them from legal hurdles and that team never let you to sue the vendors anyway.

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA

18May 2010

Find out why you may want to be using Zen Cart for a shopping cart on your eCommerces hops

Whereas it was once necessary to print and distribute catalogs, staff call centers and hire administrative assistants, it is now possible to mostly automate all of the above. Many e-commerce applications have been developed to help with this process, of which Zen Cart is but one. Here is just some of what makes Zen Cart a great choice for anyone wishing to sell online.

In practical terms, this makes Zen compatible with most inexpensive web hosts. Instead of installing it on your own computer, Zen Cart is hosted remotely and accessed by any modern web browser.

A Zen Cart installation also features a pre-populated basic store so you’ll know how your products will appear once added. This also helps you as a new user to understand how to input your own products into the system, as you have examples from which to begin.

In such an environment, sites that only speak a single language and interface with one shipper simply don’t have the maximum reach necessary to sell to anyone who finds them and Internet marketing NEWS release. To that end, Zen Cart supports multiple languages, payment methods, shipping services, currencies and tax types. Regardless of to whom you wish to sell, Zen Cart empowers you to reach them should you wish to do so.

Furthermore, in today’s digital age, many products may not even be physical but are instead downloaded directly to the customer’s computer. Again, Zen Cart covers all bases, providing an unprecedented degree of flexibility. All of this flexibility and more is available in a free, completely customizable application that can be hosted on any number of inexpensive servers, often for only a few dollars per month.

The barriers preventing anyone from reaching a global audience are now lower than they’ve ever been, and thanks to tools like Zen Cart, that power can be had by anyone with something to offer to the world.

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA

9March 2010

For organizations looking for a WCMS to manage their website, intranet, or portal there are literally over a thousand potential solutions from which to choose. WCMS solutions vary significantly in price, design, functionality, and in many cases, provide far more than just content management capabilities.

A WCMS will typically serve as the foundation of an integrated e-Business or e-Information delivery platform. As such, there is more to consider than just how content is managed. The goal of this whitepaper is to provide industry insight that will help organizations to effectively evaluate and differentiate WCMS solutions and ultimately make better informed decisions.

Identify Business Drivers

The first step is to clearly identify the core business objectives driving your organizations need for a WCMS solution. The key business drivers behind why you need content management will play a significant role in identifying potential WCMS solutions.

Get Help from A Content Management Specialist
Unless your organization has had extensive experience deploying a WCMS, it is highly recommended that you recruit the expertise of a CMS consultant with strong industry related experience. A good CMS consultant will:
 Ensure your stakeholders fully understand the complexities and scope of work involved in deploying a WCMS solution.
 Ensure your organizations business objectives and budget are realistic.
 Evaluate your organizations business needs.
 Evaluate the capabilities of your internal resources.
 Guide your organization in evaluating and then selecting both a WCMS solution and content management integrator that best meets your project need.

Define Your Base System Requirements

In identifying your WCMS solution requirements, you need to include both business requirements and technical requirements. In defining your business requirements, begin by asking the internal stakeholders that will be using the WCMS what they need the system to do. In defining your technical requirements you will need to work with your IT team by making sure that your solution aligns with your organizations IT infrastructure and long-term strategy.

Identify Potential Vendors

Evaluating WCMS Vendors

WCMS vendors vary hugely in price, design and capabilities. We have often said that WCMS products are 30% similar and 70% different. They all have the same bullet-point list of features, but it is how they work that makes the difference between success and failure.

Evaluating WCMS Products

While WCMS evaluation often focuses on a checklist of features and functionality, this rarely leads to the best selection. In most cases, a typically deployed WCMS solution uses less than 30% of the out-of-box features and functionality available in a WCMS solution. Every organization has unique needs and business processes. As a result, our experience quite often has been that out-of-box features and functionality do not match the clients individual requirements, thus, custom solutions have to be developed.

Technology platform

Many organizations have a single coherent IT platform such as Microsoft, Linux or Oracle. If this is the case, it should be specified as a precondition in the evaluation or tender. The same goes for the corporate-wide database standard, and it is reasonable to expect that the WCMS will use this database to store its content repository.

WCMS Usability

WCMS Solution Costs

When evaluating the cost of a WCMS solution, you need to consider all the costs of deploying and maintaining a CMS solution including the following:

*WCMS software licensing
*Additional software costs such as web server and database application licenses (may be included in web hosting services)
*Consulting services
*Implementation services
*Content and data migration
*Training for WCMS administrators, content editors, and developers (if required)
*WCMS hosting services
*Ongoing maintenance and support costs

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA

4January 2010

Internet forum or a massage board is a very popular concept among Internet users and mostly it is a great feature of web 2.0. It is a place where people could communicate on different context based on topics. Therefore now a day’s web site owners tend to integrate online forums to their web site with certain topics which would relate to the website. This is where online forums differ from blog spots, because author could write an article same time any one could comment on it but in forum any one could start a new post and start a new topic, there fore it will not limit to a certain boundary and has the broad knowledge shearing opportunity than a blog spot. Message board, discussion group, bulletin board or web forum are the given names for this concept.

Forums make the site very much live since it is a place of constant updates which makes the traffic volume much stronger. Speaking in which there are plenty of benefits which a website could claim having forum intergraded. Forums developed in PHP has its core capability of easy integration, PHP is a open source scripting language very much capable of embedding with HTML and CMS web applications.

PHPBB

This is very much popular Internet forum developed in PHP and released under GNU GPL. Since it has been written PHP it’s the abbreviation of PHP Bulleting Board.

vBulletin

It is commercial internet forum software developed in PHP and users a MYSQL database.

For more Information consult PHP and MYSQL expert’s contact Wakensys at 1.773.552.1355

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA

29December 2009

Wide range of soft ware development companies’ uses many different project management tools for a many aspects. Any soft ware developing company has its common objectives; it is very important that the company develop the soft ware very efficiently and deliver the product on time. Not only that every soft ware company follows certain rules & step by step approaches for their development. Some PM tools are well design to verify all the stages which project should follow and the quality of outputs respectively.

Project Pier

This is one of the great project management tools written by using PHP and MYSQL and it has been developed to satisfy the entire requirement which I mentioned above by software industries.

Features

• To-do list
• Milestone management
• Messaging system
• Email notifications
• File sharing
• Project Oriented Access Control Management

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is one of the web base project support tool for testing. It is originally designed and use for Mozilla project. It is general purpose tool released under Mozilla public licenses.

Features

• Optimized database structure for increased performance and scalability
• Excellent security to protect confidentiality
• Advanced query tool that can remember your searches.
• Integrated email capabilities
• Editable user profiles and comprehensive email preferences
• Comprehensive permissions system

Manits

Manits also one of the bug tracking web base solutions released under the terms of GPL. Software is written totally in PHP scripting language and uses the backend as MYSQL & postgreSQL databases. And it has in-built and could be integrated with many features, feature list.

Experts in open source Project Management tool Bugzilla & Manits, Contact Wakensys at 1.773.552.1355

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA

21December 2009

E-learning is very much popular concept in every corner of the world of education. Seems to be the concept provides a grater solution for many barriers in today’s most educational systems. Generally speaking this is a process of sharing knowledge to a wide range of students with maximum control over their resources. By means of effective e-learning system not only the student benefits but also the educational provider to a great extend.

Moodle is one of the main E-learning packages with significant user base of more than 50,000, especially design for online base education and most importantly it is open sources and released under the terms of open sources license. Moodle is an acronym for “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment”. It is freely available, easily deploy and maintain. Sine it has been written using PHP and SQL type databases (MYSQL) can be further extending functionality using PHP under the same license. And it can be run on windows, MAC and Linux.

Moodle infrastructure support many types of plug-ins;

• Enrolment methods
• Content filters
• Access levels
• Themes
• Question types
• Activities & games using math & words
• Interactive chat

CMS Course Management system facilitates with very efficient admin panel to administrate the student enrolments, course registrations and manage the educational recourses in a very flexible and controlled manner. Students who have access privileges to the system may sign in from any geographical location, in fact they have the privilege of review their status, update with lessons and new syllabuses, mean while students could interact live with the other students by using chat module with file sharing.

Now days why most of Universities, Collages & institutions are more likely use an e-learning package because of student population. Moodle e-learning package is a full comprehensive solution is not only for the student population but also for the dynamic functional changes which arises in any educational institute.

Experts in open source e-learning software & virtual learning environment Moodle, Contact Wakensys at 1.773.552.1355

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA

16December 2009

Open source has a greater concern in today’s world between both the web users and the web professionals.

Why it is becoming increasingly popular, simply say Open source web designing are freely available for users, because it’s under the terms of General Purpose license (GPL). No need of in depth knowledge of wed designs or the structure of it and anybody has a right to freely use and modify accordingly to their requirement.

Open source content management for E-commerce

World of business has put more emphasis on doing their business activities online by knowing that it has a broad way of reaching customers. E-commerce could be integrated in to most aspects of the business concerning B2B, B2C or B2A.

E-commerce should support the constant change of the business world to come, therefore to compliance with the changing requirement users now a day’s tend to choose very flexible and maintainable web site In fact they looking for open source web developers to develop their web sites.

One of the best open source systems to cater the e-commencing requirement is Joomla (CMS) and it’s a top rated contain management system for dynamic contents with database functionalities & user levels. Since it is written in PHP, (open source language) very much support the frequent modifications and uses MYSQL as the database. Especially it is free released under the terms of GNU GPL.

Flexibility

Doesn’t matter the size of the company whether big or small and how many business functionality it has Joomla handles it extremely well, since it has the flexibility of removing and adding functionalities to its core Joomla. Another important fact that the Joomla has is the flexibility of changing UI design according to the user preference.

Specialization

Most of web businesses tend to use the blogs, content publishing & commenting system to improve the SEO and to get the user feedback which is very effective. For a company as such the Joomla is the solution. It does both the function extremely well. Since blog is one of its core functionalities.

Search engine friendly (SEF)

Joomla supports SEO in a broad way to its context, using frequently changing content and its URL’s. More frequent change content covers wide area of the site itself. Since Joomla support the search engine friendly functionality option, it converts all the dynamic URL’s in to plain text.

Language support

Joomla support wide range of languages, Joomla has its own plug-in which translates languages therefore Joomla support Multilanguage and localization

If you want to develop a Joomla web site for your business contact Wakensys

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA

16December 2009

What is open source? That means in a software for which  source codes  and certain other rights normally reserved for copyrights holders are provided under a software license  that meets the Open source definition . This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user generated content. The term open source software originated as part of a marketing campaign for free software.

In undeveloped countries they are mostly using the open source software’s .There are so many examples for that .If we want to develop a web site there r so many solutions in the open source .PHP is a good example for it .We know PHP is a open source server side programming language when we are using a PHP script file we need a server, no need to worry we have a open source server APACHE, and we need a DATA BASE there are so many open source databases, like MYSQL.

We can use open source CMS software’s for develop a web page easily. There are so many open source CMS software s in the internet we can download and use it.open source operating systems also have like linux.we no need license for that.

This article was posted by Arshad

15December 2009

When it comes to managing employees in any organization, it is of utmost importance that they follow some sort of system or have a proper means of having it organized. For small companies even spreadsheets should do the trick. But when it comes to the larger ones managing it is going to get much more difficult. As information such as personal data, time, work history, attendance, and leave are some of the areas that the organization needs to maintain to the keep the company running smoothly.

There are many Human Resource Management (HRM) tools available in the market, but OrangeHRM is one of the world’s leading open source HRM tools. OrangeHRM is an open source Human Resource Management (HRM) system. It is developed to cater to the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). Some of the components that you would find in OrangeHRM are:-

Administration Module
Applicant Tracking Module
Employee Self Service Module
Leave Management Module
Personal Information Management Module
Reports Module
Time and Attendance Management Module

OrangeHRM is developed on PHP, MySQL and Apache HTTP Server and can be used on Microsoft Windows and Linux operating system.

Contact Wakensys at 773.552.1355 for more information.

This article was posted by Mufthie

15December 2009

Electronic commerce is a very much popular concept in typical business world rather it is a better combination of advance technology and business. Online shopping/Social shopping  are been one of the successful stories derived as a result of eCommerce.

The term online shopping has been known by different names according to their preference such as e-Shop, e-store, Internet shop, web shop, web store, Online store or Virtual store in fact all has the same concept. Online shop is a process that the consumers able to purchase product or services over the Internet. This is one of the easiest methods of purchasing goods and services. Consumers very much prefer to the concept of online shop as result the demand of the technology for the shopping online is on a grater extend.

As a result of technology enhancement now the concept has become more advanced, consumers would able to choose the product according to the activities happening around. Product would be listed according to the demand of users. This is an important feature to consumers as well as the shops owner to discover the product demand. This is more a social shopping concept where as consumer’s able recommend good products in order to others to use. User can create their user groups with trusted members. Some times top members would be invited to check their beta products. Therefore this is very much interactive concept between consumer & the enterprise.

Social shopping system include very much dynamic content, Therefore updating is an ongoing task of but osCommerce products for social shopping will be a great solutions. So if you need help for social shopping system, Contact Wakensys at 773.552.1355 open source experts.

This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA