Does inbound links really helps to come in ranking?

Link Building is very famous and most important part of SEO, Search Engine optimization process. All web site owners who want to get top their web sites, pays for SEO to come in top ranking on major search engine ranking page. Many more search engine optimization services provider companies have added Directory Submission and Link Exchange process in their SEO Services menu.

Link building and link exchanger is a process which is very famous to get top ranking, here most of website owners are looking for one way link exchange, means get inbound links from other related site, without giving him back links, as some are getting paid links, it’s not as hard as free one way link. But how one way linking is effective is possible for top ranking in search engines? I think all inbound links will not be counted by search engines as back link. Than what is benefits of that link which has not been counted by search engine? Actually I have read many more time on web and specially in forums about one way link or back links from directory submission, but if this is very effective, than why we need to work on other seo activities like forum posting, bookmarking article submission.

source:- semaphore-software.com/

Joomla Content Management System For Your Business

What is Joomla! ?

Joomla! is an award-winning, web based, Content Management System(CMS) that provides its users with the ability to add, edit and delete content. Content is the meat of a website, everything on the site, from page titles and images to text and placement on the page. It is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the vital data that makes your company run. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site. So what this means to the many non-programmers in the business World, is a freedom. The freedom to modify your website without need of hiring a html developer or web programmer just to update one image or change some text. So what is the catch? well, there really isn't one! Joomla! is open source and is released under the GPL/GNU Licence so that means its free for anyone to use as long as licenses within the code remain intact!

Currently Joomla powers millions of websites Worldwide, from the United Nations and Porsche Brazil to websites for smaller businesses with more modest design budgets. Joomla offers a versatility in how it can be used and who it can be used by. Of course for more complex jobs of modifying design and your own look and feel upholstery cleaning oakland might need to hire a designer, however this task is made easier because Joomla is so popular. To find qualified web designers who have used Joomla in the past, it is very easy, a simple search on one of the many freelance designer-for-hire websites on the Internet. You can even post your individual project and have designers bid on your project and you can make your selection from the bidders.

From my experience most people have no trouble understanding the basics necessary to edit content and pages and given that Joomla has such an active and growing community of more than 40,000 users and developers it is quite easy to find information home furniture cleaning Using the simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new news items, manage staff information, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your website.

From my web design experience I know that with very little configuration, Joomla! does a fantastic job of managing the web content needed to make a business website run. However for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in its ability to be modified with components and modules. There are literally hundreds & hundreds of component addons and plugins that add to the base Joomla website how to clean upholstery framework so that it can be molded into suiting your business processes better. For example, there are extensions to make the website an ecommerce website, to make the website a property management website or a complex download repository.

source:- corsavoo.com/

Global Software Product Development Outsource Provider Opens New Development Centers in the US and Latin America

A global software product development services and consultancy provider headquartered in San Diego, California, propelled by strong customer growth has expanded its operations through the addition of three new software development centers. These development centers are located in Quito, Ecuador, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. These sites are in addition to neubloc's existing three development centers in Poland and its headquarters site in San Diego. The new locations are part of the strategy for worldwide development of the company that aims to provide an expanded global presence, ability to handle development in time zones close to the US and the ability to implement "Follow the Sun" development/QA models by combining services in Poland and Latin America. Finally with the opening of the Oklahoma City facility neubloc now has an embedded software development facility that compares favorably to any such center worldwide.

This is just one of the most recent steps the company has undertaken to leverage its exponential growth trend, as neubloc has managed to yearly more than double its growth rate, since the date of its establishment. Monthly revenues are up 157% year over year. The company's representatives quote as reasons for this accelerated growth is its focus on software product development (vs IT development), its complete software product development offering from human interface design, development and test and finally the high quality of engineering combined with low attrition that can be sourced in Poland and Latin America. This combination of quality of development services, low employee turnover (critical in software product development), US based design and management and focus on product development make neubloc unique among hybrid onshore/offshore software services suppliers.

Although on its earliest growth phase, the Latin American centers will triple its current volume of operations by the end of this year. The new development teams comprise years of experience in bringing high-class software products to the market. The center will absorb various software development projects: development and integration of software products, usability design and implementation and finally ongoing test and maintenance.

"By opening our new centers in Latin America and the US, we are reinforcing our commitment to offering a full range of product development skills and services," said Armando Viteri, CEO and President of neubloc "The centers are a key component of our global strategy to drive the local development expertise and delivery of leading edge software products and to provide unmatched support to our customers."

Based on its experience of over 6 years in the international software product development market, neubloc addresses clients from various domains, worldwide, especially in markets like the U.S., Canada, Western Europe and in industries such as: media & entertainment, distribution, financial services, education, storage systems, social networking, etc.

source:- neubloc.com/

Internet Explorer, Firefox got their users back

Few days ago, Google Search Engine launched smart, stylish and faster web browser, Google Chrome, and after launch of chrome, many more users had downloaded browser chrome, and started to work with chrome web browser.

As I can definitely say that any seo expert has not used this web browser, coz Google’s own browser chrome, is not able to install Google Tool bar, and also other social bookmarking buttons are not supported for chrome, as chrome programming is same as Mozilla Firefox, nothing extra just difference of color. Google announced that this fast, safe and stylish browser, as it. It’s faster than IE but still as per online survey and communication with web masters and also discussing on some forums regarding Google Chrome popularity, many more web masters told that they had already uninstall chrome from their system and start using Mozilla Firefox as default web browser.

Source:- semaphore-software.com/

Microsoft's Latest Ad Buy

Microsoft today announced that it is purchasing Rapt, an advertising technology company specializing in sophisticated analytical tools. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Today's is the latest in a frenzied string of acquisitions by Microsoft and other Internet heavyweights looking to expand the reach and technology underlying their online advertising businesses. Most recently, Microsoft purchased YaData, an Israeli company specializing in behavioral targeting technology.

The Rapt buy is about helping well-funded Web publishers manage their advertising efforts with premium analytics and campaign planning features. Microsoft will fold Rapt's technology into its Atlas Publisher Suite (APS). Atlas is one of the brands Microsoft acquired through its purchase of aQuantive.

Consistently, Web publishers say that they want to focus on driving ad sales by improving their content and their users' experience, but that is only a small part of the equation, said Scott Howe, general manager of Microsoft's APS.

"Selling online advertising if you're a publisher is hard, and it's getting more complex as time goes on," Howe said.

Where many publishers need help is in the technical aspects of managing ad sales, such as pricing, forecasting and selling remnant inventory.

Rapt's Yield Advisor product, which Microsoft will begin promoting to publishers as soon as the deal closes, offers predictive tools for sites to plan ad sales around future-looking inventory estimates.

Pricing analytics are designed to help sales teams determine the optimal rates to charge advertisers, aimed at minimizing the amount of unsold inventory.

Microsoft expects the purchase to round out its suite of offerings for publishers.

"As a result of this acquisition, we feel like we have no gaps," Howe told InternetNews.com. "We can partner with the publisher very narrowly or very broadly."

The announcement comes just a day after Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced its first ad product following the close of the DoubleClick acquisition -- also a service for publishers to manage their ad inventories and sell remnant space on their sites.

In their latest ad moves, Microsoft and Google are both courting publishers. The principal difference is that Google's Ad Manager, a free, hosted service, is intended for small companies with marginal sales staffs, while Microsoft's acquisition of Rapt is geared for high-end publishers with large content networks and sales staffs. Among Rapt's clients are The New York Times Company, Fox Interactive Media, Yahoo and Microsoft itself.

source:- internetnews.com/

The sweet logic behind SugarCRM’s Tracker feature

All it took was one new feature to see that SugerCRM has a handle on the future of enterprise business applications.

The company this week launched version 5.1 of its flagship open source customer relationship management system. This includes Tracker, which allows IT managers to review who in a company is actually making use of the product, and what specific features they are using most often. This information can be compiled statistically and presented to senior management so that the strategy, or perhaps the training, surrounding the technology can be fine-tuned.

It’s possible there are many other software platforms which have this kind of capability, but no vendor I know of has really bragged about it. Instead, they invest millions in marketing fancy extras to already-functional products that get ignored. A cynic might suggest this happens on purpose, because by not paying to new features users tend to have difficulty adjusting to system upgrades, which leads to more help desk issues, which leads (in many cases) to additional revenue to the vendor through support services.

If companies really see their employees as “assets,” however, it makes sense to provide the same kind of monitoring that you would to your inventory or the performance of your corporate network. Not only would such information make it easier to evaluate the return on your IT investments, it would possibly provide a useful guide to likely adoption of future applications, whether packaged or custom-built.

Although we’re talking about CRM here, the idea of monitoring usage is really like providing business intelligence about your internal software business. We all have such businesses, whether we are in the banking or grocery sectors. What it may not offer is the necessary analytics. SugerCRM might be able tell you how many salespeople pressed a particular button, but it might be harder to figure out why they bypassed others.

This brings up the question of who should be in charge of looking at this data and acting on it. Although IT would probably be interested, this is an example of where it might make more sense for the business owner of a particular department or process powered by an application – in this case, the director of sales – to take responsibility for studying usage patterns. Of course, in the end, sales people should be spending their time selling, not redesigning software, but only actual users will have the day-to-day understanding of what influences on-the-job behaviours.

We tend to say a software deployment is successful if no one complained about it, and provided it functions as it should. Forgotten features, however, can be as debilitating to achieving business objectives as any bugs. I really hope we’ll start to see more features like SugerCRM Tracker. If you’re not actively tracking, you’re losing track.

source:- blogs.itworldcanada.com/

Partners Support on VMware vCloud Initiative

Attenda
“As ISVs adopt the SaaS model, they are looking to roll out their offerings quickly but with the minimum investment until they have grown their subscriber base,” said Simon Hansford, vice president, products and marketing, Attenda. “Leveraging the VMware vCloud Initiative will allow Attenda new ways of delivering this, whilst allowing our SaaS providers to scale rapidly.
We already find that ISVs adopting SaaS greatly benefit from the increased agility, improved availability and reduce costs that VMware delivers. As a hosting provider leveraging the vCloud initiative, Attenda will be able to offer our ISV clients a far more adaptable resource model that will enable more innovative software products, faster development and the potential for differentiated business models.”

British Telecom
“BT already uses VMware's current ESX technology as a key component of our virtual data centre capability,” said Stefan van Overtveldt, VP Emerging Technology & Innovation, BT Global Services. “It underpins both our internal IT requirements and our external customer journey: Operational Efficiency IT. BT is working closely with VMware on various initiatives to offer our customers across the globe BT's Service Oriented Infrastructure. This next generation of networked IT services will join together the management of network and compute capacity to achieve integrated service levels. BT's Service Oriented Infrastructure strategy and roadmap is aligned with VMware's vCloud initiative.”

CDW
“We currently provide Infrastructure as a Service using VMware,” Clint Harder, sales and product development manager, hosting and managed services, CDW. “Hosted Enterprise Infrastructure is our most in-demand hosted service. The additional of vCloud will let us integrate our Hosted Enterprise Infrastructure into customer VMware infrastructure to provide geographically disperse, high availability application infrastructure. We are very excited about the hosted service opportunities.”

Checkpoint
“The VMware vCloud Initiative will enable customers to have better visibility into how their cloud-based infrastructure is laid out,” said Juliette Sultan, head of global marketing at Check Point Software. “This knowledge will enable them to better deploy security as part of the cloud. As the only company that enables organizations to integrate physical network security and security in the cloud, Check Point sees the opportunity to help customers move into cloud computing securely and more easily.”

Cincinnati Bell
“VMware vCloud has enabled CBTS to build Virtual Data Center our next generation of computing services,” said Dave Heimbach, vice president, product development, Cincinnati Bell. “vCloud enables us to deliver an architecture that brings enterprise class, secure and flexible cloud services, from simple to complex. The vCloud platform allows us to scale our service offerings from providing the virtual infrastructure to run applications to redundant disaster recovery sites.”

Cisco
“Cloud computing is creating new and innovative solutions to meet the demanding computing, storage and IP resource needs of applications,” said Ed Bugnion, vice president and chief technology officer for Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit for Cisco. “Cloud initiatives, like VMware’s vCloud Initiative, supported with the power and intelligence of the Cisco network platform will make it easier for companies to leverage both public and private cloud services, that offer highly secure, cost effective off-load and disaster recovery processing capabilities. This enables rapid deployment of new virtual machines with the appropriate security, network and application policies and more importantly, transfers those policies as virtual machine workloads migrate within private clouds and between clouds.”

DELL
"Dell supports the vCloud Initiative as it makes it easier for enterprises and service providers to implement and provide cloud computing services," said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, of Data Center Solutions at Dell. "Dell helps power the world's clouds by offering customized hardware solutions and management services and we see vCloud as a key to enabling more customers to adopt cloud computing."

Elastra
“The first step, and the first challenge, in building and deploying cloud-based infrastructure has always been the effort involved in consolidating hardware, network, and storage resources,” said Kirill Sheynkman, president & CEO of Elastra Corporation. “The vCloud Initiative from VMware makes these challenges significantly less daunting. Now, ISPs and IT organizations can focus on the architectural challenges of designing application systems instead of scripting their installations and can have a choice of where these systems are easily deployed -- principles that have always been driving Elastra’s technology vision. We look forward to a productive relationship with VMware as our product suite, which already supports VMware ESX deployments, fully embraces and supports the deployment of Elastra Cloud Server designs onto the vCloud platform.”

EMC
“EMC fully supports VMware’s vCloud Initiative as we see virtualization playing a key role in this important and evolving market,” said Jeff Nick, CTO and senior vice president, EMC. “Together with VMware’s technologies, EMC can draw on its broad solutions portfolio and experience in replication, business continuity, virtualization, security and software-as-a-service to enable IT resource mobility, flexibility and end-to-end security in the cloud. These capabilities offer powerful business value for enterprises to provide transparent mobility of information and applications into and out of the cloud back to their own data center when business needs arise.”

EngineYard
"Since 2006, Engine Yard has provided a leading software stack for serving enterprise-level Ruby & Rails applications. By porting our stack to vCloud, we're offering customers a compelling new option for deploying their applications across many different forms of infrastructure."

F5
"vCloud promises a uniquely flexible enabling technology that opens up the door to cloud computing for enterprises of all sizes,” said Erik Giesa, vice president, product management, at F5. “F5 enables vCloud users to transition their application traffic to and from vCloud service providers whenever needed, instantly, seamlessly and without performance impact. F5’s BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) product achieves this by checking the health of the new site before routing any traffic and continuously monitoring performance over time with specific checks for enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Exchange. And, whenever multiple data centers are involved, GTM ensures the best possible performance by directing application traffic from each unique end-user to the most appropriate data center based on geographic proximity, quality of service or business criteria.”

Fujitsu-Siemens
"The VMware vCloud Initiative together with a broad range of our solutions and services enable customers to take advantage of ad hoc services provisioning in a most flexible way and to focus on their business without worrying about capacities or management of these highly complex infrastructures,” said Dr. Joseph Reger, CTO, Fujitsu Siemens Computers “VMware vCloud perfectly fits into our future directions of Dynamic Datacenter.”

Hosting.com
“VMware, through their vCloud Initiative will revolutionize the hosting industry just as the virtual private server did in the early 2000s,” said Darren King, CEO of Hosting.com. “VMware’s Infrastructure allows Hosting.com to provide a secure, scalable utility solution – CloudNine – to provision, support and consult with clients at a level previously unavailable in the hosting industry. VMware and the vCloud ecosystem enable our CloudNine solution to seamlessly provide disaster recovery, shared storage and utility computing to both Enterprise and SMB clients in a cost-effective model.”

INSIGHT
“As the first U.S. VMware aggregator in the enhanced VMware Service Provider Program, Insight can now offer enterprise-ready VMware vCloud services to our hosting clients using VMware market leading technology,” said David Casillo, senior vice president of strategic partnerships & marketing at Insight.

Intel
”For Enterprises IT and Cloud Computing providers who need to bridge the gap between business demands and current capacity, or connect with a broad partner ecosystem to easily integrate cloud computing services into existing IT infrastructures, the Intel VT enabled family of products, combined with VMware VI, is the foundational platform that provides the performance, reliability and scalability that enables the delivery of new virtualization 2.0 based services such as Infrastructure Aggregation, Resource Elasticity, and High Availability,” said Diane Bryant, CIO, Intel Corporation

INX
“As a VSPP partner for many years, INX, Inc. has leveraged not only the VMware Infrastructure virtualization platform to host disaster recovery services, but also offers convenience to customers by delivering virtual appliances on demand,” said Steve Kaplan, vice president, data center virtualization practice, INX, Inc. “We’re excited about how the VMware vCloud Initiative will continue to drive on and off premise application support, while extending our ability to bring new services to our customers.”

Joyent
“At Joyent, we believe the future of cloud computing is enabling customers to maximize their own on-premise clouds while taking advantage of off-premise clouds when needed and as required. This principle of federation is fully supported by Joyent using VMware’s vCloud offerings,” said David Young, founder and CEO of Joyent. “Joyent is now able to offer enterprise customers the future of cloud computing today.”

NEC
“We at NEC welcome the foundation of the VMware vCloud Initiative,” said Takayuki Okada, associate senior vice president, NEC Corporation. “Cloud computing has high expectations as next generation system and service infrastructure. We are sure that the VMware vCloud Initiative will mark a turning point of cloud computing for further disseminating. NEC offers cloud computing environments by delivery of comprehensive products and services from hardware such as servers and storage, middleware and system integration technology for SOA, and service providing infrastructure such as SaaS and PaaS.”

NetApp
"NetApp is a leader in the market today in delivering critical storage capabilities needed to build scalable and cost-effective cloud infrastructures," said Rich Clifton, senior vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Grid Infrastructures Business Units, NetApp. "These include virtual storage volumes, rapid provisioning, deduplication, Ethernet storage fabrics, and scale-out architectures. Additionally, NetApp provides the data protection features to ensure data integrity, recoverability, and isolation within a shared infrastructure. We're excited to partner with VMware in driving the vCloud initiative."

NewLease
"Our Hosting Partners can now offer enterprise-ready cloud services due to VMware,” said Dawn Edmonds, chief operating officer, NewLease Pty Ltd “NewLease is Australia's leading provider of licensing and licensing support for hosters and managed services providers. The addition of VMware to our offerings means that our hosting/managed services partners can deliver highly reliable services to their customers from a centrally managed infrastructure.”

Rackspace
“Rackspace works closely with VMware on many fronts and we believe that VMware’s vCloud framework fits our vision for the next generation of enterprise cloud-based services” said Emil Sayegh, vice president of product group at Rackspace Hosting. “Our current VMware-based offerings will allow corporations to extend the boundaries of their datacenter, and take advantage of external computing resources seamlessly. The combination of Rackspace and VMware can empower users to run their enterprise applications at the location that best meets their business needs.”

Radware
"Our solution for optimizing the virtual environment enables enterprise, service provider, and SMB customers alike to take full advantage of the multiple benefits that VMware’s vCloud offers – specifically, our solution enables transparent migration, without any code change, to an external cloud for mission critical applications as well as SLA assurance for applications deployed in the cloud,” stated Ilan Kinreich, chief operating officer, Radware.

RightScale
"RightScale strongly supports VMware's vCloud Initiative and its capability to provide a common set of cloud infrastructure services from enterprises to public clouds,” said Michael Crandell, CEO, RightScale. “We will continue to work with VMware to leverage vCloud's elastic scalability and dynamic provisioning within RightScale's cloud management platform to deliver scalable, resilient, high-performance cloud applications."

SAVVIS
“Utility computing was the forerunner for what evolved into the enterprise cloud computing solutions we are seeing today,” said Bryan Doerr, CTO, SAVVIS, Inc. SAVVIS pioneered a virtualized IT services delivery platform and now offers VMware-based virtualized services. “As enterprises design new systems they will need to optimize security, performance, and reliability attributes along with the scalability of cloud solutions to meet a range of enterprise requirements.”

Siemens
“Our partnership and leverage of VMware technologies such as vCloud allows us to deliver a global compute platform that offers our internal and external customers access to business services regardless of location or device,” said Michael Kollar, chief architect, Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Inc. “This platform is based on a tiered service model that dynamically scales compute resources to meet customer and business needs.”

SkyTap
“vCloud will give our customers even more control of VMware infrastructure in the Skytap cloud through standard APIs and seamless transition of virtual machines between onsite and cloud environments,” said Scott Roza, CEO, Skytap, Inc. “Utilizing Skytap’s ‘hybrid’ cloud computing model with vCloud has tremendous potential to improve IT’s responsiveness to the business while increasing efficiencies and lowering cost.”

SugarCRM
“SugarCRM is pleased to be working with VMware on its vCloud Initiative,” said Paul Oh, vice president of technology alliances, SugarCRM “The VMware vCloud Initiative advances SugarCRM’s vision of unlocking Customer Relationship Management (CRM) from the chokepoints of proprietary SaaS vendors and moving application services to a shared cloud infrastructure. vCloud is a win for web-based computing, open standards and, most importantly, for customers.”

SunGard
“SunGard is excited to be a part of VMware’s vCloud initiative. New business needs will arise to support end-to-end availability as organizations embrace cloud-based models,” Frank Casey, vice president, product strategy, SunGard Availability Services. “SunGard's expertise and capabilities will enable clients as they leverage cloud solutions while helping to ensure Information Availability.”

Sun Microsystems
"The combination of vCloud and Sun Microsystem's x64 servers creates a powerful, energy-efficient foundation for delivering cloud services," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's x64 systems and software give customers the performance, reliability, flexibility and massive scaling required for a broad range of applications in a cloud computing environment."

Terremark
“Terremark's Enterprise Cloud platform supports the VMware vCloud Initiative to serve customers with the agility, scalability and performance required for their applications and their businesses,” said Randy Rowland, senior vice president of product development, Terremark.

Third Brigade
“Moving ‘into the cloud’ removes physical computing limitations, but it also bypasses the policy protection provided by your network security perimeter,” said Bill McGee, vice president, products and services, Third Brigade. "Third Brigade host intrusion defense enables you to re-establish consistent security policy on internal and external cloud resources. Integrating with VirtualCenter, VMsafe APIs and the new vCloud platform, Third Brigade's cloud-ready security offerings make it possible to apply location-aware security policy to virtual machines."

T-Systems
“As a global provider of converged IT and telecommunication (ICT) services, we at T-Systems continue to leverage industry-leading products and technologies from VMware in order to provide flexible, high-quality utility and cloud computing enterprise application services for our business customers,” said Dr. Gregory O. Smith, vice president technical deal solution design, T-Systems North America.

Verizon Business
“The launch of VMware vCloud will further enable our customers to take advantage of cloud computing,” said Chris Gesell, director of IT Solutions product marketing of Verizon Business. “Through our expansive global IP network, worldwide data center footprint and rich skill set, Verizon Business is uniquely positioned to help customers harness the power of cloud computing, which will make their infrastructure more efficient and agile.”

WorkStream
“Workstream SaaS Talent Management Suite is enabled through the vCloud, providing highly available web services on demand in Workstream's Version 7 SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) across a diverse technology platform,” said Michael Gioja, CIO of WorkStream.
“VMware templates and snapshots enable reliable and consistently provisioned multiple environments for development, client configuration, user acceptance testing and production usage while maintaining the expected R&D advantages such as single code line, multi or single tenant applications.”

source:- vmware.com/

Google Apps tops 1 million businesses

Google is well known as a one-trick pony.

Almost all of the company's revenue comes from its search engine, which last quarter accounted for more than $5 billion. New initiatives, such as the Chrome browser, Google Gears, and Google Friend Connect, are focused on building a mostly open-source Internet operating system out of Google technology in order to funnel more user data and targeted advertising opportunities into the Googleplex financial engine.

It's easy to draw parallels to Microsoft, which gradually built the dominant 20th century operating system and applications platform. Bill Gates and company realized that attracting developers to the Windows platform was key. Google is following that advice with its open-source projects and allowing its mad scientists to try to remake the early 21st century software world and take on Microsoft.

Microsoft has led the way with productivity software, gaining a more than 90 percent share of market with Microsoft Office. Google is hoping to replicate Microsoft's office suite success with Google Apps. It's far less feature-rich than Microsoft Office, but Google Apps Premier edition is far cheaper at $50 per user per year.

For some companies, Google Apps is "good enough," and its cloud-based, collaborative core is an advantage--no Microsoft SharePoint server required. Even with a few enterprise wins, Google Apps is a puny business. According to a Fortune article, Google brought in about $4 million with its Google Apps business in 2007, compared with $12.2 billion for Microsoft Office. Google Apps is a profitable business, according to Matthew Glotzbach, enterprise product management director at Google.

Since early this year Google has been touting 500,000 active business customers, primarily small businesses, using at least one of the Google Apps, and more than 10 million active users. In addition, thousands of universities, with more than one million active users, are using Google Apps, the company said. So far, Google's biggest wins are Valeo, a leading automotive suppliers, with 32,000 users, and the District of Columbia, with 38,000 employees.

However, the vast majority of Google Apps users are not paying customers. The company maintains that "hundreds of thousands" of users are paying the $50 annual fee. The $50 per-user-per-year Premier Edition offers several features lacking in the free Standard Edition, including Postini messaging security, APIs for integrating Google Apps with IT infrastructure, 24x7 support, 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for e-mail, Google Video and 25GB of storage per account.

At this point, Google is underplaying the number of Google Apps business customers. The company has been saying that it is adding 3,000 businesses a day, which amounts to over 1 million per year. The reality today is that Google has more than a million Apps business customers. In addition, the Apps suite continues to fill out, most recently with Google Video.

It took Microsoft years to build a base of applications and developer ecosystem for Windows and Office. Google faces the same uphill climb for Apps and its fledgling Web operating system. The company hopes to ride on the backs of the younger generation that has grown up on the Web and identify with the Google brand. As the Google generation moves into positions of purchase authority within businesses, Google is betting that those decision makers will shun Microsoft, especially as Apps product features improve. Of course, the resilient and relentless Microsoft will respond to Google's challenge when it is more than a $4 million or even $20 million blip.

source:- news.cnet.com/

The Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects. The Apache projects are characterized by a collaborative, consensus based development process, an open and pragmatic software license, and a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field.

We consider ourselves not simply a group of projects sharing a server, but rather a community of developers and users.

Latest News

If you would like to keep up with news and announcements from the foundation and all its projects, you can subscribe to the Apache Announcements List.

ApacheCon US 2008 in New Orleans - Registration Now Open!

ApacheCon US 2008 will be held 3-7 November in New Orleans, Louisiana. The conference schedule has been published and the days for the early bird prices are already counting down. This year's US conference promises to be a special one with a number of new activities and events.

This year ApacheCon features: over a dozen training workshops and over 60 presentations, the new BarCamp Apache, the co-located OFBiz Symposium, Camp Hadoop, the Fast Feather Track, funny Lightning Talks, exiting Keynote sessions, the Hackathon for ASF contributors, and much more.

The Apache Software Foundation welcomes Microsoft as a Platinum Sponsor

At OSCON, Microsoft announced their Sponsorship of The Apache Software Foundation, joining Google and Yahoo! at Platinum level. The generous contributions by Sponsoring organizations and individuals help offset the day-to-day operating expenses to advance the work of The ASF.

The Apache Software Foundation's "Apache Way" continues to gain momentum, recognition and influence on the future of open source technologies

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) – stewards, incubators, and developers of leading Open Source projects – today announced that both the organization's community and its meritocratic process (known as "the Apache Way") continues to gain recognition as one of the most influential, prominent and innovative leaders in Open Source.

A midyear review of the initiatives underway at the all-volunteer Foundation showed that not only does the Apache HTTP Server continue to be the world's most popular Web server software, but numerous ASF Projects lead the way in Open Source technology, and the ASF community is also playing a vital role in championing the collaborative development of consensus-driven, enterprise-grade solutions.

Free Video Streams from ApacheCon Europe 2008

ApacheCon Europe 2008 held in Amsterdam was a great success, and attracted higher than ever attendance figures, with about 500 registered attendees. This figure represents an increase of more than 40% over the previous year, demonstrating the rapidly growing interest in Apache and Open Source software amongst European businesses. If you have not been able to attend ApacheCon Europe, you can still watch videos of all keynotes and select talks online. Keynote sessions and the opening plenary are available free of charge.

source:- apache.org/

WordPress Under Fire for Search-Engine Spamming

One of the most popular Weblog-publishing tools, WordPress, is stirring a controversy over search-engine gaming because it included thousands of articles related to popular search terms on its Web site while largely hiding them from site visitors.

Bloggers and search-engine marketers are accusing the open-source WordPress project of spamming the major search engines, while at the same time being one of the advocates in an effort to combat comment spam in blog postings.

The discovery emerged late Wednesday when the blog Waxy.org revealed that thousands of articles about such popular search terms as asbestos, mortgages and debt consolidation appear on sections of the WordPress.org site while being hidden from visitors to the site's home page.

News of the search-engine gaming technique spread quickly on the Web. As of Wednesday evening, search results to WordPress.org pages with the articles began disappearing from Google's Web index. Yahoo Inc. followed suit Thursday, removing the WordPress.org pages from its index because of what a spokesman confirmed was "noncompliance to our content guidelines."

Google officials declined to comment on why WordPress.org pages had dropped from the company's index, but its Webmaster policies bar techniques that display different content to its crawler than to site visitors.

The article pages were still appearing in results on MSN's search engine as of Thursday afternoon, though WordPress appeared to have removed them from its site. Links to the articles returned a "page not found" error, though a cached version still showed the articles.

WordPress is one of the blog-publishing tools supporting "no follow," an HTML tag that Google, Yahoo and MSN are beginning to recognize in order to ignore hyperlinks included in the comment sections of blogs. Search spammers often insert such links into blogs in an attempt to gain higher search rankings for their sites since search engines consider link popularity in determining a site's ranking.

"This is a big deal given the fact that they're supposed to be combating search spam, and [instead] they are generating it," said Danny Sullivan, a search-engine expert and editor of Search Engine Watch.

The lead developer of WordPress who oversees the Web site, was unavailable for comment on the controversy. According to his blog, he is on vacation. But in a support forum on WordPress.org, he previously acknowledged that the site was hosting articles and Google AdSense ads from a third party in exchange for a flat fee.

AdSense is the name of Google's program for syndicating ads to content partners. In the ad model, advertisers bid on keywords in an auction and pay based on the number of clicks on their sponsored listings.

"I'm not sure if we're going to continue it much longer, but we're committed to this month at least," Mullenweg wrote in a posting dated March 24.

"It was basically an experiment. However, around the beginning of February, donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything."

As an open-source blog-publishing tool, WordPress is supported largely through donations from users and supporters. The project, which celebrated 100,000 downloads of WordPress 1.5 earlier this month, also has begun researching the creation of a foundation to support and operate it.

Jonas Luster, a WordPress user who is leading the foundation effort, said he agrees that Mullenweg made a mistake in using the articles as a way of generating revenue for the project.

"Matt [Mullenweg] was and is trying to do right by the community," Luster said. "Has he chosen the right way? I'm not happy about it either. [But] we're all entitled to make one or two mistakes."

Luster said he expects to discuss the search-engine gaming issue with Mullenweg and to try to rectify any ill will in the WordPress community about it. He also cautioned against calling the technique "spam," saying that while he opposes the attempt to game search engines, it is not the same as filling e-mail inboxes or blog comment sections with unwanted messages.

While the articles on WordPress.org discussed legitimate topics, they appeared to have little to do with blogging or with WordPress as an open-source project, Sullivan said. More troubling, he said, is the fact that the home page of WordPress.org contains links to the articles that are viewable to the search-engine crawler but do not display in modern Web browsers.

"The articles may be perfectly fine, but why are you carrying them?" Sullivan asked of WordPress. "You do not intend for people to find them from the home page, and that's the thing that makes this stand out."

At least in Google, WordPress.org carries a high rank because it is a site widely linked to by bloggers using the tool, search-engine experts said. By showing search crawlers' links to content for terms such as "mortgages," "asbestos" and "debt consolidation," WordPress also can help boost the relevancy of its article pages for those terms.

For instance, in one example viewed by eWEEK.com, WordPress article pages appeared as the 26th and 29th top results in a Yahoo search for "pet insurance" before Yahoo stopped displaying WordPress article results.

Some of the targeted terms also are associated with Google AdSense ads that carry high prices for clicks.

"It is documented that [WordPress.org] was targeting keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes and mortgages," said Barry Schwartz, president of RustyBrick Inc., a Web development and search optimization company. "Those keywords are known to cost up to $100 per click."

Schwartz, who wrote about the issue in his Search Engine Roundtable blog, said he considers the tactics used on the WordPress site to be search spam. Sites fighting for top search-engine positions in areas such as online gambling and pornography often use similar techniques, though most would hide home-page links using less obvious approaches, he said.

As for the impact of the search-gaming controversy on the larger WordPress community, Luster made a distinction between the WordPress.org Web site and the project developer and blogs using the WordPress software.

"WordPress.org is a site that is maintained by Matt [Mullenweg] and not the WordPress community," he said. "Just because one thing happened [there] doesn't mean the tool or developers or the community has lost credibility."

source:- pcmag.com/

SugarCRM launches project-planning application

Which integrates project planning into core customer relationship management applications. A key feature is Sugar Projects, which gives users a 360-degree view of a project along with shared files, notes and benchmarks, and allows collaboration between Internet users and customers. Also included is the ability to produce grids, templates and charts of projects.

The news follows the recent announcement that the company was opening an office in Ireland, its first office outside the U.S.

SugarCRM did not release details of exact pricing, but--as with all SugarCRM applications--a free version of the software is also available. Advanced editions of the software are available, and the company offers these with an on-site license as an application server or as an on-demand service.

A key advantage for users, said SugarCRM Chief Executive John Roberts, is that SugarCRM does not have "the extreme sales and marketing of the other CRM vendors." As a result, "R&D is a very large proportion of our budget," he said.

Roberts added that, though the software is not open-source, it carries all the advantages for the user of open source. "There is no lock-in," he said. "For the other suppliers, it's all about how can I lock you in to a proprietary on-demand or proprietary software sale."

So far, the company has 200 customers in Europe, and has provided 1.5 million downloads of its core software worldwide. Most of the downloads have been the free version of the software, Roberts said, but a growing number of companies are now taking the subscription version.

source:- zdnetasia.com/

SugarCRM Expands European Reach With Dublin Office

Pushing into Europe is a smart move for SugarCRM, Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, told CRM Buyer. "There's still a lot of opportunity in the CRM market in Europe, particularly for low-cost flexible solutions that can be easily integrated with other applications."

SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, is expanding its reach to Europe -- an essential step for any small, high growth software company more than a few years old.

The company is opening its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Company cofounder Clint Oram will be the general manager of Sugar Europe.

Europe's Importance

"The establishment of Sugar Europe signifies the importance of Europe as a key driver in the success of our commercial open source model," Oram stated.

"Our strong partner base throughout Europe, the advanced multilingual capabilities of our application, and the embrace of open source by European governments and businesses has pulled us quickly into the European markets," he added.

Besides establishing a local presence in Europe, SugarCRM is also localizing support materials for the French and German markets, expanding its on-demand infrastructure there and launching a campaign to raise awareness of the platform in Europe.

Growth Opportunities

Pushing into Europe is a smart move for the company, Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, told CRM Buyer.

"There's still a lot of opportunity in the CRM market in Europe, particularly for low-cost flexible solutions that can be easily integrated with other applications."

"Given Sugar's open source model and delivery as both a hosted and on-premise solution, they should be able to attract new partners that can help them identify key growth opportunities in the European customer base," Wettemann added.

Already Making Headway

SugarCRM has already made significant headway into these markets, the firm reported.

Its open source product set has been widely adopted across Europe, particularly in France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, according to company statistics. Also, about one-quarter of its commercial customers are located in Europe, and more than 30 percent of Sugar Open Source downloads take place in Europe.

As in the United States, SugarCRM is claiming wins in Europe against competing on-demand firms such as Salesforce.com

Dublin-based customer Fineos, a provider of componentized software applications for the insurance, government social insurance and banking industries, chose SugarCRM over Salesforce.com, according to Jarlath Dooley, director of business operations for Fineos.

"For our demanding sales management process conditions, Sugar was just plain better," he said.

A Peaked Business Model?

However, the intrigue of CRM open source may have had its moment, when it was first introduced a few years ago with much fanfare.

"I don't see them on a short list of deals in which Salesforce.com, [Oracle's] Siebel and SAP are competing," Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone told CRM Buyer.

Firms most inclined to adopt open source CRM are those that want to support the technology and business model or those that don't want to put a lot of money in CRM in the first place. Open source CRM has less than one percent of the overall CRM model, she estimated.

Ongoing Development

In spite of these trends, SugarCRM has continued to develop its application with the higher end users as a target base.

At the beginning of the year, it added multichannel marketing and business analytics functionality to its Sugar Open Source, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines.

New features included a campaign wizard to set up and execute a campaign; a campaign manager to track the opportunities generated and closed by the campaign; automated lead capture, which integrates Web leads into SugarCRM and better management of e-mail marketing, online advertising, newsletters, search engine marketing, list rentals, telesales programs, webcasts and traditional advertising.

The new functionality also allows users to generate ad-hoc, multi-module reporting to analyze marketing, sales and customer support. These reports can be displayed in multiple formats such as pie charts or line graphs.

SugarCRM is built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. It was one of the first open source CRM companies to come to market.

source:- ecommercetimes.com/

Agile Development for JAVA enterprise application

The session at the Java meet this month looks at one of the most common software development questions encountered in recent times - How to use Agile methodology and techniques on large enterprise application projects? Prerana Patil from Oracle Financial Services (formerly i-flex solutions limited) speaks about "Agile Development for Java Enterprise Applications."

* For those not in Pune or unable to attend, add your queries in the comments section below and we will try and get them answered at the meet.

Session Overview : Agile is a way to quickly develop working applications by focusing on progressive requirement rather than processes. Agile development is done in iterative manner with short requirements, quick builds and frequent releases. Agile methodology when compared to traditional practices like waterfall model, makes development easier, faster and adaptive.

The session would provide a roadmap for building enterprise-class Java applications using agile methods. It would include introduction to agile methodology and when and why it should be used. Various practices used for agile development (Agile Modeling, Agile Draw, Agile estimation) would be discussed. Agile development based Case Study would be drawn using: Light weight technologies like Spring; ORM for database handling; Test Driven Development approach; Build management & Configuration control in concurrent development environment. Session would also include coding practices to make code adaptable to new requirements and tips for using IDE (Eclipse & Netbeans) for agile development.

source:- indicthreads.com/

Why use Drupal as your Content Management of choice?

Drupal CMS Benefits:

• Open Source PHP: Readily available to all with a community of users for support.

• Wide Variety of Modules: Create any type of website from Ecommerce to Weblog.

• Cost Savings: Open source means no proprietary software fees.

• SEO Friendly: Clean, concise code with great control over content and strategic fields.

• Versatility: A talented Drupal web developer can create just about anything for your website.

• Great Control: Amazing control over what goes into your website.

• Ease of Content Management: Fast, efficient content management system makes updates a breeze. No more updating fees and waiting around for your website designer or developer to update the html pages for you. login to your custom administrator platform and update your site as easily as using Microsoft word or other word processing applications.

• Scalability: with a trusted core and supported open source community the Drupal platform continues to grow and gain exposure and features as the versions go on.

• Web 2.0 Friendly: with the integration and scalability comes the ability to integrate RSS Feeds, and tap into Social Networking websites such as Facebook and Myspace. Interested in how Social Networking can tie into your Drupal project? Visit our Facebook and Social Networking development services page for additional info.

source:- digitalsurgeons.com/

Joomla Development

The basic Joomla! package is designed to be easy to install, even for non-programmers. Most people have no trouble getting our software up and running, and there is plenty of support available for newbie’s.Joomla Development have a growing, active community of more than 150,000 friendly users and developers on our forums eager to help.Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! Site.

Joomla Development Teams:-

Joomla! Is the world's hottest open-source content management system, and the winner of the 2006 Open Source CMS Prize. Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing. But for many people, Joomla Development the true power of Joomla! Lies in its application framework that makes it possible for thousands of developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions. Many companies or organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla! Package or in a freely available extension. Thankfully, Joomla! offers a powerful application framework that makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla! into virtually unlimited directions.

Joomla development Advantages:-

One other advantage of Joomap is that it allows you to hook in to Google Sitemaps. On the admin interface these is a Google Sitemap URL given. All Joomla Development; need to do to generate a dynamic Google sitemap is to copy paste this URL into Google webmaster interface and now whenever Google wants to download your whole website sitemap it gets a dynamic version - which is significantly better than just hoping Google will find all of your pages! With this sitemap it tells Google all of your pages and where they are so it can scan them more affectively.

Joomla Development Websites:-

Often content managed websites can look just that, Joomla Development but with a complex custom Joomla website package you will have the advantages of having the Joomla content management system with a truly unique look. The content area of each page can be set up so that the layout is unique from page to page and I can even take the design of a static website such as the original Xpec website and create a custom designed Joomla website.

Joomla Workshop:-

Joomla developers, web editors, Joomla users and advocates, and anybody with an interest in getting their organization’s offline content on online and managing their Web content will benefit from this workshop. Know about what's next in Joomla development, lead developer of Joomla Development your experiences with the famed content management system, ask that tough Joomla tech question the answer to which still eludes you, meet other Joomla people. And even if you're just curious about what Joomla is, this workshop is still open to you.

Joomla Development Strategy:-

The main responsibility of the development working group is taking care of the development of the Joomla! Application framework and the Joomla! Content Management System (CMS). Beside the development of the Joomla! code base the development working group defines the Joomla! Roadmap strategy, Joomla Development creating (architectural) designs for major and minor versions and of course takes care of bug- and security fixes in maintenance versions.

source:- turnaroundmedia.com/

Drupal Content Management & Drupal Website Design Services are here:

It's Not Your Grandma's Content Management System...

If you are looking for a Drupal Development and Design service and integration, you have come to the right place.

Drupal is the open source CMS platform that is changing the world of content management and web development. The Digital Surgeons team has the ability to create full custom website solutions starting with the award winning robust Drupal Content management core platform. This is not the 'add on' content management system feature of old, but a whole new way of creating great looking and highly functional online masterpieces that allow the client complete control over the content and function of the web experience.

A vast array of open source Drupal modules have been developed for creating ecommerce websites, company Blogs, site search, ad management, membership sign up, and so many other features that a Drupal CMS based site can cover just about any online application today. Digital Surgeons will build a site tailored to the unique needs and goals of your organization, incorporating appropriate Drupal modules or creating original solutions that fit your company to a tee including:

* Promotional Websites
* Social Networking and Community web Sites
* High Traffic B2B and B2C Websites and portals
* Ecommerce Websites
* University Websites
* News & Media Websites

A number of Drupal 6 themes (website layouts) have been published in their open source data base offering great variety of page layout and look. Our expert web developers can customize an existing Drupal theme that makes sense for your website focus, or we can craft a custom CMS based site from the ground up, designed to grab and hold the attention of your target audience. Once your site is launched to the web, Digital Surgeons will get to work with a custom search engine marketing campaign to target your ideal customer.

Our talented of team of expert PHP developers and Creative graphic designers can scult your marketing objectives and goals into a finished scalable platform for you and your viewers.

source:- digitalsurgeons.com/

Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution.

Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control.

Customer Main Features:

Search Engine Friendly URLs
Create search-engine friendly URLs (like http://example.com/product/brand-best-shoe/1234) that make it easier for search engine crawlers to index your site, which ultimately drive more organic search visitors.

Meta-Tags
With each new catalog page (product, category, even a static or dynamic page) you'll be able to define meta tags: page title, description, and keywords.

E-mail Notifications
Magento will makes it easy to get notifications to customers. Customize email templates for a variety of notifications in both HTML and plain text. Examples of e-mails include new customer notifications, order confirmation, order update, lost password, etc.

Customers will have the ability to:
- Find products to compare by clicking "Compare" on the products to add them to the Compare Box as they browse.
- From the Compare Box, a "Compare These" button brings up the product comparison chart.
- View, print and email a comparison chart, showing all of the selected products' comparable attributes and how they stack up against one another.
Layered Navigation allows your customers to filter products in a category using different product attributes. Customers can filter down a large number of items to fit their price range, size, etc., allowing them to find the right products quickly and easily.

On each product page, you'll find:
- Add-a-Tag: Allow logged-in users to add a tag to the product's description.
- Tag Cloud: The tag cloud will display all tags associated to the product. Clicking on a tag will bring up a product listing page with all other products that share the same tag.

The Shopping Cart will be composed of the following:
The products list, which will list the products currently in the cart along with the following information about each:
- Product Thumbnail
- Product Name
- Unit Price
- Quantity (editable)
- Total (per product)
- Remove Button
- Update Button
The totals section, which will show the following applicable totals without having to go through checkout:
- Subtotal
- Tax (if applicable)
- Discounts (if applicable)
- Grand Total (what the customer owes)
- Estimated Shipping, where a customer can enter a zip code and get a shipping quote
- The discount field, where a customer can enter a coupon code

Administration Panel Main Features:

Sales Report
A detailed overview of number of orders, items sold, revenue, shipping charged, discounts applied, taxes collected, etc.

Shopping Cart Report
This shows a per product breakdown of how often products have been added to cart, conversion rate, etc. An additional view shows a breakdown of customers and number of items in their saved shopping carts.

Wishlist Report
A per product breakdown of popularity in wishlist, number of times purchased from wishlist, percentage of wish lists purchases vs. regular purchases, etc.

Reviews Report
The reviews report will show the most active customer reviewers, most frequently reviewed products. Store owners can also view all reviews written by individual customers, or all reviews applied to individual products.

Tags Report
The tags report will show the most active taggers, and most frequently tagged products. Store owners can also view all tags added by individual customers, or all tags added to individual products. The report will also show most popular tags, regardless of product.

Search Report
Will show most popular search terms, or search terms with the highest number of results.

With Magento's Content Management System (CMS), you'll be able to create an unlimited number of static pages and landing pages using HTML. When you're creating a page, you can define the following: - Page Title: Define the title of the page.
- Meta Data: Define meta data like meta description, meta keywords etc.
- URL: Define the page URL (http://www.mystore.com/faq)

Batch Import/Export
With Batch Import/Export, you can easily manage your catalog without having to edit within the admin. Instead, export your data (you can customize exactly what data you export), edit it (add or modify items), and then import it back to see the changes in the catalog.

Not everyone in your company should have access to every facet of your store. That's why Magento features an easy-to-use Permissions Editor. Create users for all your employees then assign them to groups, eg. "Full Admin", "Customer Service", "Warehouse".

source:- webscripts.softpedia.com/

Magento: The Zimbra of Ecommerce?

Magento is a new open source ecommerce platform that aims to handle all aspects of building and maintaining an ecommerce site including shopping carts, shipping, product reviews, and much more. The company looks to play in the “professional open source” space, offering its code base to developers that want to build their own plugins or create customized versions of the software. Magento seems to be off to a good start with more than 10,000 downloads in the two weeks since first being released, according to the company.

Magento plans to make money by offering an enterprise edition, partnerships with third parties that want to integrate with the platform (for example, payment gateways), and a platform for companies to buy and sell components for the software. Other potential revenue streams include training, certifications, and consulting.

The approach Magento is taking to ecommerce software is very similar to the approach Zimbra successfully applied to email. Considering the $350 million pay-off Zimbra received from Yahoo earlier this week, Magento may be onto something as they go after one of the Web’s largest segments in ecommerce.

source:- mashable.com/

OS Commerce Watch: New Magento 1.1 Released

This is one in a series of columns on the open-source commerce (OSC) industry.

Those Magento boys and girls are at it again, kicking butt and taking names by releasing a brand-new, expanded 1.1 release of their already feature-rich open source e-commerce program. The company claims to already be the fastest growing e-commerce platform on the market – and not just open source e-commerce — with over 400,000 production downloads in only 16 weeks. This latest release will boost the world’s acceptance curve sharply with new features that will pique international interest.

The team's marketing messages, already good from the start, have become laser-focused and clearer than any open source e-commerce team I've seen. They have positioned themselves as the competitive solution for shops ranging from the mom-and-pop-type shop, through the medium-size shop selling up to $150 million per year, and their features make them ideal for an enterprise shop. The company is aiming this latest release squarely at world expansion.

Summary of New Features
This new release includes hundreds of bug fixes and performance improvements including SEO-related fixes, improvements in the Admin components, and also adds support for Canadian and European taxes. Expanded product options will win over the hearts of those who sell customized products, with custom product options, personalized products, and virtual or downloadable products. And an exciting new feature is a Web services API, which opens the door for Magento to be integrated with any application via a Web Services API.

Performance Issues Addressed
The company says one of the main goals for Magento 1.1 was to examine bottlenecks in the platform and improve performance. This new release addresses the key concerns of many 1.0 users, including many bug fixes and slow page-loading times. Changes have been made to the Admin so that data are loaded only when necessary, improving the responsiveness of the Admin significantly.

The company claims a 40-percent performance improvement. Some 1.1 alpha users reported performance improvements of 70 percent in their tests, while others complained that while the new version is much faster, it remains relatively slow. Many factors can influence the speed of the program, including server and caching settings, so if a store remains slow after upgrading, the store owner should seek out additional measures to improve the store's performance.

International Support Increased
Magento Version 1.0 was a US-centric product. Version 1.1 will see the expansion of Magento into many additional new countries where it was previously impossible to use the program due to tax law limitations. Complex laws in Europe and elsewhere for Value Added Taxation (VAT) formerly required programmers to extend the code. According to Varien's Chief Technology Officer, Yoav Kutner, the team has redesigned the tax module so it is more flexible for international use, as well as for changing taxation laws in the US. Already there are active user forums in nearly 50 languages. Translations of over 60 languages and dialects have been initiated by volunteers with varying degrees of completion, and 23 locales are 85 to 100 percent complete. As a result of these activities and changes, the number of version 1.1 product downloads should spike sharply with significant world-wide interest.

Additional “Wow” Product Features
The new version allows customers to create custom products, also known as bundled products or "kitting" (making kits). For example, a customer can create and purchase a computer with user-selectable options such as case, hard drive, RAM and monitors with pricing dynamically generated. Unfortunately, store owners who have already created simple products cannot convert the existing products to bundled products; they must go back in and recreate the product as a new, bundled product. But, this is a small price to pay for such an expansive feature.

Another welcomed product feature in this release is “customer-defined product options” such as specifying text or images for monograms, engraving, and custom printing.

Most exciting is that the company unexpectedly tucked into this release support for virtual or downloadable products. Roy Rubin, President of Varien Inc., the company that developed the program, said he Initially expected to release downloadable product support "right behind 1.1." It is rare indeed to move the launch of a planned feature up, and this new feature alone will create many new converts to the program.

Other New Features
Rounding out the gaggle of new additions to the program are a couple of small but nice new features; new customer attributes such as prefix/suffix (Dr., Jr.) and date of birth.

The “One-Click Upgrade” from 1.0
Rubin says the heavily-touted Magento "One-Click Upgrade" is now in place for this release, and that it will work with the public release of 1.1 as long as the relevant 1.0 code has not been modified. It is always wise, however, to make a copy of the site and install the upgrade on the copy. The company strongly recommends against installing on a live or production site, but how many store owners will listen only to the words "One-Click Upgrade"?

Industry Wait-and-See
Template companies that offer templates for many other open source e-commerce programs have taken a wait-and-see attitude towards releasing templates or skins for Magento. Likewise, many experienced open source programmers are unfamiliar with the object-oriented programming used by Magento. Slow release of programmer documentation to get programmers on board, and unfamiliarity with the Zend Framework on which the program is based, have all slowed the program's acceptance into the industry by Web developers. The company would be well-advised to speed the release of developer documentation even if it is not pretty or absolutely fleshed-out yet.

Enthusiastic Community
Still, the company has been responsive to the concerns of its users with the product it has released today, and that responsiveness to end users is refreshing in the techno-centric world of open source e-commerce. With this release, it's time for the industry biggies — osCommerce, Zen Cart and CRE Loaded — to sit up and take notice if they haven't already.

In its short four-month existence, Magento has already been nominated for a number of prestigious awards, including the O'Reilly 2008 Open Source Awards and SourceForge.net's Community Choice Awards. Magento was a finalist in SourceForge’s categories for Best Project for the Enterprise, Best New Project, Most Likely to Change the World and Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition. How many eCommerce programs can claim that, open source or not?

The bottom line: Magento is already loved and accepted by end users and the community. This new release will just create more, worldwide converts. It’s a real winner.


source:- ecommerce-guide.com/

Five Tips For Improving Ecommerce Website Usability

ECOMMERCE AND USABILITY: What did you spend in man (or woman) hours and advertising dollars last month to drive traffic to your ecommerce storefront? And what will you spend this upcoming holiday season? If you're like most Internet retailers, it might just seem like the total expenditure of a small nation. Is it more than you need? What are the other options to improve long-term customer value? Let's look at some practical tactics for improving the usability of your ecommerce site to increase long-term customer interaction with your products and your brand.

- Identify Users By Email Address; Not Username:-
It might seem like a good idea on the surface to enable people to customize their user experience with personalized usernames, but most consumers change their personal profiles frequently. How do you ensure your "forgot username" function doesn't get overloaded? Try using an e-mail address to identify users rather than a username. E-mail addresses (while changed frequently) are easier to remember, often require no special characters and are most always unique, so users avoid the problem of someone else already taking their preferred username.

- Shorten the (Perceived) Distance To Checkout Completion:-
Can't see the forest because of the trees? Probably so. Often times, ecommerce merchants think they "get" the optimal user checkout experience, but breaking the process up into shorter segments allows users to focus on one step at a time. There's less to think about at each step and less information to enter (or screw up). Consider splitting the ordering process into just five sections (supposing they are logged in); delivery address confirmation, delivery option selection, entering payment details, order review/submission and confirmation.

- Address (and Publicize) Common User Issues:-
All the time you've spent building out a comprehensive FAQ section should not go to waste. It's important that throughout the ordering process, common user questions and queries are addressed. Users might want to know how long delivery is expected to take, or if they have to enter extra information such as their date of birth, they might want to know why. Go through the ordering process and ask yourself at each stage: What queries might a user have? Answers to these queries should either be provided on-screen, or through a hyperlink. Take this a step further by cutting off issues at the pass. If you give your users a "dashboard" to see account activity, this is the perfect place to highlight these issues.

- Establish Trust With Users:-
Many consumers are still not 100% comfortable buying online - no surprise, right? They might be concerned about giving out their credit card number, or about not receiving the items they've paid for. It's therefore important that you acknowledge and allay these concerns to put users' minds at ease. Try and think about the concerns users might have at each step of the ordering process, and try to address them. For example, who is this person or company I am buying from? Including information on your company and the people behind the company is essential to your success. Links to this information should always be included in the navigational architecture of your users' experience, but consider calling out this information within a sidebar during the actual checkout process. If you're worried about abandonment or leakage in general - open up the link in a new browser window.

- Success From Confirmation Emails:-
Once a user has placed their order, a confirmation e-mail should be sent immediately - no waiting until you can process the order. Confirmation e-mails should be brief and tell users important information such as the order number or tracking code. Including contact information for a real customer service associate from the company might be a little too much for the business process of smaller enterprises, but if you can manage, there is no substitute for conveying yours is a quality product from a quality company.

source:- websitemagazine.com/

How to Make Your Page Search Engine Friendly and User Friendly

Every web publisher wants to attain top positions in the search engines to increase traffic. To attain a high ranking, your site has to be search engine friendly.

Search engine spiders index your web site. They only read the HTML code in your web pages. They don't read graphics, JavaScript code and other scripts and features.

Just a few simple changes to your web pages can give your site a huge search engine boost. Even better, it can bring in ongoing FREE targeted traffic.

It's important to create a search engine friendly site while at the same time keeping your site friendly to your visitors. You want to structure your pages for maximum search engine exposure without compromising the content or look of your site. After all, what good is traffic if your visitors won't read your pages?

Keyword-rich, theme-based web sites will give you both targeted traffic and good search engine ranking.

Here are 10 easy steps you can take to make sure your pages are search engine friendly and user-friendly.

1. Selecting a domain name:-

There is a lot of disagreement about whether search bots give importance to the keywords in your domain name. I suggest that you select a domain name that indicates what your site is about. Even if it doesn't matter to search engines, it's important that it tells your visitors what the topic of your site is.

2. Focus on one theme:-

Search engines love specialized content. If you have several topics, then you should create several web sites. The more you focus on one topic, the more your page will be optimized for search engines and the more relevant it will be to your visitors.

3. Create multiple content pages:-

Make a separate page for each important keyword and key phrase. If, for example, you want your site to come up for the key phrases web consulting, web design, and search engine optimization, make three separate pages. Create a web page for each major keyword. Don't create automated pages just to get search engine exposure. To keep visitors at your site, you have to give them good content. Keyword-rich articles are a good way to optimize your pages for search engines while providing useful content to your visitors.

4. Optimize each content page for ONE of your key phrases:-

Put your targeted key phrases in your content. Include them in your page title, description tag, ALT image tags, comment tags, and in internal and external links. When providing a title and description in the META tags, your listing may be displayed in the search engine listing as you provide it. Make your titles and descriptions informative and compelling to attract potential buyers to your site. Provide a benefit or solve a problem.

5. Put your keywords in your content:-

Search engines are looking at how often your keyword appears on a page. That's how they determine relevancy. Short pages provide a larger percentage of keywords and are better for search engine optimization. The keyword density of a Web page is important for search engine optimization. How often you should mention your keyword throughout the text is different for each search engine, but it varies between 3% and 5% of your text. In other words, use your keyword 3-5 times for every 100 words on your page.

6. Naming files and directories:-

Put important keywords in all file names and directories/folder names describing the content. For example, to promote e-book covers, I name my files ebook-covers.html, cd-covers.html, box-cover.html, etc.

7. Naming graphics:-

The search bots don't see your graphics but they can see the description of your graphics and navigation buttons in ALT tags (alternative text describing your images for visitors who browse your site with the images turned off). If your navigation links are images, I recommend that you provide text links in addition to the image links for search engine optimization.

8. Navigation:-

Have your main navigation links on your home page so search engines can follow your links and index your pages. This is just as important for your visitors as for the search engines.

9. Link your pages together:-

You can easily link to all your pages by creating a sitemap.

10. Directory structure:-

Put your important files in the first level. Sub-directories that lie deep are more difficult for search engines to scan. Creating a site map for large sites and providing a link to your site map on your home page is a good way to get all your important pages indexed.

Make it easy for search engines to index your site. Apply these simple tips, and you will be well on your way to having a search engine and user-friendly web site!

Source:- promotionworld.com/

PHP upgrade improves Windows backing

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) 5.3, a significant upgrade to the server-side scripting language for Web applications, is expected to be available in a beta release in October, a representative of the PHP community said on Wednesday.

Version 5.3 features improved support for Windows, said Andi Gutmans, who is participating in development of the release and is CTO at PHP tools vendor Zend Technologies. Gutmans spoke about the release during an interview at the company's ZendCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, California on Wednesday afternoon.

"The community has worked on creating a much better binary package for PHP on Windows, which includes the latest [Microsoft] compilers," to benefit performance, Gutmans said. Additionally, more recent third-party libraries are featured for running PHP applications on Windows, with support for XML, graphic manipulation, and database access.

Namespaces, a capability enabling mixing and matching of PHP code from various sources, is highlighted in 5.3. This feature enables better maintenance and reuse, Gutmans said. "It allows you to modularize your applications for better maintenance and it makes it easier to use various frameworks together," he said. Frameworks like Zend's PHP framework and PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository) could be leveraged, said Gutmans.

A full implementation of garbage collection, which provides more efficient use of memory, is featured in PHP 5.3 as well. With garbage collection, long-running PHP scripts will make more efficient use of memory by avoiding conditions that could lead to memory leaks, Gutmans said.

Another feature, PHP archive (phar) files, enables bundling of a PHP application into a single archive. This makes it easier to distribute and deploy a PHP application, Gutmans said. The concept is similar to the JAR (Java Archive) files used in the Java world.

Version 5.3 also offers significant performance enhancements as well a client library integrating PHP with the MySQL database. In general terms, PHP 5.2 applications should function on the PHP 5.3 runtime, according to Gutmans.

Internationalization support has been enhanced, for building of applications that can be multilingual. Specifically, the ICU (International Components for Unicode) library is being exposed. Developers can perform functions like sorting and transformations.

Although Gutmans previously estimated a late-2008 release for PHP 5.3, the release now is expected to reach the release candidate phase in the first quarter of 2009. General availability will follow.

Also at ZendCon on Wednesday, Zend offered insights on what it views as the next-generation of PHP applications. These will be easily maintained, extensible, powerful, and lucrative, said Wil Sinclair, manager of the advanced technology group at Zend.

The first generation of PHP applications was very simple and lacked testing, he said. They had layers for presentation, application control, database access, and business logic. The next generation of applications has had perhaps millions of users, is object-oriented, and is typically modular, Sinclair said.

Next-generation systems have been built on the Model View Controller framework and are unit-tested. "Now, we've got an assurance of quality, not necessarily a guarantee," Sinclair said.

PHP has entered the commercial world, he said. Sinclair presented as an example Magento, an open-source e-commerce platform built on PHP 5 on top of Zend Framework. Built by Varien, Magento has had more than 450,000 downloads and more than 170 Magento Connect extensions. The application has processed millions of dollars in transactions, according to Sinclair.

The first public beta of Magento appeared in August 2007, and the 1.0 launch was on March 31, he said.

"We definitely see Magento as a next-generation PHP application, said Roy Rubin, founder and CEO of Varien.

Meanwhile, open-source WSO2 leveraged ZendCon to make a play in the PHP realm. The company launched WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP (WSF/PHP) 2.0 this week, featuring a scripting language library enabling developers to build and consume SOAP and REST Web services. Security and reliability are offered for enterprise SOA, the company said. The technology was demonstrated at ZendCon.

Data services, interoperability, and security are extended in the release. Developers also gain a framework for deploying PHP services meeting enterprise SOA standards, according to WSO2. Additionally, developers can bridge to tens of thousands of PHP Web applications and enterprise data sources, applications, and services.

Capabilities are added in four key areas with version 2.0:

-- Replay detection to track whether a message is fresh or has been sent previously, thus preventing replay attacks that could lead to denial of service

-- WS-Trust backing to issue, renew, and validate security tokens for trusted relationships

-- WS-SecureConversation support to allow a series of messages to be protected by a single session key and improve efficiency of the operation

-- Public Key cryptography standards enablement for handling multiple client x509 certificates simultaneously

Developers can send and receive binary data as attachments using MTOM or a SOAP message with attachments. MTOM in version 2.0 has been optimized via caching. WSDL support has been expanded via tools. WSF/PHP 2.0 is available for download now.

source:- techworld.com.au/