“Cloud Computing”, the latest buzzword in IT services that has made key decision makers to think about adopting cloud computing services for their organizational needs. Are you one of them? If yes, then we can help you in finding whether your decision for moving to cloud is worthy of the efforts and cost involved or not.

While deciding to adopt cloud computing, two main factors to consider are: Selecting the right application to be put on cloud and selecting the right vendor.

First of all, not all applications are suitable for cloud computing environment. Generally it’s not a good idea to put applications of below nature over cloud:

• Mission critical applications like ERP & MIS that are used by more than 80% workforce in organization
• Real-time application with huge uptime requirements
• Business critical & highly secure data centric applications like applications for banking & financial sector

While some of the situations where adopting cloud computing services become a boon for your business can be put together as:

• Smaller or rapidly growing or cash-strapped businesses that require dynamic compute capabilities
• For making IT infrastructure available on-demand without any management headaches
• Lack of people internally to upgrade and maintain the software
• You like to avoid infrastructure, hardware and maintenance cost for hosting application that isn’t high performance; data access in/out is minimal; and, loss of access to isn’t critical like e-mailing application or CRM
• When you need on-demand infrastructure availability on a 24/7 basis

Now, the major factors driving the selection of right vendor includes:

• Pricing & total cost over the retention period of the data
• Information security & data protection levels provided by vendor
• Performance and latency criteria like application response time, transactions per second, and monthly downtime
• Data auditing & backup policies offered by the service provider
• Scalability of resources provided by vendor
• The vendor contract should involve a clause for service credits if the SLA isn’t met
• Financial stability and reliability for the service provider
• Existing customer base
• The level of O&M and help desk provided by the cloud vendor

If you are still confused about whether cloud computing is the right choice for you, we at Rightway are here to serve you and help you in finding the right solution for you. We will listen to your requirements and analyze all aspects of opting for a cloud computing environment for your application before arriving at the right solution for you. So come and take advantage of our cloud computing consultancy & service.

Don’t worry, it is very common situation, At Rightway we see dilemma with every 2 out of 5 clients. So let me share our experience in resolving this confusion which we gathered through lots of brainstorming sessions with our clients.

The very first step is writing your requirements which you are looking to have in your system in a document, also note down the requirements which are surly coming to your way in short span of time. Once the document is ready, start exploring the available ready-made solutions which are fits closer to your requirements or are of similar nature. While exploring ready-made solutions, not only evaluate it from requirements point of view but also analyze its market place, size of community, developer community, application architecture, ability for third party application integration and extensibility for custom requirement. If 80% of your requirements match with the selected ready-made solution and rest of the criteria are fulfilled, then you can go for the ready-made solution. Opting for ready-made solutions is very common for E-commerce and CMS kind of application requirements or if you have standard CRM system requirement. Joomla, WordPress and Drupal are very popular CMS while X-Cart, Zen Cart , osCommerce and Magento are very famous open source e-commerce solutions which cater all most every e-commerce requirement.

Benefits of ready-made over tailor-made solutions:

If your requirement is very specific to your business and huge customizations are required in the available ready-made solutions to meet your requirements, then it’s better to go for a tailor-made solution.

Benefits of tailor-made over ready-made solutions:

This write-up is totally based on our years of experience and I tried honestly to put all points without any bias.  I hope it helps you in your planning & decision making for any software application development requirement.

Please feel free to contact Rightway, if you need any consultancy in the matter, our experts will help you out.

Recently Microsoft Live Labs has launched a free web based service called Zoom.it. It is a great service for viewing and sharing high-resolution imagery. It is very simple to use.

As an input, It takes the URL of any hosted image on the website and convert that image to the Deep Zoom format.  Deep Zoom is the fastest, smoothest, zooming technology on the Web, bringing the highest resolution images (no matter how large like 6874×4888 or so) with the lowest load times to users. It gives new experience to explore the image smoothly and efficiently without compromising with image quality.

And as an output this service provides a short URL of hosted version of that image (as a spate image page) which you can share on any social networking website like Twitter & also provide a small JavaScript code which you embed into any web page.

For Developers who want to use this service in their real time application and want to customize it as per their needs, Zoom.it can be accessed through a web API which offers both RESTful and non-RESTful behavior. It supports both XML and JSON (as well as JSONP) to make it easy to use across a variety of platforms.

To know more about this serice visit their website http://zoom.it/

Nowadays Social media is playing a vital role to drive traffic on websites. According to latest internet traffic analysis, social media drives up to 33% of the traffic as search. So say a site gets 100,000 unique visitors per month from search, they’re also getting 33,000 from social networks.

So it is clear that social media can increase website traffic dramatically and can play a good role to increase your business.

To get benefit of social media, first you need to improve your social engagement by doing actively participation on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc… and second, allow your website’s user to share your website contents with their friend across social networks, affiliates groups and communities.

Further in this article we will dig out how we can allow website’s users to share contents with their friends.

The big complexity is that there are hundreds of social networking websites, which people are using for sharing information. Now if we integrate all of them into our website, so website user can share website content on their preferred network, then it would be a big, time consuming and costly job. So is there any option available which cover all popular social networks and easy to integrate & free of cost? Yes, the answer is ShareThis button.

ShareThis provides users with a simple, free of cost and easy way to implement sharing on any site via email, Twitter, Facebook and 40+ other social services. The better sharing integration, the more users will share your content and increase socially-referred traffic and engagement

ShareThis shows up on the page as a simple button or link, and clicking on it, user can send content to to Digg, Facebook, MySpace.com, or any number of related social applications.

ShareThis supports an additional JavaScript API for developers that need more control over what is being shared. It provides programmatic control of display options and supports a function based interface. It is for advanced use when you plan to:

- Share something more than just a single web page (e.g. image, video, etc.)
- Change the default object properties
- Share multiple objects on a single web page.

We have integrated ShareThis for many of clients and they are enjoying to have this on their website. Its really worth to add this small button and enjoy the increament of socially-referred traffic.

Design’n’Buy is an online design tool development lab that provides custom design tool applications for online designing of  T-Shirts, Business Cards , Shirts , Caps , Mugs , Boat Names and Numbers , Stamps, Ads , Jewelry etc.

We recently developed a t-shirt design tool application integrated with osCommerce shopping cart solution for a USA based client and now it is live and making good business. The visitor of the site can purchase standard products as well customize the available products as per their design and order.

For more details on the features of the design tool applications, please have a look on our portfolio page http://www.designnbuy.com/portfolio.html  

So, if you are looking for a design tool application and want to integrate with osCommerce, please contact Design’n’Buy team.

Thanks,
www.designnbuy.com

Do you own online store(s)? Then you must be devoting significant time daily on maintaining and enhancing your store like changing the look and feel of the store to give fresh view to customers every time they access your store, theme changes, template integration, adding new products, generating SEO friendly URLs, on page SEO changes, new payment gateway integration , price calculation changes , setting up shipping charges calculation formula, data migration work , configuring discounts and offers or work like integrating blog and social media.

We know it’s tough to manage the store as well as do these tasks yourself. Also it is quite expensive to outsource this work at onsite and equally hard to outsource these small tasks to any offshore company as frequency of changes cannot be assessed.

Rightway indentified this problem with many of its customers. After analyzing various options we came out with the solution to server such requirement. We offered them hiring offshore dedicated developer model and it succeeded. Dedicated Hiring Model facilitates in hiring of developer(s) directly from us at fixed monthly fees. Now, the assigned developer will work on the tasks assigned by you on daily basis. So just assign the task and get going with your own work. The developer will be reporting to you on regular basis and will inform you once the tasks are finished. You can just check the work done and approve or ask for modifications. How simple it becomes to manage your own tasks as well as maintain and enhance your application without much effort.

Highlights of dedicated hiring model:

• Working hours per month: 160.
• Billing: On monthly basis.
• 40 Hrs. Trial (paid): Get a test drive before you hire.
• Reporting: Daily reporting as per your need.
• Direct Communication: Timely communication through e-mail, IM (Yahoo, MSN, gTalk, Skype).
• Project Management:  www.fastcollab.com
• Source Code Authorization: All the rights of the source code will be owned by you.

I hope I have given good idea about this service, but please visit our website http://www.rightwaysolution.com/dedicated-developer-services.html for more information about this model.

Yes, your shopping cart may be developed in any technology like PHP, ASP.Net or using any open source e-commerce application like X-Cart, Zen cart, osCommerce, Magneto or Virtue Mart hence we have developers who are experts working in that particular technology or application and can take up the job quickly.

So if you feel you have enough work on monthly basis then you must go for dedicated hiring model.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any queries or please visit our FAQ section (http://www.rightwaysolution.com/faq1.html).