Posts Tagged ‘London’

GPS, GIS, iPads and Android tablets

Monday, July 19th, 2010

GIS using Android and iPad tablet devices

We all know that GIS is the merging of cartography and database technology whereas GPS is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides reliable location and time information in all weather.

Using a combination of GIS and GPS, it is possible to create innovative applications for industry verticals. Assume yours is a multi location service operation or a retail store chain located at the suburbs of a metropolitan like New York or London. Field staff or people on the move have requirements to access enterprise data, and often in map formats (GIS). It could be about instant availability of a product or a service across these locations or tracking of an asset within a building using custom google maps. Large retail formats can have bespoke maps to enable customers trace products on the rack using locator services.

GIS based android applications or iPhone applications can simplify your search.needs.  Senior sales staff working on field would be able to connect with existing CRM solutions to access information on outlets, customers, suppliers or warehouses. The possibilities are endless and using a combination of GPS services and middle tier tools, it is now possible to integrate these tablet devices with enterprise data, enhanced by the power of GIS.

The one touch feature of tablet applications scores over cumbersome web applications that would require a log-on authentication, download of web page etc. One could define custom map points as the network expands.

We build and integrate custom map solutions with GPS integration for production, warehousing and consumer retail stores for asset tracking and enabling production data using a mix of ready to use frameworks for iPhone and google Android tablet devices.

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    Posted in Android, Google, Google API, Maps, apple, iPhone, research | No Comments »

    Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 competencies update

    Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

    Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.  read more

    We have added Mircosoft Office server 2007 as part of our offering with aim of generating better output for our customers. An update on Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 competencies, offered by our Microsoft web development group.

    • Installation, administration and basic configuration
    • Building sites with default WSS and MOSS Site templates
    • Building WSS custom site templates.
    • Manage user profiles,active directory users etc
    • Configure and implement search in WSS and MOSS    
    • Configuring searching services in sharepoint 2007
    • Manage contents in sharepoint application using building features
    • File management with versioning system and permission policies.
    • Creating Intranet and Internet sites based on WSS and MOSS 2007
    • Configuring intranet and extranet sites based on default templates
    • Customizing and branding the sharepoint 2007 Interface    
    • Out of box customization (web parts,site themes,site templates)
    • Developer focused customization (master pages,page layouts,CSS)
    • Programming WSS using object model and web service    
    • Understanding of sharepoint object model and web services
    • Creating simple collaboration solution with RSS,Blogs and Wikis    
    • Business Intelligence dashboards for verticals such as healthcare
    • Configuring forms based authentication    
    • Integration of FBA with sharepoint 2007
    • Custom webpart development

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      Posted in Microsoft, Sharepoint | 3 Comments »

      Project execution – The Agile way!

      Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

      Best practices – Agile scrum

      At Software Associates we have adopted the Agile Scrum way of working for execution of small and medium sized projects. This methodology lays stress on iterative development, focusing on a working product at all times in the execution lifecycle. A large project is broken down into releases and releases to sprints. The project gets executed through multiple time-boxed sprints, in which user stories are implemented as fully functional features and integrated into an evolving working product. Multiple small scrum teams are involved in the execution of the project instead of large teams.

      During the execution of a sprint, collaboration within the team is ensured through daily scrum meetings and progress is tracked through burn-down charts and scrum boards. A sprint culminates in a sprint demo that verifies the features developed against the acceptance criteria. A sprint retrospective conducted at the end of every sprint strives to improve the efficiency of the scrum team continuously.

      Some of the key advantages of agile model are as follows:

      •  Iterative method of execution through intermediate releases facilitates early feedback and corrections
      •  Requirements are consumed sprint by sprint in small portions. This enables start of development work even before complete clarity on the entire functionality is achieved. Clarifications for features being implemented are obtained sprint by sprint.
      •  Requirements are managed through product backlog and implemented sprint by sprint by creating sprint backlog. Each sprint / release gives an opportunity to reprioritize the features / user stories.
      • The early testing involved in the agile iterative approach unearths issues early on.

      e.mail or call  to know more about our services service can add value to your client projects

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        Posted in Agile | 4 Comments »

        Component library and knowledge management

        Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

        At Software Associates we give high stress on knowledge management. We strive to provide higher value to our customers by incorporating lessons from our past experiences. On same lines we have championed the use of component library which is a collection of reusable functional and cross-functional components. These components are customized and reused across projects to reduce effort in development and testing. Major features of component library are:

        • Basic architecture – and design guidelines that will be customized for each project. Reduces time on defining the architecture and helps in applying good design guidelines across projects.
        • Development acceleration tools – It is a repository of  code snippets that can be integrated into the development environment to accelerate development of code which follow standard pattern according to the design guidelines.
        • Code generator – Tools to auto generate components according to our design guidelines for standard functionalities like data access. Automated unit test cases also generated. Helps in getting a head-start with a set of generated components that is unit tested.
        • Cross-functional components – Cross functional logic like data access, session handling, exception handling, logging etc. are implemented, tested and maintained as components and reused across projects.
        • Functional Components – Different artifacts needed to implement common functional requirements like authentication, audit trail etc. are also managed as part of the component library and reused across projects.

        The major benefits from the component library are :

        • Faster time to delivery – component library with tools like code snippets, code generators and tested components helps create robust and stable code in much less time thereby ensuring faster delivery.
        • Robust and stable code –Usage of code generation, unit testing of generated code, pre-developed and tested components help in creating robust and stable code.

        Call Steve Roche on 020 3287 2635 (London direct) to know more about our services

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          Posted in knowledge management | No Comments »

          Android and iPhone tablet browsers

          Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
          Quality is free but no one is ever going to know it unless there is some agreed system of measurement. A report by Creative Good showed that 39 per cent of test shoppers failed in their buying attempts because sites were too difficult to navigate. Additionally, 56 per cent of search attempts failed.

          Portal development is only half the work done. You need professional web site testers who can unearth hidden bugs and enforce webs standards that would otherwise cost your company thousands of pounds in maintaining and fixing these costly errors. In 2004, the UK's Department of Inland Revenue experienced software errors that resulted in a $3.45 billion tax-credit over payment. 

          Here is a recent report on the horrors of coding errors – surprisingly from a mutual fund company

          It seems to be happening all over the world – but who or what is to blame? All web developers understand the need to test their own scripts, but few take the time or make it a priority to test early in the web application development cycle. The result is a vicious cycle of few tests, poor-quality code and an increasing amount of debugging work. This is often due to insufficient resources, lack of technical know how, inadequate planning, scope creep and poor design.

          Our experienced team of web and application testers could help you save thousands of dollars through our manual and automated testing procedures for ERP applications using TestComplete and selenium.

          We do quality assurance testing services for web portals, extranets and intranets; they include tests for cross browsers, website functionality, performance, security and web standards ; work closely with designers and developers to bring about drastic improvement in code quality and predictability. Our quality assurance projects include big names in United Kingdom such as O2, NHS, Honda, Esprit, Dell and Cadbury.

          Whether you are based at London or New York,  – our web standards testing, application testing and web portal application development and testing services are available to you at a short notice. We also provide long term independent testing services for web development companies who build portals and social networks to bring about tangible benefits in testing time and shorter version release cycles

          What we provide

          #Standard operating checklist with severity of errors
          • Critical Error
          • Lack of Functionality / Logical Error
          • Not Living up to Specification
          • Spelling or Grammar Error
          • Design Problem
          # Web security
          • SQL injection
          • Bot login prevention
          • JavaScript loopholes
          • Password protection
          • Document privacy
          • Reader privacy
          • IP restrictions
          • Credit card encryption
          # HTML web standards
          • W3C standards
          • Web accessibility
          • Section 508 compliance
          • AAA compliance
          • XHTML compliance
          # Cross browser compatibility testing
          • Internet Explorer 6
          • Internet Explorer 7
          • IE 8
          • Firefox 1.5 browser
          • Safari browser for Mac and Windows XP
          • IE 5.2 for Macintosh
          • Netscape browser 7.x
          • Opera 8.x
          • Android and iPhone tablet browsers
          # Coding and performance
          • Portal development standards
          • Web services testing
          • Web load performance testing
          • Automated web testing
          • Web site optimization
          • Website coder matrices
          # Requirements
          • Functional specification of the project
          • Client / Admin login access on staging server
          # Engagement models
          • Pay per bug
          • Fixed hour testing
          • Agile testing for large projects

          Write to us to know about skill sets and the services that we can provide to you. 

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            Posted in Android, HTML, QA, USA, Web standards, Web testing, best practices, iPhone, united kingdom | 2 Comments »

            Microsoft aspnet case studies

            Sunday, March 9th, 2008

            Recent .NET projects done by our dedicated offshore web application development team for clients in United States and United Kingdom.

            Event Management – London

            Our client wanted an enhanced event management system by incorporating a dynamic form building functionality. The existing system had a form building option developed in legacy scripting, which was not flexible enough to create forms with varied controls and validations.

            The admin users needed to design forms dynamically based on the information collected from the users for an event registration. The form controls added had be made mandatory and also be given the required validations. There was an option to format the title and descriptions of the form using HTML editor. Admin is able to reposition the form elements easily and update the form design. The system should also track the number of registrants for each form generated for these events.

            The client application was developed in ASP.NET 2.0 using C#. A layered architecture using Object Oriented method was followed strictly for the project. This made the system highly extensible and maintainable. New features in .NET 2.0 like master pages and generics were extensively used. By using generic object collections, runtime type conversion errors could be avoided.

            Restaurant booking system – London

            A flash based interactive website for a popular speciality restaurant in North London for their clients to make online booking for tables. The data had to be synchronised from an existing Php/Mysql CRM database.

            Flash enabled controls and components. Actionscript files for event handling and query generation. Custom built user components and controls for alerts,buttons, input, check and text boxes. ASP.NET Web service for general data retrieval method to accept XML stream and parsed into an SQL. Customer database table search with the help of regular expressions. Connectivity through data provider for MySQL

            Telecom component branding website – London

            A tool for the existing website to compare features of compatible products. Features: Option to select the product that customers currently use, which populates another list of compatible headsets and on selecting a compare option; Customers can view the features of the products.

            Secure admin to manage product features and linking compatible products. DataGrid control of .NET was put to use extensively for this purpose, which enabled faster and reliable application development.

            Extranet for airline catering company – London

            Website that manages and sells meal plans. Highly advanced WYSIWYG content management system to add meal plans and link it with them with recipes, food etc. An efficient Boolean search functionality with twenty-five filter parameters to search from over a thousand meal plans and their recipes. Custom built data listing functionality to show recipe ingredients and their alternative ingredients as child nodes with root as main ingredient in dynamically created and loaded UI controls. Custom developed tree view functionality to show registrants and weekly allotted meal plans.

            All words in the web pages that have an explanation in the glossary will be dynamically linked to the library section. A layered popup showing a small description with read more hyperlinks will be shown when the mouse is over the linked word. Regular expressions used while page rendering to develop this functionality. Compatible with web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox 1.5, Safari, Mac IE and Opera.

            Windows service for allotting the meal plans on a weekly basis and email subscribers who were allotted these plans. Seven step user-registration process that ends with an online payment option. Customized view and functionalities based on the membership privileges. Print, Email and SMS features included for high-end memberships. Complex allocation procedure that filters the meal plans based on user profiles, ingredients, cost, dietary requirements, and food timings. Selected pages are accessible through small screen browsers (PDA / PocketPC).

            Portal for holiday rentals – Brighton, United Kingdom

            Website that lists villas for rent worldwide. Mail manager module to send mail alerts, mail broadcasts etc to users and villa owners. Fully SSL certified to facilitate credit card information storage. Bulk newsletter managing module. Registered villa owners have the option to choose their own mini-site from a list of template designs and dynamically create sub domains of the site.

            Online villa booking option. Integration with villa owner's Paypal account. Custom made dynamic image manipulation class files to load, compress and display in a custom manner on the web pages for latest property images uploaded by villa owners. Flash banner showing newly added villas by reading information from a dynamically generated XML file. AJAX enabled quick jump combo box options. Advanced search option with numerous filter parameters.

            Forecasting tool for global chocolate vendor – Washington, USA

            Web application for displaying foresights, trends and observations. A content management system developed very efficiently with extensive use of web controls under .NET framework. User-friendly design to cross-link related data easily.

            Extensively built using custom user controls to make the site modular so that changes to any part of the site can be done easily. Dynamically loading tree showing foresights as root node, trend as first level child and observation as second level child. Very fast and scalable boolean search.

            Soccer hats eCommerce – London, United Kingdom

            A site selling soccer fan hats. Features: Payment Integration with PROTX. Site was developed on the fly with in-house developed database manipulation class files.

            Clothing retailer extranet – London, United Kingdom

            Requirement: An Extranet accessible by the company, its suppliers and factories. Features: Complex data analysis and report generation done with extensive use of Cross-Tab feature in SQL Server 2000.

            • All database operations are implemented as stored procedures to make application faster.
            • Reports are highly customizable with option to select up to five year time span.
            • Admin e.mail notification detailing the changes made by suppliers or factories on an order.
            • All updates are logged to enhance extranet security.
            • Option to download the reports as Excel file.
            • Easy printing for huge reports in to a number of pages
            • Scale to any paper size.

             

            Read about our portal building expertise

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              Posted in .NET | Comments Off

              SVN – Version control

              Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

              Version control for projects

              We have been using version control systems for some time now to avoid multi timezone chaos. It is an easy way to collaborate developer code across the world, manage backups locally and sync with client hosting servers located in NewYork and London.

              Ours is a mix of SVN and Freevcs depending on client projects.

              Now SVN visual adds a new dimension to versioning

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                Posted in SVN, version control | No Comments »