Tech 4 Professionals

The technology world especially the software product firms has exploded with humungous amount of innovation and new product creation due to the bottom-up approach by an always increasing number of startups. This destructive creativity has been possible due to a global collaboration between software tech community and the ability to create products in a boot strapped model. One of the legacies of a bygone era which still exits as a thorn in this process has been patents.

In an recent article by Prof. Wadhwa he discusses that the only beneficiary of this archaic system has been the legal folks. Companies still apply for defensive patents to avoid law suits from competing firms. IMHO this stifles innovation and reduces the confidence level of teams to continue to extend the boundaries of technology. Leading companies should look at fostering innovation rather than take cover under the patent system. Look forward to seeing a constructive discussion on reforming this system.

Things change and they change fast. Some of our bloggers earlier had shared their views on how tablet computing and more specifically Apple ipad will change the personal computing landscape. What we are seeing now is that iPAD is making its presence felt in businesses. Large organizations such as Wells Fargo, Mercedes Benz, SAP etc. have approved usage of iPADs in their organizations. Some of them even calling this as a revolutionary step towards achieving a sustainable office (Paperless office). As more and more business applications gets written for iPAD it will move from being just a productivity application to a realtime information dashboard.

Checkout these set of article at Business week.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/special_reports/20100707ceo_guide_to_ipad.htm

Related links:

http://injoos.com/blog/tech4professionals/2010/02/01/ipad-even-your-grandpa-can-use-it/

http://injoos.com/blog/tech4professionals/2010/02/06/the-dead-mouse/

One of the areas where collaboration has been become very much important is the version control systems. Some kind of version control systems are an inevitable component of any coding environment. GitHub is a version control system in the cloud, with  Social Behavior. Or I would love to define GitHub as a coding environment with a backend of a code repository and a  facebook kind of interface

GitHub provides a profile for each user, on which the public repositories and the activities on them are displayed. In other words, describes you, if you are a coder. The user is allowed to create public (free) and private (paid) repositories in GitHub, and a url will be provided to both. This link is public and needs no authentication and provides options to download, view activities, commit and a wiki for the repository. For the members of GitHub can ‘watch’ the code which will let them know all changes to the code and can ‘fork’ the code and start coding for that project.

GitHub provides the ‘follow’ option to any user which gets us all the updates of the user, all commits, updates, new repos etc.

Now a few words on How this Stuff works. GitHub provides a desktop client to perform all the actions to the repository. We can use a command line or GUI to update or commit to the repository. The authentication of the user is done by an SSH key. We have to generate this SSH keys to make a commit or update to the repository.

Setting up the repository

* Create a repository in GitHub website

* Open the GitHub Command line interface on your desktop

git config –global user.name “Injoos Web”

git config –global user.email contactus@injoos.com

* To commit the code

mkdir  testing

cd testing

git init

touch README

git add README

git commit -m ‘first commit’

git remote add origin git@github.com:injoos4world/testing.git

git push origin master

Existing Git Repo?

cd existing_git_repo

git remote add origin git@github.com:injoos4world/testing.git

git push origin master

File servers have been part of the business setup for a long time. For both small and large companies file servers have been a way to store important documents and provide access to team members. While discussing with the Process manager of a Business transaction processing organizations, realized the limitations of this setup. This organization was storing their operating procedure on the servers.

Who has accessed the document?

The process manager wanted to get an idea of how many people downloaded a particular document. He wanted detailed statistics on number of access and downloads by day. An alert that a particular document has been downloaded heavily would suggest to him that a process has not been understood clearly. Maybe it would be a good idea to do a training for all team members on that process.

Is the document useful?

Did the document serve the purpose it was written for is an important question for both the author and the team manager. To get comments on a particular document a procedure was devised in the firm by creating a sample response document which once filled by a user will have to be saved in a particular folder to be later acted upon by the process management team. Since this was a cumbersome and non transparent procedure it was hardly a surprise that there were very limited feedbacks.

Apart from this manager discussed other issues such as version management, easy edits, popularity rating, feedback, multi media files, etc. Lot of material for another blog post.

My suggestion to him was to move the documents to any application that provides collaborative workspace where all his requirements mentioned above have been addressed. Why a document management system would not solve his problem will be addressed in my next post.