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Go Social with SharePoint 2010, Bootstrap Innovation Monday, January 23, 2012

When an organizations workforce grows rapidly, it often becomes difficult for the organization to efficiently engage with its employees.To overcome this challenge and collaborate better organizations can leverage the social features of SharePoint 2010, implementing an intranet with social features. SharePoint’s social features enable users to write blogs and micro blogs, perform rapid enterprise search, and integrate user profiles with the option of tagging etc. For instance finding a new member for the sales team can be accomplished through a quick search for Sales Executives across all company locations.

In the above example, the search fetches three results: more details on each candidate can be easily obtained by clicking on their names and displaying resource profiles.

Selecting the best resource for the team can be done efficiently, based on information on skills and experience. At any time, employees can updater their profile with more information about themselves. This way, information, pictures, and documents can be shared across the organization.

Tags: SharePoint 2010
Posted by Lokesh V and Ansari S.P | No Comments

Software Testing Trends To Watch for in 2012 Wednesday, January 11, 2012

With the growing complexity and dependence on software applications, software testing and quality assurance is becoming an increasing critical function. Here’s Marlabs take on the Software Testing trends to watch out for in 2012.

Mobile Application Testing

With the dramatic growth in mobile devices, mobile operating systems have taken center stage across the globe. Popular operating systems found in smart phones and mobile OS powered tablet computers include:

Android from Google
Symbian OS from the Symbian Foundation
iOS from Apple
Blackberry OS from RIM

Google Android OS has had amazing success and has grabbed over 43% of the market. The number of smart phones globally is estimated to reach over 500 million by 2014. There is a growing nexus between the mobile and cloud with a growing number of mobile apps leveraging the cloud to interact with enterprise systems at the back end. Data security has become key and some of the types of mobile testing that are becoming increasingly relevant are functional testing, browser compatibility testing, security testing, load testing, and localization and usability testing.

Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS)

There is increasing demand for TaaS to rapidly manage a wide range of testing projects, reduce production defects, and resolve testing issues on priority. Organizations are reaching out to third party providers for instance Google Docs TaaS offers a platform for a shared services model. This will be beneficial as ramp up and ramp down of resources can be done at any phase of the project. While India has so far been the most preferred destination for TaaS , it is expected to face competition from the countries such as the Philippines in 2012.

Business Intelligence Testing

The efficiency of a business intelligence tool can be gauged not just by its ability to analyze vast pools of data but also by the options it provides to extract real time data and identify key trends. It is effective testing that will ensure an efficient system that can pull out data, clean it, and present it in without compromising system performance.

Test Data Security Standard

While testing an application, confidential information could get exposed to testers. Clearly a breach can lead to significant damage. Proper test data management ensures the availability and security of test data by masking it on testing engagements. A number of testing vendors are researching various methods to mask data or create ‘test-only’ data that will help maintain privacy and security.

Cloud Testing

With the cloud computing market is soaring to new heights, more and more organizations are looking to host their applications on cloud servers and make them available via tablets and mobile devices. Testing applications on the cloud is also emerging as a promising area.

Business Intelligence (BI) as a Tool for Middle Management Monday, January 2, 2012

With the evolution of BI tools, the effectiveness of Business intelligence continues to improve by the day and the software vendors are developing more complete solutions. However, these systems are far too expensive and complicated to use at the middle management level. Access is often limited to senior executives and the system is maintained by an army of technical and analytical staffs.

When one considers the decision and process structure for most organization , it is easy to see how even the most complete BI solution can fall short in providing the value expected by the enterprise. Whether an organization is large or small, it is comprised of staff members with diverse responsibilities. Line staffs, supervisors and middle level managers are required to contribute information to support business decisions, yet these managers rarely have access to information outside their own department.

Most middle managers are experts in their own discipline, but rarely understand other aspects of the business causing to missing information and assumptions in decision. An ideal Business Intelligence (BI) solution should provide a cost effective integrated environment in which a knowledge base reporting methodology and critical metrics can empower users to take day to day and long term middle management decisions.

At the center lies the business decision. Rather than keeping the business components integrated, the critical knowledge remains the sole property of each functional domain.

Tags: BI, BI Solutions, BI Tools, Business Intelligence
Posted by Marlabs | No Comments

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