Archive for January, 2010

Digging and digging into Drupal open source cms

Drupal

There is a really ‘open’ revolution going on. Not only in software business, there are many other products and projects based on ‘open source’ collaboration. Some say it’s the next logical step in evolution of mankind.

We (Lucius Websystems) are strongly focused on the magnificent Drupal cms: an example of a world leading open source project. We don’t build the core, but we provide services for the free product. So companies have someone to lean on. Things like consulting, training, writing documentation and coding for custom functionalities. So no charge for the product, but the services you provide for it. Currently we are also working on some modules and themes to contribute to the community. And I think a lot of products will evolve like this, were the internet provides the collaboration tools. And Google walks up front, with their free and distributed product models. With products, I also mean computer hardware, cars, food, you name it. Even Microsoft is doing some open source projects nowadays.

On http://www.ohloh.net there are over 433,883 (software only) open source projects listed right now, with over 524,039 people involved.

See also this article about open source hardware & crowdsourcing: “In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits“: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1 (more…)

2010-01-26 18:59:24 | Joris Snoek | Open Source | 9 Comments »

Social Media in 2010

Social Media

2009 has been quite the eventful year: There were plane crashes in Holland and on the Hudson River, Michal Jackson died, everybody was freaked out by Swine Flu, Lance Armstrong returned to the Tour de France, there was a climate summit in Copenhagen, America got its first Black President that gave new meaning to the sentence “YES we can!”, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were elections in Iran, there were tensions between the West and euhm.. well.. everyone else. AND of course the mother of all newsitems in 2009 there was the big CC, the Credit Crunch…. oooooh the Credit Crunch

If you are an average news-follower you will for sure recognize all these events, because they have been in the news at the time and in pretty much every news-year-review program towards the end of the year. But the careful observer will notice that all of these events have something in common……. see it yet??….. yeaaaah there you go…. all these events have had something to do with Social Media. (more…)

2010-01-21 17:41:33 | Peter Doesburg | Social Networking | 1 Comment »

7 fat years: where will we get our IT people?

DagobertDuikA new research from Forrester says that a new cycle of ’7 fat years’ starts in 2010. (http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,1317,00.html) Some details from the research:

After a dismal performance in 2009, the technology sector will see a recovery in 2010 as businesses and governments in the US and around the world begin spending again on information technology, according to a new report by Forrester Research, Inc. After declining 8.2 percent in 2009, US IT spending will grow 6.6 percent in 2010 to $568 billion. Global IT spending, which dropped 8.9 percent last year, will rise 8.1 percent in 2010 to more than $1.6 trillion. Software and computer hardware will see the greatest growth, as Forrester forecasts a new multi-year cycle of technology investment growth and innovation defined by Smart Computing. “The technology downturn of 2008 and 2009 is unofficially over.” (more…)

2010-01-14 21:38:51 | HugoMesser | Offshoring, Outsourcing | No Comments »

Inside perspective: My Experience with Epicerie des allergique

epicerie_home

Epicerie des allergique is an online store built on the ecommerce open source package, Magento. With this project, I got a nice exposure to Magento ecommerce, where I had to dig in, to make some modules and to create an external communication from the site. I have worked as a dedicated programmer for this project. The interaction I had with the client contact, Richard Good, was the most important part in the success of this project. We had regular meetings to discuss the progress of the work and to analyze the upcoming tasks. We always made sure we didn’t spend much time on discussions and therefore the work was moving according to our plan. The cooperation and understanding of Richard was really great.

The most important part of this simple shop is its communication with a desktop application, XLPos (The client used this in the shop to manage the products and its inventory).  We are updating the stocks, product details and prices every 30 minutes using a cron job. In this process, we are adding new products, if any, to the online store and updating the existing products, if any new updates are there. The next process is to update the product stocks based on the sales. And the last process is to send the orders we got in the site to the XLPos. These processes update and maintain the products, stock and price in the site and shop, frequently. We are using magento modules as the base for importing the product and stock to the online store and for exporting the orders from here. (more…)

2010-01-14 20:00:45 | Krishna | Technology | 2 Comments »

The rising popularity of outsourcing in Germany

imgname--a_more_pessimistic_view_of_outsourcing---50226711--images--istock_7893322

In 2006 the phantom of the financial crisis appeared for the first time on the surface, when some bad speculations on the US real estate market emerged. In 2007 the first banks announced losses and depreciations of billions. Till this time nobody was really worried, but when the well-known investment bank Lehmann Brothers registered insolvency in September 2008, the day became part of world’s history, the so called “Black Monday” at the Wall Street. At the end of 2008 Germany is already standing at the edge of a recession and the financial crisis is affecting the real economy. Results of these events are fear for investment, short-time work, increasing unemployment rates, insolvencies and order losses.

But besides these future fears, uncertainties and stand stills, one could already see some light stripes on the horizon – Outsourcing. So far often treated as a taboo word, new discussions and considerations towards this topic are arising at the end of 2008 and at the beginning of 2009.

So it was no wonder when the international market research institution EITO (http://www.eito.com/) announced a strong increase for the demand of outsourcing for the year 2009. For the German market it forecasted a growth in revenue for IT and Business-Process Outsourcing of about 7.2% to an amount of € 14.6 billion. Cause of the difficult economic situation at that time, even these companies started thinking of outsourcing who faced this topic till now rather skeptical. (more…)

2010-01-06 19:03:10 | Sandra | Outsourcing | 1 Comment »