Why Your Business Should Consider Professional IT Support

In today's volatile business climate, modern companies have to be flexible to cope and adapt to change. This is especially true of IT infrastructures that need to alter to keep pace with rapid developments in technology. Outsourcing your IT support is one way of ensuring that your business maintains a flexible approach and stays competitive.

Cost Effective

Most modern businesses rely heavily on IT infrastructures whether they are file servers, email and phone systems or simple office machines. As your business grows and more pressure is placed on these systems, it may be tempting to consider employing IT specialists within your company to administer them. However, a team of IT specialists can be very expensive to employ on a salaried basis. A more cost effective approach is to outsource this requirement to a specialist company where you only pay for the level of support you require.

Specialist Knowledge

Companies choosing to hire IT support in Cheshire, for example, can take advantage of the services of a team of qualified professionals, all with expertise in specific areas. This specialist knowledge is far more beneficial than employing a single IT administrator who may only have general knowledge. Expertise can be acquired through training, but this is a costly process. An IT support company will ensure that their technicians have been given the relevant training, passing this expertise on to your company without you having to make major investments in human resources.

Infrastructure

Maintaining the ability to adapt to new demands is the key to a successful and strong business. Developments in technology happen at a fast pace. Hiring an outsourcing company can help your business to keep abreast of these changes. IT support specialists can design infrastructures that allow for the addition of new services, workflows and technologies to be installed when the need arises.

Reliability

When IT systems crash, it can be a stressful, frustrating and expensive experience. Any glitch in a company's IT system can have a catastrophic effect on its revenue. Ensuring that your company is able to function, your employees are able to work and your customers are able to buy is essential. Hiring the services of an IT support specialist will help to minimise downtime and service issues. Experienced trouble-shooters can also take steps to ensure that problems do not repeat themselves.

Support

We live in the age of the internet, which has caused us to change the way we approach business. In traditional high street commerce models, companies operate in standard business hours between Monday and Friday. However, the internet facilitates online businesses' ability to operate a 24 hour service. Many businesses worry that outsourcing to an IT support company will leave them vulnerable without any expertise out of hours when they really need it. However, most outsourcing companies offer telephone based assistance with qualified operatives that deliver support 24/7. They can monitor your systems, deliver server management and even carry out remote administrative maintenance, ensuring your systems are up and running at all hours of the day.

Author Bio: Trevor Gordon is an experienced ICT consultant based in Warrington. He believes that IT support in Cheshire is the best in the country.

Benefits of Hiring a Local Logo Design Company

Significance of a Logo

Personalizing your product brand is one of the ideal options to experience business development. A logo depicts the scope of your business and speaks about is volume. Earlier people approached logo designing agencies for creating a brand image for their business; however, the request was implemented in print media. With the tremendous development of technology in design media, many software companies have started offering logo designing services. Also many Logo designing companies have come into the market who assist their clients in creating unique and attractive logos for their business.

Implications of Having a Logo

Logos need to be designed in an attractive and informative way and at the same time they should easily identifiable since logo will help your customers recognize your products in the market. Your product might have several benefits when compared to other identical products, however creating a brand logo will have some special effect on your business since it will help you reach the target customers easily.

A logo on your business presentations and marketing collaterals can add up an enhanced image of your business. Moreover, logo builds up your company’s impression and identity in conferences, marketing, seminars and advertising. A good brand image built via logo also helps you stand out of the competition in the market.

Outsourcing Logo Designing Service

There are several highly skilled logo designers in India; hence, quite a few people outside the country choose Indian logo design companies to outsource their logo design projects.

In such scenario, it is advisable to go for a company that gives your business a competitive advantage amidst the other identical businesses. Working with proficient designers will help you reach the targeted clientele quickly and effectively. So, you must select a logo design service that can cater to long term branding needs.

Advantages of Hiring a Local Logo Designing Company

If you are a start-up business, ideally you should prefer a local logo designer who can understand your business needs in a better way and provide prompt results. Besides, preferring a local design company will benefit you in terms of following advantages

• Custom made personalized logo concept
• Affordable pricing
• Quality and quick results
• Best deals available in local logo designing companies

Another advantage of choosing a logo design company in your locality is that you can feel the ease of working with programmers and designers as they are highly trained and experienced in dealing with the regional customers. However, before finalizing a particular company, you should first collect enough information about the company in terms of their previous projects, read the customer reviews and analyze the ratings achieved by that company.

Author Bio: Manoj Bhardwaj is a Blogger Specializing in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization. Currently, He is Working With Addictive Media, New Delhi, India. Manoj Has Authored Several Blogs on Web Design, SEO, SMO and Web Services Like Web Design Gurgaon and Web Design Cardiff. You Can Follow Him on Twitter at @manojbhardwaj

8 Must Have Features in Your Intranet

It’s good when organizations decide to explore the path of greater efficiency and productivity with an Intranet system. Whether you want to build a new intranet or modify an existing one, providing features that attract the attention and actually excite your employees is a difficult task. The following is a small guide to the 8 most effective features of a good intranet.




Intranet Features

Document & Content Management 

This is the main feature/function of any Intranet system. An Intranet system should store and manage company documents in the form of files, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc. It acts as a gateway of knowledge allowing employees to store, access and share the content and documents securely and easily with just a few clicks.

Search Capability

A good Intranet system should have an enterprise search feature. The search feature helps employees pull the information related to content or people by searching through specific keywords or phrases, categories, filtering the tagged content, etc. A good Search feature also enables employees to find items stored on the intranet even when they don’t know what exactly they are looking for using ‘suggested search results’.

Information Generator

An Intranet system should allow members to generate and view information as and when required. Timely request processing and form processing are important tasks to be performed every now and then. An Intranet with good information generation capabilities allows employees to access business information such as forms, workflows, employee details, reports, etc. as and respond to business tasks more rapidly and efficiently.

Security 

Every company has some sort of confidential data such as company plans & policies, personnel information and financial data, which is shared only on a need-to-know-basis. A good Intranet should have tight password protected security layers that blocks unauthorized access and relieves you from the worries of data misuse and theft.

Integration 

An intranet system must integrate business critical information and KRAs such as total sales, revenue generated, expenses incurred, traffic generated, etc. This will help employees get up-to-date information about their company in order to make wise decisions. It will also help in responding to many business needs at a time and in generating real time reports by refreshing and integrating company information whenever any essential data changes.

Sharing & Collaboration 

Where there are great employees, there are great ideas and opinions which should be shared with other members. A good Intranet should not miss the great feature of sharing and collaboration since Intranet is the only platform where communication flows in different ways i.e. top to bottom, bottom to top, peer to peer, etc. Moreover, to make sharing a non-stop process, organizations should incorporate a blogging feature in their Intranet since it will help employees to share, view and comment on the posts of internal as well as external participants.

Social Networking 

Companies are recognizing the value of social networking and social sharing over the internet. Moreover, with the increasing demand of bringing the social networking inside the corporate walls in order to create awareness about the company online as well as to include it in the marketing strategy, companies should look for an Intranet suite that supports social networking. With appropriate widgets of each social site in the Intranet, employees can connect with people, create a sense of community and build a brand image at no cost.

Available On-Cloud 24x7 

A good Intranet should not limit its access within the corporate boundaries. Rather, it should be deployed On-Cloud to make it available to employees 24x7 so that they do not lose the connectivity with their organization when they are away from the office. This will help them in responding and acting on information and reports on time through their laptop, mobile phone, home PC, or any other network.

The above mentioned 8 features are the must-haves from your prospective Intranet. For those out there who are already using Intranet in their organization, check out where your Intranet stands and how much it scores.

Selenium vs. QTP vs. TestingWhiz

Testing automation tools enable developers and testers to easily automate the entire process of testing in software development. The technology market offers a wide range of automated testing tools that caters to specific testing such as web application testing, mobile application testing. Talking about web application automation tools, there are several open source as well as commercial tools availalbe in the market. Open source tools require low investment but lack support and maintenance whereas commercial tools are quite expensive.

To help testers narrow down their choice from the wide range of available web application automation tools, we have charted a list of features of the three highly used testing tools, which are recommended by most of the test managers and automation engineers. These testing tools are Selenium, QTP 10 and TestingWhiz.

• Dependence on Programming Skills: Whereas QTP and Selenium require 3-4 months of training to learn their proprietary programming languages, TestingWhiz does not demand any programming knowledge. Even a novice tester with no coding experience can get started with TestingWhiz.
• Record and Playback facility:  Selenium and QTP have their respective platform i.e. Selenium IDE and Windows internet explorer, where they can offer record and playback facility, whereas TestingWhiz can offer the same on multiple platforms like IE, FF, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
• Support for Data Driven Testing – HP QTP requires Complex VB scripting and Selenium requires extensive coding for data driven testing. On the contrary, TestingWhiz has in built data tables for effective data driven testing.
• Database Support – When it comes to DB support, QTP demands for DSN (OBDC32 interface) and selenium demands for extensive coding but, TestingWhiz does not require any scripting. It offers database support through Oracle, MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, and MySQL.
• Access to Object Repository – Through selenium, it is not editable, whereas through other two i.e. QTP 10 and TestingWhiz, it is editable. In addition, object repository is re-usable through TestingWhiz.
• Test Case – In QTP and Selenium, every test case consists of block of coding statements, whereas in TestingWhiz no coding blocks exist. Test case is managed through set of keywords in TestingWhiz.
• Support to Programming Language– Selenium and QTP offers support to limited programming language, whereas TestingWhiz provide support to more than 120 coding languages.
• Functional and Load Testing – QTP requires complex coding for functional and load testing but, TestingWhiz has WhizAgents for varied distributed testing. It is noticeable that selenium does not support functional and load testing.
• Result Reporting Types – In QTP, results are stored in binary files, which can be turned into various formats.  Selenium generates basic reporting, whereas TestingWhiz generates advanced reporting with multiple screenshots and reporting API.
• Defect and Test Management Integration Facility – Test management integration is possible in TestingWhiz and QTP 10 via HP quality center, whereas Selenium does not offer such integration. Defect management integration facility is in-built in QTP but, TestingWhiz offers the same with Atlassian, JIRA and Mantis.
• Supporting OS – QTP can be run on Windows only, Selenium offers support to Windows and Linux but, TestingWhiz is stable on 3 OS platforms including – Windows, Linux and Mac.
• Price – QTP is available for $6000 USD, and charges $1500 USD as maintenance amount, whereas TestingWhiz is available for free and there is also a paid enterprise version, contact for its quote. Selenium can be purchased for free.
• Scheduled Execution – It is possible through Selenium (With the help of complex code) and TestingWhiz but, not possible through QTP 10.

Looking at the above comparison, TestingWhiz defeats Selenium and QTP in every feature and stands out as an ideal tool for web application automation testing.

Want to experience TestingWhiz? Download free trial

Mobile Device Management (MDM) – An Essential Ingredient of Enterprise Mobile Security

With mobile device replacing enterprise IT assets (desktops and laptops) due to trends like BYOD, wireless workforce, tablet adoption, etc. IT security professionals face severe challenges to ensure security of corporate data and information being accessed by these devices. Organizations completely rely on security managers to confirm that the company data used by the mobile workforce is secure.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) is slowly becoming the need of an hour in enterprise mobile security concerns. MDM is a policy of deploying, securing, monitoring, integrating and managing mobile devices in the workplace. The intent of MDM is to optimize the functionality of mobile devices within the enterprise and protecting the corporate network. According to The Nemertes Research Group Inc, 46% of companies have implemented MDM and 84% are expected to embrace the MDM practice by the end of 2014.

With this the demand of software for managing the mobile devices is growing rapidly. Mobile Device Management Software allows securing and managing all the mobile device deployments remotely. It gives Security Managers, way to troubleshoot the mobile device management by allowing them to distribute configurations and data settings and resolving patches in the devices and applications. Software for MDM generally supports file synchronization and sharing, data security and corporate content security. Besides most software of mobile device management include following features:

• Mobile Application Management (MAM) or Enterprise Application Management
• Workspace Security for documents, information and applications
• Secure Document Sharing (SDS) with platforms like Dropbox, SharePoint, etc.
• WLAN Integration for network security
• Certificate Authority Integration

Of all these MDM functionalities, mobile application management feature is used by 29% of enterprises. Companies in mobile application development also consider MAM for managing, distributing, licensing mobile applications developed by them. On the other hand, document sharing from mobile devices requires more control unlike desktops and laptops. Thus SDS feature of MDM provides necessary APIs to control and secure the document sharing practice from mobile devices.

Looking at the features of MDM, especially MAM and SDS, it should be considered as a primary tool to ensure security of mobile devices within the enterprise and apps and functionalities running on them.

Looking to develop a software for managing mobile devices and applications at your place? Contact us at info@cygnet-infotech.com or visit http://www.cygnet-infotech.com/enterprise-mobility/byod-management

Business Intelligence Best Practices

Enterprise business intelligence is an important concept for modern businesses, encompassing the most effective strategies, tools, technologies, theories and practices for managing data. In most cases, business intelligence refers to digital data, as most information is stored electronically in this day and age. An effective business intelligence solution can help a company manage its supply chain and meet its own goals, such as customer satisfaction, productivity, cost efficiency and more, with a range of innovative technologies and tools. Effective technology solutions are especially important for global business intelligence, where the supply chain may span countries and continents, making it particularly difficult to handle all the data. That being said, not all business intelligence solutions are effective. In order to make the most of a company’s big data, there are certain best practices that must be followed. 

Rely on Business Intelligence Experts

Some businesses make the mistake of relying on IT professionals to develop their business intelligence plan because they assume the technology experts will be best equipped to manage the digital data they have at their fingertips. The problem is that effectively managing and analyzing data requires business tools, not just technology tools, and the solutions should be developed by professionals who understand the most efficient and effective enterprise solutions. The best bet is to work with qualified business intelligence consultants who also have programming capabilities in order to achieve a strategic solution that addresses both technological and business-oriented needs.

Make Sure Your Solutions Are Easy to Use

An effective business intelligence solution is one that is easy to use, plain and simple. If it isn’t easy to use, there is a high likelihood of frequent human error that will prevent your organization from making the most of your data. The tools and technologies you develop to manage your digital information should be automated as much as possible, and require a minimal number of mouse clicks otherwise. All tools should be developed with cost/benefit analysis in mind and tested to ensure ease of use with end users. 

Build a Central Database and Keep it Clean

In order to manage your data effectively, you must also build a centralized database where it is all contained, but only after being screened for errors and low-quality data that should be eliminated. This may include all data from in-house sources as well as business partners and other outside sources. The architecture of this database should be carefully structured to support the needs of the organization as it continues to grow and evolve, and to accommodate for new technology tools in the future.

There are many advantages to enjoy once you have a successful enterprise business intelligence system in place. With the right tools, technologies, methods and processes, your organization can manage all levels of your supply chain more effectively and efficiently, even in a global business environment. This will reduce the amount of work it takes to analyze your data and increase the level of accurate, useful, strategic information you have available. With fewer resources devoted to business intelligence, you can focus more on improving your products and services, driving productivity, keeping clients happy and attracting new generations of clients in the future. If you have effective technology tools that are properly implemented, your organization will also have a fuller picture of the data, and not just a micro view of data subsets separate from one another. In the end, this saves time, money and resources while adding substantial value to your business plan. It’s worth the effort and investment to contact the most qualified business intelligence consultants to help put these best practices to use today.

Erik Johnson is the Digital Marketing Analyst for Paragon Solutions, an advisory consulting and systems integration firm that specializes in delivering enterprise business intelligence services for organizations in various industries.

Identify Blind Spots in Your Applications with Continuous Integration Testing

Continuous Integration is a software development practice that requires developers to integrate codes in the system in order to test the changes and identify errors early. Continuous Integration (CI) or Continuous Testing significantly reduces the backtracking to discover where things went wrong so that development teams can focus on developing software more rapidly.

CI reduces the period between developing and identifying defects which results in knocking a project on-schedule. Moreover, it dramatically increases the productivity and applies lean workflow in the development process. Many organizations have started adopting CI testing with an aim to deliver quality software in the given time-frame and lower the overall cost of development.

Continuous Testing is a continuous cycle which can be applied in different methods of testing such as load testing, performance testing, regression testing, etc. Applied in whichever fashion, Continuous Integration Testing helps achieve greater scalability, productivity and quality throughout the software development lifecycle.

Take a detailed tour of Continuous Integration Testing and its various aspects with the below presentation.

Continuous Integration Testing Fundamentals

For consultation on Continuous Integration Testing, email us at info@cygnet-infotech.com or visit www.cygnet-infotech.com