Microsoft: Scoop On BizTalk Server 2009

Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2009 is on track for availability during the first half of next year with a full public Community Technology Preview of the business process management server product slated for this year's fourth quarter, Microsoft said Friday. Microsoft also provided more details about new capabilities in the software, which until now Microsoft had called BizTalk Server 2006 R3.

As it has done with some of its other products, Microsoft is committing to a regular and more transparent development schedule for BizTalk Server, said Burley Kawasaki, product management director for Microsoft's Connected Systems Division. Microsoft wants to fall into a "rhythm of releases" for BizTalk Server, delivering a major upgrade every two years as it plans to do with Windows Server and other products. "We're trying to be more predictable for our enterprise customers," Kawasaki said.

Microsoft has begun planning for the product release that follows BizTalk Server 2009, code-named "BizTalk Server 7," Kawasaki said, and will start providing customers and channel partners with information about that release early next year. Priorities for that and future generations of the product include more tools for enterprise connectivity, support for the latest capabilities in the Windows platform such as messaging and workflow, and improved visibility throughout a business for such applications as business intelligence and asset tracking.

Enhancements and new capabilities offered in BizTalk Server 2009 generally revolve around improved enterprise connectivity, expanded platform support and improved developer productivity, Kawasaki said. "It's a pretty full release. It helps reinforce the focus on enterprise connectivity."

BizTalk Server 2009 will support Microsoft's new wave of platform systems including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5, as well as supporting Microsoft's new Hyper-V server virtualization software. Managing the life cycle of applications developed for BizTalk will be easier with a new release of ESB Guidance 2.0 patterns and practices.

The new software will offer improved connectivity both inside and outside the firewall through a new UDDI v3-compliant services registry; new and enhanced line-of-business adapters for SQL Server, Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL)'s E-Business Suite and other applications; enhanced integration with host systems such as IBM (NYSE:IBM) WebSphere MQSeries and CICS; and a new mobile RFID platform. The software will also provide enhanced business-to-business capabilities with updates to its EDI, AS2 and SWIFT protocols.

Source:- crn.com/

Zend Framework update focuses on AJAX integration

Zend has added integration with the Dojo JavaScript toolkit in the new version of its PHP programming platform.

Zend Framework 1.6, released yesterday, makes it easy to integrate AJAX and JavaScript with PHP applications, according to the company. There is a Dojo view helper for setting up the Dojo environment, along with form elements and decorators for integrating with Dojo’s Dijit library, which provides interface widgets. A new JSON-RPC server implementation and class can manipulate Dojo data envelopes in Zend.

Also new in Zend Framework 1.6 is interoperability with the SOAP Web services protocol, which Zend said makes connecting Web services to data across the Internet easier. New features around SOAP include client and server classes that can operate in both WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and non-WSDL modes, and auto-discovery. Unit testing features for controllers enable agile practices like unit testing and test-driven development, where a developer writes tests prior to writing code.

“Functional tests for your application will be much easier to write now that Zend Framework has built-in support for testing controllers,” said Wil Sinclair, Zend’s development manager.

Other new features and improvements are a component for displaying large data sets from multiple sources, a service providing text-based CAPTCHA images, and smaller XML documents that are easier to read, the company said.

Zend will tout version 1.6 at ZendCon 2008, taking place Sept. 15-18 in Santa Clara. The conference offers presentations and networking opportunities for PHP developers and business managers.


Source:- sdtimes.com/

Flash designs to bring your website to life

The internet is now a domain full of intense competition. An individual or an organization looking to establish their web presence needs to put in a lot of effort into various promotion techniques on the internet. But all these efforts will be in vain if you don’t have an attractive website in the first place. One way of making sure you attract the attention of the public on the internet is to incorporate flash design into your web pages.

Flash is a multimedia tool belonging to the Macromedia family. Web designers can make use of this software to develop interactive movies, innovative innovations and different kinds of artistic images. These clips are designed in such a manner that they can be embedded on to the web page along with the other content.

It is but obvious that flash design can be used to enhance the impact of your website which is the dire need of the hour. Flash Web Design is extremely useful because of its amazing features. This is the reason why people are finding it the only logical means of creating a website that captures the imagination and attention of the visitors.

Flash can be used in a variety of different ways on a web page. You can make a flash animation presentation to display your company profile or product ranges on your webpage in a 30 second series. Another good thing about flash movies is that they do not have a compatibility issue with different web browsers. So you do not run the risk of not having your video played on a different website. Hence working with flash doesn’t mean you will have to get tangled up in XHTMAL and other programming languages.

Flash can be used for a variety of other purposes on your website. You can use the program to create innovative ads that will be sure to capture the attention of your visitors. The program can also be used to create animated games that can be played on your website or downloaded.

The use of flash has now become a common practice amongst web designers due to the impact that it generates. The difference between websites that make use of flash techniques and those that don’t comes out quite obviously. The plain old and simple websites that do not make use of the innovative techniques of flash do not stand in any comparison with the websites that have been enhanced with the use of flash.

Creating flash animations, ads and presentations is however a technical job that requires highly trained individuals. Most of the good web design agencies now have a full time dedicated team of flash animators who provide invaluable services to clients looking for something out of the box when it comes to website design.

It is however advised to take a look at the flash animation portfolio and the previous work of the agency that you will be choosing for your website designing. A good idea is to read customer review in order to get an idea of the level of satisfaction they are able to deliver.

Sourc:- promotionworld.com/

Web Design For Small Business

Any type of web development project is going to be an important, necessary, and pricey job. This is especially true for small businesses, who are dependent upon new clients to keep their services up and running. One way to “sink and reel” new clients in is to have a great online website design, along with a functional web development application.

Companies that specialize in web development and design are offering an invaluable service to small businesses. Small business owners won’t be able to create their own designs due to time constraints, and certainly won’t be able to sacrifice many weeks of learning just to get a website up and running. In this sense, the fees of a web designer are very well justified.

Branding is an aspect of web design that usually costs more money, but is worth every single penny spent. A logo and certain set of colors is what sets one business entity apart from another. Knowing that a golden set of arches is a McDonald’s logo, for instance, is one example of how society takes kindly to a branded company. This helps on return traffic and potential profits in the future.

Web development is part of the web design process, whether or not the web design company agrees with this or not. A web design company should be able to provide consulting for applications that may be able to offer an easier experience for the webmaster or his or her clients- such as a contact form.

As the industry goes, most small businesses will pay a lot more in the physical world for a web design job than they would if they purchased online services. Real world businesses know that customers that visit them are probably not too keen on web design elements, so they can charge extra where possible. Internet web design companies also face more competition, so they have to likewise stay competitive in pricing.

Web design and development is a big money-maker for those who take part in it, but don’t expect to cut too many costs in the process. A cheap web design service will give you exactly what you pay for, while the “big dogs” will have a service that is on par with big business designs. In the end, one can easily spend hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on what is requested by the small business owner.

Final Thoughts

A good thing to take from this is to simply shop around, especially over the Internet. Some services are more expensive than others, so try to find a median between prices and contact the web design company for a portfolio. Once all is said and done, marketing can be done to bring all sorts of new clients in.

source:- 3x24.com/

Tips on Creating Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Friendly Web Pages

If you design a search engine friendly or a site with search engine optimization in mind you are likely to rank higher in search engine results and grab more valuable free visitors for yourself.

What point is there in having a website that nobody sees? The largest source of free web traffic for most websites on the Internet comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN etcetera. Therefore, if you design a search engine friendly or a site with search engine optimization in mind you are likely to rank higher in search engine results and grab more valuable free visitors for yourself.

The Big 3 search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo! and MSN use internet robots known as web crawlers or spiders to crawl and index websites which they then can list within their organic search result pages. Most spiders follow links to a page then read the text content of the page and make a record of it in their own database… this allows the search engines to pull up the listing at any time as people search for it.

In order to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to index and crawl and index your site, the use of frames on your website should be avoided. Frames can often confuse search engine robots and many spiders have difficulty indexing pages created with the use of frames. They could even leave your site without crawling it any further if it is not search engine friendly enough. In addition, frames can make it difficult for users to add a bookmark a particular page on your website without using certain long and complicated scripts.

Don’t put valuable text content inside flash movies or in images… remember search engine robots can only read the text on your website source code. Therefore if crucial text is presented in flash movies and or inside images rather than the readable textual form, your website’s search engine rankings could be affected dramatically.

Correct use of meta tags on each page is essential, especially correct use of titles and descriptions. This will allow search engine robots to understand straight away what your web pages are about and whether or not to index it. Correct use of meta tags helps to make the search engine robot's job easier so they may be encouraged to crawl your site more often.

Stop using old style HTML methods like tables and font tags to style your page. Instead use div tags and CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. This is because div tags and CSS are a more search engine friendly method and are also more efficient. With the use of div tags and CSS, you can eliminate old style HTML tags and your pages will be much lighter and faster to load.

Make sure that you always put the text you want to be found for on the body text of your page with your most important keywords near the top or beginning of your body text. For example, if your primary keyword is green widgets put the keyphrase green widgets in the first sentence of your body text and repeat the phrase a few more times throughout the page preferably also somewhere in bold or strong text. Always remember that if you don’t put your primary keywords on your body text and also in your titles and meta tags etc you make it much harder for your site to be found in search results.

source:- powerhomebiz.com/

Zend mixing PHP, AJAX for RIAs

Integration provided between the open-source framework and Dojo Toolkit

With an upgrade to its software development framework for PHP scheduled for release today, Zend Technologies is mixing in client-side AJAX capabilities with server-side PHP functionality.

Zend Framework 1.6, the company's open-source framework, integrates with the Dojo Toolkit for AJAX. Developers thus gain front-end rich Internet application capabilities via Dojo (version 1.1.1 of Dojo will ship with Zend's framework); integration between Zend and Dojo is accomplished via a piece of software called Zend_Dojo.

In this approach, developers would use Zend Framework to build JavaScript-enabled Web applications that Zend Framework renders, said Wil Sinclair, the Zend project lead for Zend Framework.

Although Zend worked with the Dojo Foundation on the Dojo integration, the Zend Framework still can be used with other AJAX technologies.

Also added in version 1.6 is full support for SOAP Web services. With that support, developers could build integration with an application based on Microsoft's .Net Framework. Jeffrey Hammond, a Forrester Research analyst, lauded the SOAP backing in version 1.6. "SOAP support is something many enterprise IT shops will find interesting. Many have made significant investments in SOAP-based SOA strategies but would still like to take advantage of lighter weight Web-based frameworks that use dynamic languages like PHP or Ruby. The updated version of Zend Framework should help them significantly," Hammond said.

Another capability highlighted in Model/View/Controller-enabled (MVC) Zend Framework 1.6 is unit testing for controllers on top of the existing object-level unit testing. This benefits agile and test-driven development, Zend's Sinclair said. Unit tests on controllers allow developers to test realistic user scenarios, such as log-ins or balance transfers, he said. The MVC support allows developers to separate applications into presentation and business logic, he added.

Version 1.6 features a preview implementation of the Zend_Tool project, for creating projects and project assets and managing them. This capability is important for rapid application development, Sinclair said. Zend Framework also features a "use at will" architecture, enabling developers to use separate components such as a forms creation component.

Source:- infoworld.com/

IT workers hit hardest by offshore outsourcing, survey finds

Jobs most at risk for offshore outsourcing are computer programming, development

As many as 8% of IT workers have been displaced by offshore outsourcing, either through job loss or an involuntary transfer to a new job by their employer, which is twice the rate of workers in other occupations, according to a study based on data collected from some 10,000 people, which may be the largest survey of its kind.

The survey, conducted by researchers at the New York University Stern School of Business and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, also backs up the long-standing view that IT employees in purely technical jobs -- computer programmers and software developers who have little customer interaction -- are at the most risk from offshore outsourcing.

The broad conclusions are unlikely to surprise many high-tech workers, but what may make this offshore outsourcing study unique is its breadth: some 6,700 workers across a variety of occupations and more than 3,000 hiring managers and human resources professionals were surveyed.

There has been a dearth of data about the impact of offshore outsourcing on U.S. workers, and its authors, Prasanna Tambe of the Stern School and Lorin Hitt of Wharton, said their work is the first to pin down offshore outsourcing's impact by occupation.

The job site Careerbuilder.com funded the research, which looked at a spectrum of occupations, including technology, and published initial data from the survey in April. But the 44-page paper, posted this week on the Social Science Research Network (registration required) analyzes what the data is saying about the fate of high-tech workers who have been directly affected by offshore outsourcing.

Tambe, an assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences at NYU, said the data isn't a forecast of how extensive offshore outsourcing will be, but instead tries to fill in the gaps of the theoretical work on offshore outsourcing and address the dearth of data on this topic.

But the impact of offshore outsourcing on IT jobs may just be a sign of how this trend will unfold across a broad range of occupations. "I think [IT] is definitely ahead of the curve, but I think that gap will probably close in the future," Tambe said.

The base rate of offshoring across all industries is just over 15%, but some 40% of all tech and telecommunications companies are doing some type of offshore work, according to the research.

By occupation, more than 30% of the survey respondents said they are offshoring computer programming and software development jobs, but only about half, or 15.5%, reported offshoring systems analysts, who typically interact more with others in a business.

Among employees, across all occupations, slightly more than 4% of workers were displaced because of offshore outsourcing, half the rate of IT workers. The survey's 8% figure for IT displacement represents the percentage of workers who have ever been affected by offshore outsourcing, a rate that implies an annual offshoring-related displacement of 1% to 2% per year for IT workers, according to the study.

Of those displaced by offshore outsourcing, 70% lost their jobs, with older workers more likely to be displaced.

The researchers don't predict what future displacement rates may be, but they say that as offshoring grows, tech workers without jobs that don't require interpersonal skills, are being replaced more rapidly.

IT workers concerned about displacement "can focus on further developing these interpersonal skills, or may find more robust long-term careers in IT professions that involve significant face-to-face interaction such as those involving cross-organizational process change or hands-on support functions," the report's authors wrote.

Since IT workers have been more severely affected than other types of workers, Tambe and Hitt argue that policy-makers could focus on tech workers to provide help, including job training and government compensation to offset wage losses. Educational institutions will have to react as well, with "increased emphasis on the development of interpersonal and management skills within the IT curriculum."

Source:- computerworld.com/

Web Designer, Meet Search Engine Optimizer

SEO specialists and designers should work together as one since they both have the same goal. Customer success.

The Creatives verses SEO war has been going on for years. One side says “make it pretty”, the other side says “make it wordy”. Funny enough, both sides are right. When marketing your web site online, you could possibly make something so ugly that you get a lot of traffic from a favorable Google ranking, but no clients or conversion.

Why is that? Because Cleanliness is next to Googleness. If you would like, take a few moments to search some highly competitive keyphrases in Google. The web sites that are ranked on the first page are normally, professional, well designed web sites. This is not a coincidence. Clean sites rank higher and convert better.

So why does the average search engine optimization company pay such little regard to professional design? Because search engine optimization specialists are analytics gurus and designers are artist. In short, it takes two to make it work.

When working with a designer, you should ask them what their strategy is for maximizing your search engine exposure. While designers do not have to speak fluent SEO, they do of course need to know what not to do to your web site so that an SEO can come in after them and help increase your search engine ranking.

When considering SEO friendly design, think clean. Web sites that have a direct point (call to action) at the top of the page will convert visitors to customers much better than the competition. If you searched for health insurance quotes on Google, you would see a list of natural results. Most of those allow you to start the health insurance quoting process right at the top of the home page.

If you work with a guaranteed search engine optimization company, (one that guarantees first page ranking) they may require you to update your design to decrease their risk. Yes, design makes that much of a difference. Search engine’s like what people like. Easy to navigate web sites, text that is clear and to the point, and simple vertical layouts.

So if high search engine rankings are at the top of your concerns, make sure your designer plays nice with search engine optimization specialists or even better, use a search engine optimization company with a talented on staff designer. This will greatly increase the success of your online presence.

Source:- promotionworld.com/

SugarCRM Announces Sugar 5.1 General Availability

The world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the general availability of Sugar 5.1, which includes new reporting and wireless capabilities for SugarCRM. The new reporting and analytics engine provides SugarCRM users with improved insight into sales effectiveness and customer behavior. Revamped wireless capabilities deliver the feature-rich SugarCRM user experience on mobile phones, including support for the popular BlackBerry^® and iPhone™ smartphones.

Sugar Community Edition 5.1 is available at http://www.sugarforge.org/content/downloads/. To sign-up for a free trial of Sugar Professional 5.1, please visit: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/ondemand_eval.html.

Community Support

SugarCRM’s commercial open source model invites the download and inspection of source code by users, developers, customers and partners, producing a higher quality product than possible in proprietary development models. During the beta process, Sugar 5.1 was installed over 10,000 times and tested by over 25,000 users.

Sugar 5.1 builds on a product legacy that has made SugarCRM one of the most popular open source projects and CRM products in the world. Since its founding four years ago, Sugar Community Edition and its related components have been downloaded over 5 million times. Over 80,000 registered community members, including 14,000 developers, have created over 500 extensions and 75 language translations of SugarCRM at www.sugarforge.org, SugarCRM’s community web site. SugarCRM’s user base consists of over 400,000 users on 50,000 installations in 195 countries.

“Software is transitioning from lock-in based proprietary systems to an open, standards-based world,” said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. “As the mass adoption of SugarCRM proves, users want freedom and choice in their software, not artificial constraints and dictates from software providers.”

Sugar 5.1 Features

Sugar 5.1 offers new features and improvements across end-user and administrative functions, including:

• Advanced Reporting and Analytics provide support for complex reporting sets, matrix reports, run-time filters and integration with Microsoft Excel.

• New Wireless HTML Client delivers an improved user interface, new search capabilities, and support for BlackBerry^® and iPhone™ smartphones.
• Tracker Reports provide a snapshot into system usage in order to increase user adoption and visibility into CRM utilization.
• Data Import Enhancements have been strengthened, making it easier than ever to move data from applications such as Excel, Act!, Microsoft Outlook and Salesforce.com into SugarCRM.
• Module Builder Enhancements support new relationships and templates, auditing and support for creating end-user dashlets.

The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited.

The iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM’s open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers’ security, integration and configuration needs.

source:- businesswire.com/

A Brief History of Search Engine Optimization

In the middle of the 1990s webmasters and search engine content providers started optimizing websites. At the time all the webmasters had to do was provide a URL to a search engine and a web crawler would be sent from the search engine. The web crawler would extract link from the webpage and use the information to index the page by down loading the page and then storing it on the search engines server. Once the page was stored on the search engines server a second program, called an indexer, extracted additional information from the webpage, and determines the weight of specific words. When this was complete the page was ranked.

It didn't take very long for people to understand the importance of being highly ranked.

In the beginning search engines used search algorithms that webmasters provided about the web pages. It didn't take webmasters very long to start abusing the system requiring search engines to develop a more sophisticated form of search upholstery cleaning new york optimization. The search engines developed a system that considered several factors; domain name, text within the title, URL directories, term frequency, HTML tags, on page key word proximity, Alt attributes for images, on page keyword adjacency, text within NOFRAMES tags, web content development, sitemaps, and on page keyword sequence.

Google developed a new concept of evaluating internet web pages called PageRank. PageRank weighs a web page's quantity and quality based on the pages incoming upholstery cleaning system This method of search engine optimization was so successful that Google quickly began to enjoy successful word of mouth and consistent praise.

To help discourage abuse by webmasters, several internet search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com, will not disclose the algorithms they use when ranking web pages.The signals used today in search memory foam mattress topper optimization typically are; keywords in the title, link popularity, keywords in links pointing to the page, PageRank (Google), Keywords that appear in the visible text, links from on page to the inner pages, and placing punch line at the top of the page.

For the most part registering a webpage/website on a search engine is a simple task. All Google requires is a link from a site already indexed and the web crawlers furniture cleaning chicago visit the site and begin to spider its contents. Normally a few days after registering on the search engine the main search engine spiders will begin to index the website.

Some search engines will guarantee spidering and indexing for a small fee. These search engines do not guarantee specific ranking. Webmaster's who don't want web crawlers to index certain upholstery cleaning methods and directories use a standard robots.txt file. This file is located in the root directory. Occasionally a web crawler will still crawl a page even if the webmaster has indicated he does not wish the page indexed.


Source:- corsavoo.com/