WordPress 3.0 RC1 is a great tool that can be used to present people’s ideas on the web. The main priorities of this platform are to be beautiful, convenient to use, and comply with the latest web standards. In short, this platform is designed to make everything simple. When you use a simple publishing platform like this, you can focus on building your content, rather than wasting your time just to configure your blog.

WordPress 3.0 RC1 is a platform designed for publishing contents that focuses on creating and maintaining personal journals. To install this platform, you need a web space on a server with PHP and MySQL databases. Once you have WordPress 3.0 RC1 installed, you can start writing and publishing your contents. In each of the entry that you made in this platform, you can insert images, videos, and sounds with ease. You don’t need to have any special coding knowledge. You can create your entries just like when you are working using a word processor. The admin panel at WordPress 3.0 RC1 has been lightened, so that it can run more smoothly and you can focus more on developing your contents.

With WordPress 3.0 RC1, you are facing endless possibilities. Beyond the power achieved through labels and categories, this platform has a wide variety of plugins and skins that you can use. You can easily find a lot of plugins and skins on WordPress’s website. For plugins itself, there are currently 9,840 plugins available, so that there’s always a plugin for something. You can also use the search engines to find plugins and themes. There are many websites that provide them. Most of the plugins and themes are available for free. But sometimes, you have to pay for them.

WordPress 3.0 RC1 is simply the best blog publishing platform that you can find on the web.

Source: wpthemesplugin.com

Outsourcing Center conducted a study among 65 of the outsourcing relationships nominated for the 2009 Outsourcing Excellence Awards. Almost half of the service providers stated they developed entirely new best practices for the nominated relationship, which the providers plan to implement with their other customers. Four providers reported that they developed more than one new best practice in their relationship.

The study then analyzed the 31 new best practices the service providers described and found a trend in the drivers for the uptick in developing new best practices.

Drivers for creating a new best practice

Most of the new best practices arose from working through unanticipated challenges that occurred. In addition, although some of the new best practices involved modifying one or more of the service provider’s existing best practices, the majority of the new best practices brought into play new procedures and activities that previously had not been necessary or needed to be modified.

As Exhibit 1 shows, more than half of the new best practices arose from new needs such as complexities in a process (for globalization objectives or mobile processes, for instance) or from a new focus (such as taking a proactive approach or taking a business approach rather than solely an IT approach to a decision).

Exhibit 1: Trend in drivers for developing new best practices

Outsourcing Center’s study also found that the 31 best practices segment into seven types of procedures, techniques, or activities (see Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2: Seven types of new best practices found in study

As Exhibit 2 reveals, study participants reported that creating a new tool, new methodology, or a new training process were the most frequent focus of their new best practices. In all of these cases, the need for a new best practice arose because of increasing complexities in business processes.

Examples of new best practices

Globalization is at the forefront of many newly created best practices. As service providers apply their existing standard best practices to larger, international contract scope, they find that managing the projects requires new techniques, procedures, and activities devised for specific regions. After modifying its existing transition-phase best practices for a customer with locations in more than 100 countries, one provider now exploits its global management governance model as the best-practice blueprint for other similar customers.

Similarly, several providers reported they developed new best practices around software configuration management to support different versions in a customer’s different subsidiaries in different global locations.

Several best practices focus on training and end-user feedback. One arose in a situation where the buyer added new products or services that the provider supported but the buyer’s end users had not performed that work before and had unrealistic expectations for the service. The best practice established training around expectation setting.

In another relationship, the service provider implemented a cross-training best practice of grouping processes that have an affinity in tasks, steps, or system access. Training its resources across these affinities resulted in an additional capacity of 20 percent over contracted capacity.

Another provider implemented a focus group of end users to continually provide feedback on its solution for the purpose of continuous improvement.

A knowledge-transfer and training best practice created for an offshore service provider begins with the customer sharing the standard operating procedures. It then shifts to workshops where the provider’s team plays back its understanding of the procedures. Once both parties are on the same level of understanding, the customer teaches the actual process steps through WebEx Live meetings. This process saves time and reduces the overall cost of transition.

Other providers are establishing best practices that focus on modifying their team’s negative behavioral characteristics. This has better outcomes because the best-practice method gives them new skill sets, rather than just telling them (with or without an incentive) that they need to perform better.

In the human resources world, a service provider’s best practice established a certified Specialist role to serve as a single point of contact for high-impact events such as retirement or death, assigned to handle the end-to-end process including educating the customer’s benefits member.

Another provider of BPO services created a new role of an “Operations Manager” with responsibility for long-term planning. This level of management focuses beyond the day-to-day service delivery and SLA fulfillment level with best practices to build trust and ensure that the provider delivers value above the contractual terms.

One study participant reported that it revamped its existing project management methodology due to the demands of a particular client for evidence of return on investment (ROI). This is an increasing demand in the marketplace and becoming an important decision factor in provider selection. This provider’s best-practice project management methodology now includes ROI templates along with detailed project plans.

As a different example of new complexities affecting standard best practices, deviations in a customer’s back-up process prevented a provider from implementing its standardized best-practice back-up service. The two companies worked together to eliminate as much of the deviation as possible within the designated tools. The outcome was actually a more flexible standard for the provider, which it now plans to use in other client situations.

Among other new best practices for the providers participating in the study are the following:

• Joint root cause analyses for all critical issues and doing a trending analysis of all root causes captured
• The buyer’s financial and non-financial strategies to motivate the service provider’s staff on an individual level to achieve more passion and commitment to the objectives
• Random audits and independent scoring of call center sessions to gather data and discuss variances in provider and customer scoring, with the goal of follow-up to hone processes so that both organizations’ scoring will be within a designated variance of each other

One provider in the study actually established best practices for 242 clinical workflows for a medical center or hospital, which result in the speed and accuracy of patient data presented to a clinician.

Advice for buyers

Outsourcing Center’s annual studies of successful outsourcing relationships clearly indicates that, although some buyers think of them as table stakes, most buyers include “industry-standard best practices” and “best-practice methodologies” among their selection criteria in the service provider selection process. Given the impact of quickly changing technologies and the impact of new workflow requirements because of globalization and mobile processes, buyers of outsourcing services also should consider looking at a service provider’s newly created best practices in these areas.

These types of best practices will result in significant cost, quality, performance, security, and other measurable impacts on the outsourcing return on investment.

How the study was conducted: Outsourcing Center studied comments provided during 2009 by service providers in 65 IT and business process outsourcing relationships worldwide. The information was provided in a written questionnaire

Source: ITonews

A study by the company reveals that outsourcing application building is particularly important as applications make up to 40 to 60 per cent of most IT budgets, but they are rarely outsourced.

Infrastructure and communications outsourcing are far more widespread and many businesses have adopted this approach.

John Hanley, managing director of Fujitsu, said outsourcing can save money, and that applications are “the next big area CIOs are under pressure to address”.

“The application outsourcing market is not as developed or as advanced as infrastructure outsourcing, but huge cost savings can be realised.”

He added that the need for businesses to stay competitive drove them towards outsourcing as the best solution to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Previously, Cery Perle, CEO of Spare Backup, computer security specialist, also expressed his belief that IT outsourcing improves the productivity and profitability of a business.

Source: IHotDesk

Outsourcing became a good way out for getting more work done for less money paid but still not every kind of work (and not every business process, of course) can be passed for outsourcing. This fact keeps the in-house employees calm about their future in the company, and even gives them a great opportunity for salary increase. The salary increase for in-house workers becomes a consequence of actually saving company’s money by outsourcing time-consuming  work to the third party (for example, offshore web development company).  Offering a higher salary, such a company can hire more talented and experienced in-house workers, and therefore increase its’ overall financial efficiency.

Another great advantage of outsourcing is its’ impact on company’s overall productivity. Productivity is always a key measure that leads to company’s success and prosperity. Increase of productivity has always been a main point for any employer and in this case outsourcing turns out to be the best solution. It allows to maximize the result the company gets for the same money it spends – either passing a certain part of a current work or business process to the third party (offshore company) or developing the new services or products and conquering the new markets with the help of the offshore outsourcing partner. While outsourcing leads to increase in company’s productivity, it allows company to expand, and open new vacancies in-house.

The most common part of work done in-house that is now passed for outsourcing is definitely a web development part. Whether we talk about custom web development of specific web applications that automate company’s business processes,  or about new projects that are developed and maintained by IT outsourcing companies, it’s always important to find a reliable outsourcing partner that will understand all company’s needs and will be able to handle projects in time and deliver the best quality.

Comparing main IT offshore development destinations  (China, India, the Eastern Europe) of today’s IT market, their peculiarities of doing business, relations with clients, working discipline etc., the Eastern Europe can be named a rising star. Unlike India and China, who occupied leading positions in offshore development during last years and became rapidly developing countries with instantly growing outsourcing prices and salaries in IT sphere, the Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine, as a non-EU country) is still a growing IT outsourcing market with  predictable outsourcing price stability for at least 3-5 years more. The education in IT sphere (in Ukraine as an example) during last years remains at a top level and meets the IT market’s changing demands. The political stability and still complicated economical situation (which will take at least 10 years to take it to a new level) make Ukraine “a calm shore” for any IT development business. And for American or European companies seeking for IT outsourcing partner, the convenient geographical position (2-3 hours flights from Ukraine’s capital to the most European cities and direct 10hour flights to the USA)  gives additional opportunities for managing outsourcing projects, meeting contractors and as a result – being always “in-depth” of the development process and one step ahead of the competitors.

Outsourcing became an ultimate solution for cost reduction  being used by companies in different spheres of business. Their wide experience and constantly  increasing financial results prove the outsourcing to be cost-effective, highly productive and time saving business tool that not only creates working places in offshore country, but also supports in-house personnel, explore in-house talents and makes a company a “premier league player”.

Outsourcing – Outsourcing is – to put it plain and simply – subcontracting. When you hear someone use the phrase “IT outsourcing services,” they are referring to merely subcontracting IT work to a third party. Outsourcing, contrary to popular belief, does not necessarily refer to sending work overseas. A company in Minneapolis could “outsource” work to a company in St. Paul. One of the most common examples of outsourcing is telephone sales and call center services. While many companies used to employ their own in-house call centers, these services are now usually subcontracted through a third party company.

Offshore – Offshore is a pretty simple term: It merely refers to any company, service, or client that is based overseas. Offshore outsourcing means that you are subcontracting work to overseas companies. If a company based in Texas has subcontracted an IT outsourcing company in Ukraine to develop their website or provide their call center services, that Texas company has outsourced offshore. Offshore outsourcing does not, however, refer to hiring employees from overseas to work at your company in-house.

Now that you understand the difference between these two phrases, let’s look at the benefits of outsourcing within the U.S. versus outsourcing overseas.

Outsourcing Offshore – Outsourcing offshore is one of the best strategies for a company to get work done without breaking the bank; as in, offshore outsourcing allows companies to accomplish necessary tasks (such as creating efficient websites or call centers) without having to hire new talent in-house for things like IT application development, product development and rich internet application development. Offshore outsourcing also allows companies to access an entirely new talent pool, and allows access to brilliant new technology that is not yet prevalent in the United States.

Outsourcing Domestically – Domestic outsourcing usually happens for two reasons: Either a company is subcontracting another company for work they cannot do in-house, or, a company is seeking cheap call center services. Typically, outsourcing offshore is more lucrative. Not only is it usually far more cost efficient, but it also allows companies to access quality professionals and technologies that are not widely found in the U.S.

Source: ITONews

Outsourcing software jobs, even on a regular basis, can be profitable. Most people incorrectly assume outsourcing is a short term solution when a quick fix is needed and that it can not be a long term way of doing business while still enjoying profitability. IT outsourcing is a good idea in the software industry for a couple of very important reasons.

One of the most prominent reasons is the software industry is continually evolving and outsourcing software jobs to independent contractors or other software firms gives companies an increased flexibility that is not possible when they rely solely on their in-house software personnel. Being able to offer clients a wider range of skills is beneficial to the company.

This can be achieved through outsourcing software jobs to individuals or firms with unique skill sets. Another key element to the theory of it being profitable to outsource software jobs is the effect of virtually increasing your manpower through this process. This article will discuss these two components in greater detail to explain how outsourcing software jobs can be profitable.

Increased Flexibility through Outsourcing

One way outsourcing software jobs helps companies to be more profitable is by increasing their flexibility. This is especially important in the software industry where there is a continuing education process which must be followed in order to stay up to date with the latest software, technology and trends in the industry.

Maintaining an in-house staff of employees who were up to date on all of the latest issues in the industry would be time consuming and costly not to mention extremely difficult, if not impossible. Employees would spend more time in training then they would spend completing their actual work which would result in the inability to meet deadlines. It may also result in missed opportunities if there are currently no in-house employees qualified to perform specific tasks.

One way to avoid these pitfalls is to rely on outsourcing to fill in the gaps when there are project needs beyond the abilities of the in-house staff. This allows a company to keep their clients happy by being able to meet their needs. When this happens the company is much more likely to see return work from the client than they were if they floundered on previous tasks.

The flexibility outsourcing provides also allows companies to afford the luxury of allowing their employees to participate in important training classes. This is an important issue because while training and continuing education does make employees more marketable, it also costs the company in terms of productivity because the employees are not profitable during the course of their training.

However, if companies are outsourcing some of their software jobs while some of their in-house employees are in training classes, the company gets the benefit of more knowledgeable employees without having to pass on potentially profitable endeavors in the employee’s absence.

Increased Manpower through Outsourcing

In addition to the flexibility issues described above, outsourcing has the added bonus of essential increasing a company’s manpower making them more appealing to potential clients. While there are always going to be some potential clients who are drawn to the appeal of a smaller company, the vast majority would prefer dealing with a larger company that has the manpower necessary to meet all of their complex needs. Outsourcing gives a company the luxury of having industry experts at their disposal without having to maintain these individuals on staff.

Increased manpower through outsourcing is also beneficial when companies want to attempt to procure larger projects. A company may spend years working on smaller projects because they do not have the manpower to adequately complete larger projects.

However, realizing how to properly utilize outsourcing gives many smaller companies the confidence they need to begin searching for more complex projects. This is significant because these larger projects will result in a higher rate of profitability.

Source: ArticlesAlley.com

In its quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Adobe said (emphasis mine):

We offer our desktop application-based products primarily on Windows and Macintosh platforms. We generally offer our server-based products on the Linux platform as well as the Windows and UNIX platforms. To the extent that there is a slowdown of customer purchases of personal computers on either the Windows or Macintosh platform or in general, to the extent that we have difficulty transitioning product or version releases to new Windows and Macintosh operating systems, or to the extent that significant demand arises for our products or competitive products on other platforms before we choose and  are able to offer our products on these platforms our business could be harmed. Additionally, to the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed.

Adobe’s disclosure comes as Apple’s developer agreement for iPhone OS 4.0 forbids connectors to Flash. There are a few things to note about that passage. For starters, Apple wasn’t listed as a risk factor in Adobe’s annual report. In fact, Adobe played down the risk of HTML5 as a Flash rival. From the annual report in January:

Version 5 of the Web markup language HTML (“HTML5”) is being developed by an industry consortium that includes Adobe and leading browser manufacturers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.  HTML5 will contain new features which will compete with some of the features of Flash Player, such as the ability to play video natively within the browser.  We will work to implement support for HTML5 in our Web authoring solutions.  Yet, we believe the competing interests of the browser developers, and the potential for inconsistency in how each major browser implements HTML5 will create a continuing demand for solutions such as Flash that provide a consistent presentation capability that works across browsers, operating systems and devices.

Here’s what Adobe said about Apple in its annual report:

With respect to the Apple iPhone, although our desire is to work closely with Apple to deliver Adobe Flash Platform technologies on their device similar to our approach with other mobile vendors, we are prohibited from making advancements towards this goal until we have Apple’s cooperation to do so.

The conclusion: Apple’s decision to keep Flash off the iPad was a manageable threat to the business. Now that Apple has launched the iPad, the threat to Flash isn’t as contained.

Source: Blogs.zdnet.com

1. Facebox : Facebook-style lightbox

2. Making a Photoshoot Effect With jQuery & CSS

3. Fancy Thumbnail Hover Effect w/ jQuery

4. Beautiful Slide Out Navigation: A CSS and jQuery Tutorial

5. Create a Slick and Accessible Slideshow Using jQuery

6. A fancy Apple.com-style search suggestion

7. Hovering Scroll to Top Button With JQuery

8. AJAX Tabs With jQuery 1.4 & CSS3

9. “Who Is Online” Widget With PHP & jQuery

10. Coding a CSS3 & HTML5 One-Page Website Template

11. jQuery image viewer plugin

12. Jquery TopUp Light Box

13. Animated Navigation with CSS & jQuery

14. Sexy Drop Down Menu w/ jQuery & CSS

15. Color Fading Menu with jQuery

16. Vimeo-like top navigation

17. Amazing Music Player

18. Jquery Slide SubNav

19. Jquery PHP Chat

20. Contact Jquery Plugin

21. Date Picker

22. Ajax Fancy Captcha – Jquery Plugin

23. Slide-in jQuery Contact Form

24. Signing dropdown box likes Twitter with jQuery

25. MicroTut: The jQuery Hover Method

26. Extended Breadcrumbs Jqury Plugin

27. Easy Display Switch with CSS and jQuery

28. Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

29. jQuery – dropline with current selection

30. Horizontal dropline/dropdown/flyout menu using jQuery

Source: WebdesignersBlog.net

Thriving in today’s business environment has become more challenging than ever. If you are a small business owner, it is unlikely that you have the time, money, or resources to dominate your marketplace. This is why using our IT outsourcing company is a great idea for grounding your business in any environment. Read below for a list of benefits gained from using a professional technology services provider.

• Free up resources to concentrate on core business functions – Employees are used to the best of their abilities when they are focused on their core competencies. The time, effort, and resources spent on learning IT tasks have a very real opportunity cost in the long run. Dealing with IT-related issues is enormously inefficient and time consuming for those untrained in Information Technology. By using a professional technology service provider, your staff is free to focus on revenue generating opportunities and their own specific tasks.
• Reduce costs and operating expenses – The value of an IT outsourcing company services go far beyond cost reduction, and typically result in substantial hard dollar savings. On average, small businesses will spend up to 50% less than the cost of hiring just one mid-level IT professional. Additional costs able to be avoided with our services include recruiting, training, vacation, sick days, and turnover. With the help of IT outsourcing company, all costs are budgeted, planned, and controlled.
• Easy access to specialized expertise – The dizzying rate of change in the Information Technology field means that IT-related tasks are best left to the professionals. The services IT outsourcing company provides allows businesses to utilize specialized expertise that would otherwise be too expensive to maintain in-house. The good IT outsourcing company offers access to teams of IT professionals that provide both ongoing and critical support for small business networks.
• Get the technological edge over your competition - a professional IT outsourcing company can help you take advantage of new technologies that will allow your small business to keep up with the competition and react to competitive threats. We specialize in implementing the latest hardware, software, and network applications available. Our capabilities help small businesses move rapidly and speed time to market.
• Eliminate excessive downtime – Even a small amount of in-house downtime can end up costing a fortune. Small businesses can no longer afford to deal with problems with internet connectivity, corrupt data, and email communications. IT outsourcing company offers a tried and true approach to proactive systems maintenance, security, backup, and recovery. When these services are coupled with our remote systems monitoring and round-the-clock response capabilities, costly downtime effectively becomes a thing of the past.
• Increase productivity – True productivity and business benefit can only be realized when technology is properly implemented. IT outsourcing company’s state-of-the-art technologies are delivered through file servers, central databases, broadband connectivity, and mobile platforms to enable communication, collaboration, and knowledge.

Information Technology outsourcing is growing at a rapid rate in the United States because small businesses understand that it is a strategic way to achieve goals, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. Some companies in the Eastern Europe are really becoming the nation’s leading small business IT outsourcing companies. They have continued to deliver dynamic, cost-effective IT solutions to thousands of small businesses like yours for over 10 years. Log on today to see what the good IT outsourcing company from the Eastern Europe can do for you.

Source: Allcovered.com

The upcoming Microsoft Windows Phone 7, might look all consumer friendly, but enterprises want and expect more, especially when it comes to how mobile devices will handle SharePoint.

Big Things Are Afoot for SharePoint

We hope to see a difference between SharePoint Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.x and Windows Phone 7 series devices, like the difference between night and day. It has been a slow evolution for SharePoint on the mobile, but things seem about to take off in a major way.

The current application could easily be from the 90s

Early efforts have been very limited, but recently, we have seen the arrival of a beta of SharePoint Workspace Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.5. This offers shared documents, document viewers, configurable alerts, filtering and mobile shortcuts. Pages can easily be configured for mobile and (using the ?mobile=1 tag) while photos can be uploaded and status updates entered.

However, there is little in the way of live editing and limited use of the social elements that are now seen as a key part of SharePoint and appearing on mobile versions of other applications at a rate of knots.

The True Mobile Office Beckons

While much of SharePoint 2010′s Mobile features might be accessible now, the way we use them and the scope of features will change radically when the 7 series phones arrive. In fact, if SharePoint was a mystery to some users and even organizations, it will soon be right in their faces as Microsoft makes it key to linking the office desktop to the mobile. Microsoft will be pushing SharePoint as the key to help mobile users interact with colleagues, office documents and information.

The future offers something far brighter for Office and SharePoint users

The new Office Hub that links your desktop Office environment to the phone will bring productivity and collaboration in a more coherent manner than before on a mobile. With access to Office, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace all in one place, users can read, lightly edit and share documents with colleagues. With integration with your Outlook messages and contacts via Outlook Mobile, users will be able to stay productive and up to date while on the go.

Your Mobile Space

SharePoint 2010 will launch with mobile integration, but this has all been developed with existing phones in mind,  Windows Phone 7 should offer integration a step above what was planned.  Instead of relying on different apps or screens for your SMS alerts, viewing documents, search and microblogging — now, Microsoft has the chance to bring a fully-rounded, unified solution to upcoming devices.

With what we have seen of Windows Phone 7 so far, SharePoint and Office integration should be a seamless whole that takes the minimum amount of effort on the part of the user to get information and perform tasks.

SharePoint Something Special?

The prominence given to SharePoint on the Windows Phone 7′s front end hints that business is being taken just as seriously as the needs of Gamers (with Xbox account integration) and music/film lovers (with Zune integration). To illustrate the point, there’s an interesting message from Charlie Kindel on his MSDN blog:

We often remind developers that the vast majority of phones are purchased at retail, which means the “end user” we are focusing on is often referred to as a “consumer.” This is not to say that phones or Windows Phone 7 Series in particular are less valuable to business or corporate scenarios; it’s simply a comment on purchase behavior.

We are building a phone focused on the end-user. We are building a phone that will be, primarily, purchased by end-users. We know those end-users have busy personal & business lives. We are building a phone that will be GREAT for helping end-users deal with BOTH their personal & business lives.

While business users are eager to find out exactly what level of document integration, support for Active Directory or Exchange and other business essentials will be offered. It looks like Microsoft is keeping the door to the executive suite firmly shut for now, we await a more formal unveiling with great interest.

Source: CMSWire.com
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