How To Manage Your Documents Efficiently With SharePoint Development

Every business regardless of industry will have a certain amount of data which needs to be kept protected and easily obtainable at all times. Managing the documents is essential for every firm to run the business activities efficiently. A document management system is required to the same effectively. SharePoint is considered to do the task aptly It's the most commonly used document management system which provides an easy way to manage all the important documents related to business activities. Here, we will discuss the advantages of SharePoint development in document management.

SharePoint is basically a web-based documents control system which facilitates the employees to work collectively and share the resources through a distributed platform. It helps in creating the resources like intranets, extranets, and project portals. Following are the various betterment, SharePoint provides:

• Integration with MS-office: The smartest feature of SharePoint is that it is fully integrated with Microsoft Office suite applications such as MS-Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As a result, it meets up all the industry standard requirements.
  
  

• Effortless Migration: The biggest setback faced by firms or businesses currently is, that the information is stored at different locations in different formats. If remote user has to access the data, they might face some issues such as compatibility, consistency, security etc. Utilizing SharePoint development, we can get rid of such situations. Since SharePoint provides a collaborative platform with all documents in MS office format everyone can easily access these documents with no compatibility issues.
  
  

• Easy Communication: SharePoint allows the employees and other users within the firm to easily communicate with each other. It ensures that employees across the firm can easily access all the important files and folders. It brings more alliance by creating a central platform and employees can work together more successfully.
  
  

• Remote Access: Using SharePoint, Users can remotely access the documents from anywhere. For users, who want to do work from a remote location, SharePoint is nothing less than an endowment. They can simply access the files and folders without being logged into company's intranet.
  
  

• Rapid Access: It is easy to access a SharePoint application via web browser or mobile browser. All just need is an internet connection and you can allow the employees within the organization to access the significant documents, whenever they want. Therefore, SharePoint development is an painless and speedy way to access and share the important information.
  
  

• Secure Platform: By hosting SharePoint application at a secure data center, you can make sure that all the important data such as files and documents are safe and secure. Strictly speaking, SharePoint is completely safe and secure to share the important information over the internet.

Utilizing The Capability Of Social Media Tools

Social media is the new object in business promotion and marketing be it an online business or a basic model. It is preferred because of its numerous valuable features. It not only helps you keep in touch with friends and family but also in creating connections with people across the globe working in the same niche market. To summarize, social media is a swift and easy format to issue information to one's contacts.

When we say social promotion, we involuntarily think of networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media is a large category which includes an array of media tools and networking platforms like Facebook are just one of them. We have debated on some of the social media tools you can employ to spread word about your business and receive more website traffic.

Social Networking Platform

This is the sovereign of all the available social media tools which includes Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. Set up with the initial objective to help people connect with friends and family, it is now being used as an efficient business promotion tool because of its ever-expanding fan base and wide reach. These networking platforms tolerate subscribers to create personal profiles where they can share articles, link and photos. Facebook integrate special features such as Facebook Likes and Shares making it effortless to distribute content to a large network. Facebook fan pages and communities also facilitate people with similar interests and hobbies to connect.

 Social Bookmarking Platform

This is the next most popular method used to boost visitors to a website. Bookmarking sites make possible for internet users to bookmark their favorite websites and can then share these web page links with their contacts. Sites are planned using tags, which are relevant keyword phrases used in describing content. Tags make it trouble-free to search for content. Other members of bookmarking sites can observe recently tagged sites and save pages that interest them. Stumble Upon, Reddit and Del.icio.us are amongst the popular bookmarking sites.

Social Recommendation Sites

Designed on the same strategy as social bookmarking sites, recommendation sites differ slightly in the manner in which one can share content. Digg is one of them. Here registered users can propose and share articles, images, blogs and news stories with trillion other users. Subscribers vote on the shared content. Thus, you're not only sharing content but also getting feedback which is quite important to increasing website traffic for your business.

Social Content Sharing Sites
YouTube, Flickr and Pinterest pertinently define the nature of content sharing sites. Content sharing websites allow subscribers to upload and share different types of content. For YouTube, it is videos whilst at Flickr, it is images and photographs. This information is available for public perusing free of charge. By further incorporating your YouTube channel with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can strengthen Flickr and YouTube Views. The liberty to upload content from a variety of devices including mobile phones and cameras makes it a more realistic option for business promotion.

Micro-Blogging Platforms

Twitter is a micro-blogging site. The unique feature of a micro-blogging site is that subscribers can keep posting in not more than 140 characters. It impels you to create brief and concise messages. Micro blogging sites are quite well-liked with websites viewers because they like better short messages over lengthy articles.

These are just a few of the social media tools available for use. And, given the fast increasing popularity of social media as a promotion tool, additional types will be likely be introduced in the near future. While social media propose great growth potential to a business, one also needs to be careful and stick on to social etiquette so that it proves most advantageous to their business.

Business Advantages of Traditional Software Development

All businesses and IT firms will usually need some form of software during their lifecycle. The types of software utilized by most companies vary from applications that will facilitate better management of key organizational functions - Human Resources Department, Finance and Accounts, Inventory and Stocks to be more precise elements of software that have a key purpose such as Content Management Software for use on company websites. Even though these software applications can be bought "off the shelf", there are many business advantages that can be related with choosing custom software development.

Custom Software Development Is Created Uniquely For You
Developing custom software is a tailored made to determine process, which means that any applications and software programs developed as a result of the process will be uniquely made for your company and its specific needs and requirements. Fundamentally a piece of custom made software is flexible and has the potential to fulfill your specifications meaning that it is easy to use and can be deployed throughout your entire organization. Instead of having to make do with a readymade software program or application, with customized software you can be sure that what you will obtain will be entirely fit for purpose. There are also considerable financial benefits that can be associated with custom made software even though it costing a slight more to purchase than readymade packages. Software applications that have been made for you don't require any license fees, so you can distribute them across your entire organization without requiring paying extra.

Custom Software Developers Will Support Your Company
When creating customer software designed for your company developers will design and develop code it to integrate properly within your firm. The software won't just help you achieve what you need it to achieve, it will be affluent in features and tools that will make it usable by the team who will be working with it. With a piece of custom software almost all the requirements of your business will be well thought-out, and developers will meet these both in the way that they develop the software and the after care that they provide properly. While some training and support is available with readymade software to a certain level, with custom made software your developers will continue to work with and support your company whether that's through training staff members in the use of the software or providing maintenance and technical help to remedy any errors that might crop up in the software.

Customized Software Is Secure And Protected
The readymade software packages available to businesses today are certainly a lot more secure than the ones that have been developed in previous years, nevertheless they don't compare to the security levels of customized software the reason it has been created for your company it will only be usable by personnel in your firm. When you obtain custom software you will be given administrator rights to the software ensuring that you can change and alter user profiles and passwords to be in accord with your own internal data protection policies. Customized software used on the web is also a lot harder to hack than standard readymade software, and you can be sure that a reputable custom software developer will work hard to keep your application or program safe and secure.

Customized Software Is Quite Flexible
Customized software is designed to be adaptable and supple meeting your company's needs and requirements both now and in the future. Even if you need a few special software programs to accomplish organizational tasks, a custom developer will be able to integrate the different processes that you need into a sole usable application. Custom software is also much more probable to be cross-platform suitable, so you can be certain that when your company goes mobile you already have the necessary software that will support it.

Basics of Cross Platform Mobile Application Development

The use of Mobile Apps has been immensely increasing in the recent past. There is a lot of possibility for extension in this field. Nearly all principal software companies are focusing on mobile app development. Conversely, time and money are proving to be a challenge.

Frankly speaking an app built for an Android device will not be attuned with other devices, and the efforts are to be continual so as to make that app compatible with other devices. This impelled to the requirement for cross platform mobile apps. These apps bound the efforts of the developer for creating or testing mobile apps on various platforms. The theme of these tools is very easy, the developer can construct apps using any custom language (java or vb.net or HTML be it any scripting language). One time the design and execution of the app is accomplished, the developers can use an effortless function to generate the same functional app for any mobile platform version of Android, Blackberry, or iOS or any other mobile platform.

Reusability of code, Cost effective development and easy deployment are some of the benefits of using cross-platform networks. There are diverse cross-platform frameworks available. 

Some of the top ones are PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium and Rhodes.

 

1) PhoneGap: PhoneGap is an open source mobile application framework for building such cross-platform mobile applications utilizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The app helps the developer create applications that can run on multiple devices/platforms with the same code base. Apps developed with PhoneGap can interrelate directly with mobile device hardware like GPS, which are unavailable to normal web apps. These apps can be built and deployed like native applications. PhoneGap supports nearly all platforms such as Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Mobile making it the most dominant framework for cross-platform development.

2) Appcelerator Titanium: Appcelerator is known for their innovative product, Titanium, which allows web developers to create mobile applications without knowledge of Cocoa-Touch or Java. Titanium is essentially an API and run-time which allows you to build a web application and deploy it to a mobile device, or run it on the desktop. A Titanium Mobile Web app is intended to be run from a web server. You can effectively run it from a browser as a local file also. The main downside with Appcelerator is that it doesn't have Android Emulator, a virtual mobile device that executes on your computer, which lets the programmers to develop and test Android applications without utilizing a physical device.

3) Rhodes: Rhodes is a Mobile App Development framework from "Rhomobile" that empowers developers to enhance sophisticated mobile apps that could be deployed on all the major mobile platforms like iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android.

Rhodes uses HTML for user interface development. Therefore, instead of having to develop the UI in Objective C, C++, Java, or.NET for each device, one can do it once in HTML and deploy on all the devices. Rhodes is dual-licensed under the GPL and a commercial license. Open-source Developers make their apps by using the GPL version of the framework without any cost. 

To summarize the cross platform mobile development tools are still not considered be solution. Although the majority of these tools are still growing rapidly the mobile platforms are evolving even swifter pace. Major platform vendors are contending against each other to bring loads of functionalities and capabilities to life. You may expect some surprises when testing the same functionality on different platforms/devices. Another significant thing to consider when constructing a new functionality that does not exist in the cross platform may take even more time to its cross platform counterpart. When the application is getting complex and time to bring in new enhancements, you cannot assume it would be breeze anymore.

Even though it is better to build proof of concepts and prototypes using these cross mobile frameworks, we should better estimate the nature of the app, users of the app, performance requirements and ease of maintenance and adapting enhancements.

Why Re-Engineering And Software Testing Are Critical For A Firm?

Testing of software is imperative as a few errors and faults are inevitable. Software developed will be put to testing procedures to look for as many faults as possible to make sure that a standardized product with least number of errors is delivered. The software testing team has majorly a couple of primary responsibilities

1. To recognize the defects and ensure that the software is error free

1. To confirm the software would be able to successfully meet the user's requirements

To sum it up it is the key goals of the testing team are to recognize errors, non-coherent and threats related with the product and communicate the same to the development team so that all the defects discovered are taken care of and a high class product can be delivered to the client.

Testing is not a single time activity. It needs to be carried out over the entire life cycle of the software. There are several reasons for which software would need to be tested again. Any changes big or small like version upgrade, enhancement or module addition, deployment at a new client site and addition in the number of users require the software to be re-tested to make sure that it is bug free.

Why re-engineering is required?

As quoted before as the software keeps on changing there is a need for altering the software applications and products as well as they need to be re-tuned to comply to the changing requirements. As the software firms constantly attempt to meet the customers' demand they also need to make certain that the software applications are often and continuously updated to keep pace with the challenging and competitive business world. In the elementary words re-engineering could be described as renovation. For e.g. If a program is written in an old programming language this would limit its functionalities. Now, if the same program is re-written in a language more relevant in today's time it would increase the functionality. 

Listed are some of the acumen why re-engineering is requisite in an organization

1. Pricing - Old software systems maintenance cost is high

1. Performance Issue - Improved performance of the re-engineered software acts as a huge incentive

1. Operation and flexibility - New and revised software system would be more agile and effortless to use

1. Data storage necessities - As the firm grows the data also grows. Increasing quantity of data create a need for the organization to revamp its existing systems and software

1. Altering technology trends - It is essential for a business to stay in tune with the changing technology trends and update its software accordingly.

Re-engineering or migration can be a modest challenging as the company's information and data can get vulnerable in the process.

The business needs to come up with a solid testing strategy to ensure conformance, completeness and agreement.