Leading edge technologies and techniques applied to solve business challenges

Introduction

Google has been releasing wonderful applications, software, tools, over a period of time. One set of applications all related to pictures, and albums are Picasa, and Picasa web albums. If you do a google search with these terms you can spend the rest of your life analyzing pages and information.

This article is not about explaining about picasa, or picasa web albums, but how it has been used to address the need of a small preshool in Bangalore.

Background about the need:

A small preschool called Stepping Stones in Bangalore is quality conscious, take utmost care about  preschooling of the children and manage the preschool in a professional manner.

Since preschool is the first step into child’s schooling out of their homes, parents are quite anxious to get the pictures of the child. Be it the first day at school, the child playing at the sand pit, child deeply engrossed with Montessori, listening to stories, etc.,

The staff takes hundreds of pictures throughout the year on various occasions like: show and tell,  plays during festivals, field trips, sports, and such. Once the pictures are taken,  here is a brief list of tasks done by the staff to process the pictures:

• Good pictures need to be selected and bad pictures (pictures that are out of focus, bad light conditions, chopped off heads,….)  are deleted.
• Pictures need to be sorted based on occasion, class (nursery, LKG, UKG), and dates.
• Some times captions are to be embedded.
• Pre-schools logo or the web site need to be embedded in the picture.
• Pictures need to be e-mailed to the right set of parents.

All of the tasks take time, and utmost care and attention  to the details need to be given, but parents do enjoy a lot when they receive the pictures. As you can see in the activities above, lots of time need to be devoted by the preschool staff to achieve end result. If the pictures are few, all of the above can be handled very easily. If the number of pictures are in the range of thousands (number of children, pictures taken by multiple staff on multiple occasions through out the year) then that becomes a big challenge to manage. Hope you have an idea about the challenge the preschool staff face.

Solution: 

After analyzing the tasks, we came up with a comprehensive solution as listed below:

• Staff to use picasa as the desktop application.
• Developed custom script (which was embedded as a button in picassa) to embed the captions and preschool logo (using imagemagick’s application & tools)
• Albums are uploadedto Picasa Web Albums
• E-mail with the link to the albums uploaded (which can be obtained from picasa web album) is sent to the right set of parents.

Conclusion:
By adopting the technologies & applications listed above, the staff at Stepping Stones were able to save time and at the same time provide a memorable service to the parents.  This not only gives pleasure to the parents, but benefits the preschool as well by differentiating themselves with hundreds of other preschools mushrooming everywhere and by establishing a brand.
Hope you enjoyed the article. For feedback or to know more details about the solution do visit ebanyan.net or write a detailed  e-mail to: admin at ebanyan dot net with your requirements.

Is Microsoft really the only major player in this field? Well no…we definitely have other options these days!

Back in the days when I began using MS Project, there was really no other tool (at least thats what I was forced to think) that could compete with MS in this area. I have to admit MS Project is a complete package and is very exhaustive. However, there were a few things that makes one look for alternatives. Cost - of training the user, maintenability, portability, license, etc…The features packaged into MS Project were exhaustive and well integrated…One would easily opt out and start using spreadsheets instead.

With more and more people realizing the power of collaboration, came the need for sharing the data that would be available on the fly…MS has evolved and how! But there is still something that makes the users to continuously lookout for other options! Ease of use? Freeware?

I have evaluated other tools available on the internet, some free, some available at a nominal cost, however… I have never been able to hook up to one specific tool that I think I would be happy using all the while…Yeah… yeh dil maange more!

Here is an article that I recently read that talks about some other available options:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/techguide/techmanagement/0,39044902,62053326,00.htm?scid=nl_z_tgtm

Happy reading… and if you have finalized on one tool that you would put to use eternally…let me know too

Cheers!

Raju

Introduction

IT professionals keep pounding at me with questions related to SaaS, but the most common  question is: How can we SaaS enable an On Premise application? Here with this series of blog entries, I will shed some light on what ISVs should consider while SaaS enablement of an OnPremise application.

Details..Details…Details….

Here is my analyses:

When I am asked with the question, I keep thinking in my head that there is no magic pill in SaaS enablement. IT folks have different perspectives. This is more true with SaaS as there is no common understanding with :

• Technologies and platforms adopted
• Architecture & design of the application
• Methods
• Standards
• Terminology used

In these set of blogs, I will try to decipher as much as possible based on my perception and experience.

Technologies and platforms adopted

An OnPremise application can be SaaS enabled using any of the technologies or platforms. However there are some platforms suited well for implementing a SaaS application from scratch. The platforms that are common are from salesforce.com a.k.a force which is  a platform and the platform itself exposes the services similar to SaaS. However if the OnPremise application is already in production, being used by many clients it becomes a different challenge altougether. Some challenges might not be related to the technologies being used, but how existing customers and clients expectations are managed. Here are some areas to ponder about:

• Real Users: OnPremise applications are used by users of ISV’s client. So the real end user is at least 1 point away from the ISV.
• Data: Data is like antique art (assumption: that the art in question is valuable and good) the older it gets, it is valued more, and that it should be  managed well.
• Migration: Once end users get used to using the application a certain way, typically they expect the same kind of usability even with with the upgraded version as well.
• Support: If not all the clients of the ISV are willing to migrate to the SaaS enabled application, the clients would have to be supported till a clear path is laid out.
• Integrations: The application would have been integrated with many application - some might not have been developed or managed by the ISV. The SaaS enablement of the application should have a strategy to address these.

As mentioned, the list above is just a beginning and is specific to the ISV, the application, clients in question. There is no simple answer.

 Architecture & design of the application

Architecture and design of the application are the most important decisions an ISV has to consider for SaaS enablement of an existing application.  Most often than not, ISVs give lot of emphasis on the functional features of the application. Although functional aspects of the application are important, ISVs cannot take light of the Non-Functional features of the application. Here are some areas to consider (not necessarily in any order):

• Usability:
  • No matter how many features are packed, if it is not user friendly then the chances of acceptance of the application by the user will be an issue - unless it is mandated by various stakeholders or the application is a unique one.
• Usage analytics:
  • In order for the product managers to take decisions, usage analytics are very important. At a very high level if the application is instrumented to track user clicks, various metrics (feature usage, frequently visited pages, page click flows, time spent across features, peak usage times, …..). These metrics would be valuable inputs for product managers to decide on project planning, releases,  roadmap of the application,  prioritization of features and to effectively deploy the efforts of the team.
• Supportability:
  • Self help of the application,  support staff friendly features to assist end users, troubleshooting the application,  capturing user data, tracing,  diagnosing the application remotely, meaningful error messages to navigate the end user and such. Some of these aspects have to be instrumented in the application. If they are not, then other processes and methods have to be adopted to manage the same which would mean more operational expenses.
• Performance:
  • Users like to work with applications when the pages of the application are rendered fast. If the perceived impression is that the application is slow then there might be resistance to accept the application.
• Scalability
  • Because of the nature of SaaS,  cost of signing up & upfront costs for clients is not huge (compared to OnPremise) . Due to this, customers signup and if they are not happy they could discontinue the service. Any customer signing up means configuration of the users, application, customization, backups, which is a.k.a as provisioning. The application’s ability to scale up to accomodate  ‘customers churning’ need to be well thought out and instrumented.  The challenge could bloat as the customer needs from the application raises.
• Deployability:
  • Deployment of applications at client’s location means lots of professional help from the ISVs.
  • Product release time (From inception to build to test and deploy) could be months if not years depending on lots of factors. However, with SaaS applications release cycles are shrunk to few weeks. Although the requirements are broken down to smaller chunks, there will still be inherent shifts in the way software is built, tested and deployed. Continuous integration methods and practices need to be adopted to manage short release cycles.
• Resource usage tracking:
  • OnPremise applications typically follow the upfront licensing schemes. Whereas SaaS applications typically adopt ‘Pay as you use’ model and the licensing could involve various factors like number of users, application features usage,  application customization/personalization and such. In order for the support groups to raise the invoices for the customers, the application should be architected for resource usage tracking, feature usage tracking, report generation and more.

Conclusion
In this blog entry, I have addressed the aspects to consider under 2 most important dimensions. In the next set of articles I will adress aspects under the remaining dimensions.  Until then keep  SaaSifying.