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  • SEO Benefits

    Many people don't know the benefits of performing Search Engine Optimization. This space can help such people to understand why it is necessary in making a website to be listed in the top results of search engine.

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  • Is SEO Critical to Your Business? Consider This

    The number of people turning to the Internet to get answers to their questions is growing by leaps and bounds. Currently, the amount of people utilizing search engines like Google to find information, answers, shopping solutions, and more, sings to the tune of 64%! And as that number will undoubtedly grow, properly implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices into your marketing grows with it.

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  • Boosting Up Your Search Engine Ranking With SEO

    Why do websites need high search engine rankings? That's a question not many people can answer. You may think this is a silly question, especially if you are in the business of search engine marketing. Nonetheless, I think the majority of people really don't know much about using search engine marketing.

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  • How to Choose an SEO Company

    Having a website or blog that appears in the first page of the search engine results is necessary if you want people to find your website when searching the internet for information. It's also the hardest part of any web-based project! Many people and small companies looking to increase their online visibility will look to professional search engine optimization (SEO) companies to help optimize their websites and increase site visitors.

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  • Help no sound 13.10

    - by user204393
    I've been looking for people who have the same problem but i can't find any so i decided to post it and see. i have no sound through speakers BUT nothing like the other people on the forums! you know sound settings, i don't even have speakers in there only digital output and headphones same thing in alsamixer no speaker! BTW i upgraded from 13.4 which was fine ! i have an image but i need 10 reputation -_- anyway...

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  • System Idle Process network traffic?-Updated

    - by Moab
    I was using NetBalancer and noticed network traffic on an unidentified service, but when I highlight it and then go to the lower center pane and click the parent process it says it is the System Idle process, it is showing incoming and outgoing traffic in the upper pane, anyone know why this Windows System Idle Process is talking on the network? Windows 7 HP 64bit . . . Edit, after blocking the traffic for that unidentified Service I checked my event viewer (Windows LogsSystem) and found 3 new events that were never recorded before and matched the time I blocked the traffic. So is this part of the Windows local DNS cache? Event ID 1014 DNS Client Events Name resolution for the name dns.msftncsi.com timed out after none of the configured DNS servers responded. dns.msftncsi.com Name resolution for the name wpad.home timed out after none of the configured DNS servers responded. wpad Name resolution for the name mscrl.microsoft.com timed out after none of the configured DNS servers responded. mscrl.microsoft.com . Then My Web Browser refused to work, I re-enabled the traffic and all returned to normal. .

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  • Server Names Inside Private Network

    - by thyandrecardoso
    Our office has a private network, where any requests on a (pre-determined) public IP are forwarded to a private IP inside said network. On that private IP, we've got a server running several services, including HTTP servers, and SCM systems. We only control our private network, having no control on the public IP configuration. We bought a domain name, and pointed it to that public IP, so people can access our services from the outside. But, when inside the office, people can't use that DNS name, because the server and any other hosts inside the network share the same public IP! For desktops, inside the office network, dealing with names is really easy: one entry on the hosts file and we're done. However, for laptops, that keep going in and out, and need to access services inside the office, the naming is really annoying. I don't know the "standard" process for dealing with these kind of situations. I've considered installing BIND in the office, and make people configure their wireless and wired connections to use that DNS server. What is the correct approach in this situation? If using BIND (or any other DNS server) is the answer, how should I configure it so that people inside the office can use it to get our custom names, and get forwarded to the ISP DNS when trying to reach the internet?

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  • Why Is Web Sharing Broken on My Mac?

    - by Sam Murray-Sutton
    Background: I use my Mac for web development, running copies of web sites locally. I recently installed the Snow Leopard update, which to all intents and purposes seems to have gone fine, except... What's not working? Web-sharing; more specifically I can't turn it on via preferences. The preference pane just hangs when I try to. So Apache doesn't start on reboot. I can start Apache by hand, but I don't know enough to either setup apache to start with the computer, or to properly fix web sharing. Further details My Apache error log shows nothing on when the system boots up (as I would expect). This is the error message when I try to start web sharing from the sharing preference pane. 28/09/2009 10:58:05 System Preferences[834] setInetDServiceEnabled failed with 1 for org.apache.httpd Here's the messages given when I start apache from the command line. [Mon Sep 28 10:35:53 2009] [warn] Init: Session Cache is not configured [hint: SSLSessionCache] [Mon Sep 28 10:35:54 2009] [warn] mod_bonjour: Skipping user 'sams' - index file /Users/sams/Sites/index.html has zero length. [Mon Sep 28 10:35:54 2009] [notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ... [Mon Sep 28 10:35:54 2009] [notice] Digest: done [Mon Sep 28 10:35:54 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8k DAV/2 PHP/5.3.0 Phusion_Passenger/2.2.5 configured -- resuming normal operations Please let me know if you need any further details on this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. UPDATE I have added an answer of my own below - I was able to solve it thanks to being pointed in the right direction by the comments below, so thanks very much. But I'm still not totally clear as to what caused the problem or how my solution addressed it, so I'm leaving the question open for now.

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  • Is it ever good to share a userid?

    - by Ladlestein
    On Un*x, Is it ever a good idea to have one userid that many different people log into when they do stuff? Often I'm installing software or something on a Linux or BSD system. I've developed software for 24 years now, so I know how to make the machine do what I want, but I've never had responsibility for maintaining a multi-user installation where anyone really cared about security. So my opinions feel untested. Now I'm at a company where there's a server that many people log into with a single userid and do stuff. I'm installing some software on it. It's not really a public-facing server, and is only accessible via VPN, but it's used by many people nonetheless, to run tests on custom software, things like that. It's a staging server. I'm thinking that at the very least, using a single user obscures an audit trail, and that's bad. And it's just inelegant, because people don't have their own spaces on the server. But then again, with more userids, maybe there's a greater chance that one can be compromised, allowing attackers to gain access. ?

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  • Help Email Account Management among multiple users

    - by CogitoErgoSum
    So I preface this with saying this may belong in IT Security, not too sure feel free to move. Currently we have an email account [email protected] - hosted via google apps (as is all our email). We had an incident where we had to terminate an employee. This employee however had the password for this account as we have 20-30 people utilizing it at any given point to manage customer emails etc. Thinking on this I feel there must be a better way to manage access. With Google you can associate upto 10 email accounts to another the problem is we have more like 20-30 people going. We were evaluating tools such as SalesForce and Assistly where people have their own login credentials and then the system contains the appropriate smtp information for the [email protected] email address to send emails from it rather than a users personal account. Aside from those options does anyone have any other thoughts? One suggestion floated was moving everyone to desktop clients and saving the PW info there so they could only login from their physical workstation but we may have situations where we'd like employees to work remotely. Does anyone have experience with this sort of system where ~20-30 people are responding from one email box and how to manage security and access?

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  • How to let MSN or Yahoo Messenger set you to be Invisible or Offline when you are idle for an hour?

    - by Jian Lin
    The short question is: How do we let MSN or Yahoo Messenger set us to be Invisible or Offline when we are idle for half an hour or an hour? The reason is: if I am on 24 hours a day, some people see me as weird. Some people see my value as low, because I am always there. There are ways to set me to "Away" or "Busy" after 10 minutes, but there seems to be no way to set myself to invisible or offline after 1 hour. As I am a software developer, I am very used to turning the computer on 24 hours a day. (for example, for checking email for urgent fixes, and fix issue and push to web server). We don't turn off computer usually even when we sleep, because we may sometimes can't sleep yet and come check on the computer, or wake up in the morning and immediately need to check if everything is ok. But, my MSN and Yahoo Messenger is always on for 24 hours a day, and I found that some girls start to ask me why I am always there 24 hours a day (even though they see me as away or busy, their feeling is that I am always there). What's more, I found that since I am always there, my value actually drop in their eyes, because hard to get = high value, and always there = low value. Some people feel me as having nothing much to do, always in front of computer, or what is he doing in front of computer so much? Now since it is my job, and I need to read emails once in a while, I am in fact in front of the computer more than some other people. I am in front of the computer maybe 10 hours a day, far from 24 hours a day. Is there an easy and automatic solution to this?

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  • IIS Manager - Connect to Another Server (Win7 to Win2008 server)

    - by Matt
    I am running Windows 7 Ultimate. If I open up IIS Manager, I see a list of "connections" on the left hand side. In previous versions, I would be able to select an option to "connect to another server" or "connect to another machine", but there is no such option visible anywhere here. The only thing in the list is my local machine. Even in the address bar, if I manually type in the server location (\servername, even tried just servername), nothing happens (it just reverts back to my current local computer) The documentation at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732466%28WS.10%29.aspx seems to imply the very same steps... but there is just no button or menu option anywhere to do this. Am I missing something? I'm not even seeing a grayed out menu option. EDIT: Under the "File" menu, I see 2 options: Save Connections (grayed out) Exit Under the "Connections" pane, I see 1 button, grayed out. When I hover the mouse, it simply says "Up", appears to be usable if I browse into an element in my local computers IIS settings If I right click inside the pane itself, I see Refresh Add website (to the current host) Start Stop Rename Switch to Content View UPDATE: I downloaded and installed the Remote Server Administration tools from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7D2F6AD7-656B-4313-A005-4E344E43997D&displaylang=en, and I enabled everything listed under "Remote Server Administration Tools" under "Turn Windows Features On or Off". Still nothing.

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  • Are there cloud network drives that let users lock files or mark them as "in use"?

    - by Brandon Craig Rhodes
    Having spent several hours reading about the features and limitations of services like DropBox and Jungle Disk and the hundreds of competitors they seem to have (as though everyone with an AWS account these days goes ahead and writes a file sharing application just for fun), I have yet to find one that would let a team of people at a small business collaborate without stepping all over each other's toes. At a small business there are often many small documents per project — estimates, contracts, project plans, budgets — and team members frequently have to open and edit them, with all sorts of problems happening if two people edit a file at once. Even if a sharing service is smart enough to keep both versions of the file created, most small-business software (like word processors, spreadsheets, estimating software, or billing systems) has no way to compare — much less to merge! — the changes in two rival versions of a file that two people edited at the same time without each other's knowledge. So, my question: are their cloud-based file sharing solutions that not only provide a virtual network drive that people can access, but that also let users lock files — even if it's not a real lock but just a flag or indicator — that could possibly prevent remote workers from both editing the same file at once? Having one person wait for another person to finish editing is a very, very small inconvenience compared to the hour or more than it can take to compare two estimates by hand until you find and resolve the rival changes. Given this fact, I am surprised that almost none of the popular file sharing solutions seem to recognize this problem and provide some solution! Does anyone know of a service that does?

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  • Are there cloud network drives that let users lock files or mark them as "in use"?

    - by Brandon Craig Rhodes
    Having spent several hours reading about the features and limitations of services like DropBox and Jungle Disk and the hundreds of competitors they seem to have (as though everyone with an AWS account these days goes ahead and writes a file sharing application just for fun), I have yet to find one that would let a team of people at a small business collaborate without stepping all over each other's toes. At a small business there are often many small documents per project — estimates, contracts, project plans, budgets — and team members frequently have to open and edit them, with all sorts of problems happening if two people edit a file at once. Even if a sharing service is smart enough to keep both versions of the file created, most small-business software (like word processors, spreadsheets, estimating software, or billing systems) has no way to compare — much less to merge! — the changes in two rival versions of a file that two people edited at the same time without each other's knowledge. So, my question: are their cloud-based file sharing solutions that not only provide a virtual network drive that people can access, but that also let users lock files — even if it's not a real lock but just a flag or indicator — that could possibly prevent remote workers from both editing the same file at once? Having one person wait for another person to finish editing is a very, very small inconvenience compared to the hour or more than it can take to compare two estimates by hand until you find and resolve the rival changes. Given this fact, I am surprised that almost none of the popular file sharing solutions seem to recognize this problem and provide some solution! Does anyone know of a service that does?

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  • How to configure a trusted connection between IIS 7 and SQL Server 2005?

    - by user1180652
    How do configure a trusted connection between IIS 7 and SQL Server 2005? My webapp was working fine with Windows Authentication enabled in IIS. Now, in order to solve a problem, we need to use a trusted connection. Unfortunately, enabling the trusted connection in the web.config broke the webapp. Oddly enough, when I run this application with trusted connection from my local dev machine (using the Cassini web server) IIS (Windows Server 2008) is running on one machine. The database (SQL Server 2005 but could migrate to 2008) is running on another machine. We are on a Windows domain running AD. All traffic is within our own firewall - no public access. Beyond that, I can't provide much info but I can find it. We're very "compartmentalized" (we have server people, security people, oracle people, SQL Server people, etc.) Thanks! Update 02/14/2012 0902: The webapp is now functional (app no longer broken) but the main issue is still unresolved. Now I have the app's application pool running as a domain account with permissions on the SQL Server box and IIS box. We were using this account to run the application but, and here's the problem, we need to log the real user name that made a change. When using the service account, the name of that service account appeared in the audit tables, making the auditing quite useless. So, not I'm at least running again. The connection string in the web.config is using "Trusted_Connection=True", the appPool is using a domain account with access to both boxes, BUT when I make a change (logged in as me) the name of the service account (appPool identity) is still logged in the audit tables. I also manually granted full permissions to the service account on the webapp folder. What do I need to do in order to log my name, not the service account, in the audit tables? Everything I'm reading says I need to establish a trusted connection between the two servers.

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  • git : The remote end hung up unexpectedly - too many simultaneous users?

    - by Pritam Barhate
    I asked this first on StackOverflow and I was suggested that I should ask it here: We have a self hosted git server (Gitolite) on a VPS account (CPU:2.68GHz RAM:1824MB). This same VPS is also used to publish our underdevelopment web apps for client demos. (Very little traffic). so the main use of the server is as a Git Server Only. This git server is accessed by a team of 30-40 people for various projects. Our problem is that during the day when 6-7 people are trying to access the server (sometimes same repo) we get frequent error message: ssh: connect to host xxx.xxx.xx.xx port 22: Bad file number fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly After trying for 10-15 minutes it generally succeeds. During early mornings and late nights when there are only 1-2 people, git commands work with 100% success rate. Also I would like to note that if I access the other file hosted on the server through HTTP it works fine. I found a couple of questions on StackOverflow and on other sites regarding this. But most of the people point towards SSH key set up or conflicts between Msysgit and Cygns SSH. However I don't think this is the problem in our case as we get this behavior on Windows (using msysgit only) as well as Mac Machines. Also if it was SSH configuration issue then it shouldn't work at all. But in our case it works after 10-15 minutes. I think in our case it might be too many simultaneous connections to same server (or same repo) or something like that. Does there exists a setting or a conf file that needs to modified to solve this problem? Please help me solve this problem or point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance. Pritam.

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  • Wake on Demand for Apache server in OS X 10.8

    - by Gary
    Mac OS X Mountain Lion does not have a Web Sharing box in the Sharing system prefs menu. It is thoroughly discussed on the web that the Apache server is available, and that it can be turned on manually in the command line, or by using a convenient Prefs Pane. That works while the computer is awake. But, when my computer goes to sleep, the server stops working, even though Wake for Network Access is checked in the Energy Saver Pref Pane. From the discussion on Bonjour, I see that this problem probably results from the fact that Apache isn't registered with Bonjour. Does that sound likely? If not, please make some suggestions. The connection is via hard-wired ethernet. If registration with Bonjour is the problem, I'd like to know how to register it. You gave a nice description of dns-sd, and the command description says dns-sd -R Name Type Domain Port [TXT...] (Register a service)", but I don't know what to use for "Name" or "Type", or the format of the domain. I tried some dns-sd -B searches and found nothing I could use as a model, and it doesn't show up in Bonjour Browser. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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  • Can IP address transfer from person to another after he disconnects from ISP or any other way?

    - by learner
    I have been checking this website that sells a product (health related) and trying to find out if it is a scam site. The site is something.blogspot.in (and not something.blogspot.com, which happens to be a different site altogether). So is it an Indian site? It has a CBox chat box where the owner communicates with customers (or potential ones) for information. The owner shows that his product has worked for people by providing links from a forum (created by him at network54.com) where people have posted positively. One doesn't have to be registered to post on there, but the IP address of the poster gets shown along with the post. According to the owner, IP address is basis of authenticity. I found that many people had different IP addresses on their different posts. The owner has declared the nationalities of the people who posted. When I traced the IP addresses of them with this site, I found that the nationalities provided by the owner were wrong. Is it possible that when a person disconnects himself from an ISP, another person from another country gets his old IP address?

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  • Proper Outlook Free/Busy status when working from home

    - by rwmnau
    Our office (pretty large - about 200 people) has recently started part-time telecommuting. It's only one day/week now, but it's already raised some questions about availability, so I wanted to see how the users here, some of whom I'm sure telecommute to a corporate job, how they set their out of office status. Outlook has four statuses, and here's what I (and most others?) take them to mean: Free: I'm available for meetings Busy: I'm in a meeting or otherwise occupied, and unavailable Tentative: Shy away from scheduling over, but I'm available if needed Out of office: I'm on vacation and unavailable. However, I don't travel for work - do people tend to use this status to mean they're remote, but available for a phone call/bridge? As we begin to telecommute, I'll be available by phone for meetings, but not in person - any meeting can have a conference bridge, but some meetings just need to be in person. I'd like to send the right message about my status - people can schedule meetings with me on my telecommute days, but they should expect me to be on a conference bridge when they do. What status do people use? Does "Out of Office" correctly reflect that you're working from home, even though I perceive this to mean that somebody is on vacation? Maybe I'm the only one confused here, but as a company that's never before done telecommuting of any kind, I'm in the dark about standard practices. Thanks for the insight! Though this isn't a technical question directly, I'm hoping it's still applicable to the group and constructive - if it's not, please close it and accept my apology.

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  • iPhone all day meeting request bug?

    - by RodH257
    We've come across a bit of a weird bug in the office. our office is closing for a week or so over christmas, and our admin staff sent a meeting request to everyone in the office to go from 5pm on the 23rd of December until we return to work at 8.30 on the 5th. However there was some confusion, as if you look at the image below, the same meeting request is showing up with different start times for some people. While most people get the 5pm date, for others it shows up as an all day event! Staff have been planning their activities for the 23rd only to find out that their calendar is wrong and they are required to work. With some investigation, we noticed that all of the people with the incorrect time own iPhones or iPads. So perhaps they accepted the meeting on their phones, and it has put the meeting in wrong? There are people with the correct one that have iPhones, but perhaps they are on ios4 still, or perhaps they didn't accept the meeting request on their phone. has anyone else come across this error at all? is there a fix?

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  • SQLAuthority News – A Successful Community TechDays at Ahmedabad – December 11, 2010

    - by pinaldave
    We recently had one of the best community events in Ahmedabad. We were fortunate that we had SQL Experts from around the world to have presented at this event. This gathering was very special because besides Jacob Sebastian and myself, we had two other speakers traveling all the way from Florida (Rushabh Mehta) and Bangalore (Vinod Kumar).There were a total of nearly 170 attendees and the event was blast. Here are the details of the event. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days On the day of the event, it seemed to be the coldest day in Ahmedabad but I was glad to see hundreds of people waiting for the doors to be opened some hours before. We started the day with hot coffee and cookies. Yes, food first; and it was right after my keynote. I could clearly see that the coffee did some magic right away; the hall was almost full after the coffee break. Jacob Sebastian Presenting at Community Tech Days Jacob Sebastian, an SQL Server MVP and a close friend of mine, had an unusual job of surprising everybody with an innovative topic accompanied with lots of question-and-answer portions. That’s definitely one thing to love Jacob, that is, the novelty of the subject. His presentation was entitled “Best Database Practices for the .Net”; it really created magic on the crowd. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days Next to Jacob Sebastian, I presented “Best Database Practices for the SharePoint”. It was really fun to present Database with the perspective of the database itself. The main highlight of my presentation was when I talked about how one can speed up the database performance by 40% for SharePoint in just 40 seconds. It was fun because the most important thing was to convince people to use the recommendation as soon as they walk out of the session. It was really amusing and the response of the participants was remarkable. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days My session was followed by the most-awaited session of the day: that of Rushabh Mehta. He is an international BI expert who traveled all the way from Florida to present “Self Service BI” session. This session was funny and truly interesting. In fact, no one knew BI could be this much entertaining and fascinating. Rushabh has an appealing style of presenting the session; he instantly got very much interaction from the audience. Rushabh Mehta Presenting at Community Tech Days We had a networking lunch break in-between, when we talked about many various topics. It is always interesting to get in touch with the Community and feel a part of it. I had a wonderful time during the break. Vinod Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days After lunch was apparently the most difficult session for the presenter as during this time, many people started to fall sleep and get dizzy. This spot was requested by Microsoft SQL Server Evangelist Vinod Kumar himself. During our discussion he suggested that if he gets this slot he would make sure people are up and more interactive than during the morning session. Just like always, this session was one of the best sessions ever. Vinod is true to his word as he presented the subject of “Time Management for Developer”. This session was the biggest hit in the event because the subject was instilled in the mind of every participant. Vinod Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days Vinod’s session was followed by his own small session. Due to “insistent public demand”, he presented an interesting subject, “Tricks and Tips of SQL Server“. In 20 minutes he has done another awesome job and all attendees wanted more of the tricks. Just as usual he promised to do that next time for us. Vinod’s session was succeeded by Prabhjot Singh Bakshi’s session. He presented an appealing Silverlight concept. Just the same, he did a great job and people cheered him. Prabhjot Presenting at Community Tech Days We had a special invited speaker, Dhananjay Kumar, traveling all the way from Pune. He always supports our cause to help the Community in empowering participants. He presented the topic about Win7 Mobile and SharePoint integration. This was something many did not even expect to be possible. Kudos to Dhananjay for doing a great job. Dhananjay Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days All in all, this event was one of the best in the Community Tech Days series in Ahmedabad. We were fortunate that legends from the all over the world were present here to present to the Community. I’d say never underestimate the power of the Community and its influence over the direction of the technology. Vinod Kumar Presenting trophy to Pinal Dave Vinod Kumar Presenting trophy to Pinal Dave This event was a very special gathering to me personally because of your support to the vibrant Community. The following awards were won for last year’s performance: Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group (President: Jacob Sebastian; Leader: Pinal Dave) – Best Tier 2 User Group Best Development Community Individual Contributor – Pinal Dave Speakers I was very glad to receive the award for our entire Community. Attendees at Community Tech Days I want to say thanks to Rushabh Mehta, Vinod Kumar and Dhananjay Kumar for visiting the city and presenting various technology topics in Community Tech Days. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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  • Seriously, It’s Time to Get Your Content Act Together

    - by Mike Stiles
    Branded content, content marketing, social content, brand journalism, we’re seeing those terms more and more. Why? The technology tools are coming together. We should know. We can gather big data, crunch it, listen to the public, moderate, respond, get to know the customer intimately, know what they like, know what they want, we can target, distribute, amplify, measure engagement and reaction, modify strategy and even automate a great deal of all that. An amazing machine, a sleek, smooth-running engine has been built such that all the parts can interact and work together to deliver peak performance and maximum output. But that engine isn’t going anywhere without any gas. Content is the gas. Yes, we curate other people’s content. We can siphon their gas. There’s tech to help with that too. But as for the creation of original, worthwhile content made for a specific audience, our audience, machines can’t do that…at least not yet. Curated content is great. But somebody has to originate the content for it to be curated and shared. And since the need for good, curated content is obviously large and the desire to share is there, it’s a winning proposition for a brand to be a consistent producer of original content. And yet, it feels like content is an issue we’re avoiding. There’s a reluctance to build a massive pipeline if you have no idea what you’re going to run through it. The C-suite often doesn’t know what content is, that it’s different from ads, where to get it, who makes it, how long it should be, what the point of it is if there’s no hard sell of the product, what it costs, how to use it, how to measure it, how to make sure it’s good, or how to make sure it will keep flowing. It could be the reason many brands aren’t pulling the trigger on socially enabling the enterprise. And that’s a shame, because there are a lot of creative, daring, experimental, uniquely talented entertainers and journalists chomping at the bit to execute content for brands. But for many corporate executives, content is “weird,” and the people who make it are even weirder. The content side of the equation is human. It’s art, but art that can be informed by data. The natural inclination is for brands to turn to their agencies for such creative endeavors. But agencies are falling into one of two categories. They’re failing to transition from ads to content. In “Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies?” Alexander Jutkowitz says agencies were made for one-hit campaigns, not ongoing content. Or, they’re ready and capable but can’t get clients to do the right things. Agencies have to make money, even if it means continuing to do the wrong things because that’s all the client will agree to. So what we wind up with in the pipeline is advertising, marketing-heavy content, content that was obviously created or spearheaded by non-creative executives, random & inconsistent content, copy written for SEO bots, and other completely uninteresting nightmares. Frank Rose, author of “The Art of Immersion,” writes, “Content without story and excitement is noise pollution.” In the old days, you made an ad and inserted it into shows made by people who knew what they were doing. You could bask in that show’s success and leverage their audience. Now, you are tasked with attracting, amassing and holding your own audience. You may just want to make, advertise and sell your widgets. But now there’s a war on for a precious commodity, attention. People are busy. They have filters to keep uninteresting and irrelevant things out. They value their time and expect value back when they give it up. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says, "Your customers don't care about you, your products, your services…they care about themselves, their wants and their needs." Is it worth getting serious about content and doing it right? 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content (Custom Content Council). Interesting content is one of the top 3 reasons people follow brands on social (Content+). 78% of consumers think organizations that provide custom content want to build good relationships with them (TMG Custom Media). On the B2B side, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company info in a series of articles vs. an ad. So what’s the hang-up? Cited barriers to content marketing are lack of human resources (42%) and lack of budget (35%). 54% of brands don’t have a single on-site, dedicated content creator. And only 38% of brands have a content marketing strategy. Tech has built the biggest, most incredible stage for brands that’s ever been built. Putting something on that stage is your responsibility. Do a bad show, or no show at all, and you’ll be the beautiful, talented actress that never got discovered. @mikestilesPhoto: Gabriella Fabbri, stock.xchng

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  • The Product Owner

    - by Robert May
    In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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  • On Contract Employment

    - by kerry
    I am going to post about something I don’t post about a lot, the business side of development.  Scott at the antipimp does a good job of explaining how contracts work from a business perspective.  I am going to give a view from the ground. First, a little background on myself.  I have recently taken a 6 month contract after about 8 years of fulltime employment.  I have 2 kids, and a stay at home wife.  I took this contract opportunity because I wanted to try it on for size.  I have always wondered whether I would like doing contracts over fulltime employment.  So, in keeping with the theme of this blog I will write this down now so that I may reference it later. ALL jobs are temporary! Right now you may not realize it, most people simply ignore it, but EVERY job is temporary.  Everyone should be planning for life after the money stops coming in.  Sadly, most people do not.  Contracting pushes this issue to the forefront, making you deal with it.  After a month on a contract, I am happy to say that I am saving more than I ever saved in a fulltime position.  Hopefully, I will be ready in case of an extended window of unemployment between contracts. Networking I find it extremely gratifying getting to know people.  It is especially beneficial when moving to a new city.  What better way to go out and meet people in your field than to work a few contracts?  6 months of working beside someone and you get to know them pretty well.  This is one of my favorite aspects. Technical Agility Moving between IS shops takes (or molds you into) a flexible person.  You have to be able to go in and hit the ground running.  This means you need to be able to sit down and start work on a large codebase working in a language that you may or may not have that much experience in.  It is also an excellent way to learn new languages and broaden your technical skill set.  I took my current position to learn Ruby.  A month ago, I had only used it in passing, but now I am using it every day.  It’s a tragedy in this field when people start coding for the joy and love of coding, then become deeply entrenched in their companies methods and technologies that it becomes a just a job. Less Stress I am not talking about the kind of stress you get from a jackass boss.  I am talking about the kind of stress I (or others) experience about planning and future proofing your code.  Not saying I stay up at night worrying whether we have done it right, if that code I wrote today is going to bite me later, but it still creeps around in the dark recesses of my mind.  Careful though, I am not suggesting you write sloppy code; just defer any large architectural or design decisions to the ‘code owners’. Flexible Scheduling It makes me very happy to be able to cut out a few hours early on a Friday (provided the work is done) and start the weekend off early by going to the pool, or taking the kids to the park.  Contracting provides you this opportunity (mileage may vary).  Most of your fulltime brethren will not care, they will be jealous that they’re corporate policy prevents them from doing the same.  However, you must be mindful of situations where this is not appropriate, and don’t over do it.  You are there to work after all. Affirmation of Need Have you ever been stuck in a job where you thought you were underpaid?  Have you ever been in a position where you felt like there was not enough workload for you?  This is not a problem for contractors.  When you start a contract it is understood that you are needed, and the employer knows that you are happy with the terms. Contracting may not be for everyone.  But, if you develop a relationship with a good consulting firm, keep their clients happy, then they will keep you happy.  They want you to work almost as much as you do.  Just be sure and plan financially for any windows of unemployment.

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