Sam's World

Dont Believe the Lies Satan tells you about being Single!.

Now-a-days most of the business owners are looking for responsive ecommerce website design for their business. Having an responsive website has become the emerging trend as it allows your website to adapt in a controlled style to fit the different screen sizes devices. In a Business Insider Report it is reported that 54% of adults in US own smartphones and about 25% own tablets. In roughly 3 years, the number of tablets alone will overtake the number of PCs and by 2016, about 450 million tablets will be sold worldwide a year. That’s why many e commerce business have paid more attention to go mobile.

Moreover, the users can have a optimal viewing experience on any device type, no matter how big or small. Except this, there are many advantages of having an responsive website design for your business. Let’s check it out.

Enhanced user experience

According to a study of Morgan Stanley, almost 91% of the people have smartphones therefore having a Liferay responsive design can help to enhance the user experience by delivering a well-formatted site to its users worldwide. Making your site quickly accessible on mobile devices is necessary for businesses these days. In a responsive design, the device automatically adjusts according to a device’s screen and orientation. Also, it has a remarkable navigation control that is scaled for different device types and deliver access to all the content with ease.

Increased sales and higher conversion rates

One of the greatest benefit of responsive design is it delivers an enhanced site experience which can lead to a stronger conversion rates in the future. A ForeSee Results’ report said 54% of respondents are highly satisfied with their mobile experience and more likely to buy from the retailers mobile channel again. It uses standardized style sheets for many devices and creates a consistent look that delivers a positive impact on your conversion rates.

Flexible site management

If you have two versions of your website – one desktop version and one additional stand-alone mobile version then you must be cautious of losing traffic to your main website. You will have to take extra effort to manage two different sites. Responsive website design enables easier and less time consuming management to a single site. The administration interface are flexible and optimized and you as a business owner can access it with ease on every screen and device.

Improved SEO of your site

A responsive web design is always recommended for your business as it has single URL that represents to desktop as well as mobile users. It becomes easy for search engines to index responsive site, discover content and crawl correctly. This is the main reason why responsive sites scores high in search engine results as compared to other website. Your users will be able to find your site quickly thus generating more traffic.

Improved brand reputation

If it were some years ago the visitors might have accepted your business website accessible to them on their PC. But the contemporary websites have improved their standards thereby raising visitors expectations and requirements. They expect a company website to look good on any mobile device. If you don’t meet their expectations you are likely to spoil your brand reputation to your prospects. Offer customers and visitors a solid experience and always stay ahead of their expectations by designing and developing a responsive website which inturn increases your brand reputation and encourages good words about your brand as a whole.

Now it’s time to review your own stores? Do you have a responsive web store? If “YES” you should keep improving your site to satisfy your customers and if your answer is “NO” then you are losing your potential business opportunities to your competitor. Do you have any other ideas? Leave your comments in the below box…!

Governments realize these are tough economic times & are working to find ways to cut costs & increase effectiveness.  So how could government agencies take advantage of collaboration tools to solve today’s problems and lower cost? Here are five steps to consider.

1.  Go Opensource. Agencies need to comply with open data principles and lower costs while improving the collaborative process. Using commercial opensource allows governments to have no vendor lock in and take advantage of open standards while having the peace of mind of a company fixing bugs, making enhancements to the technology and providing support. Liferay has made several improvements to Government agencies around the world by providing project based licensing to decrease costs while improving overall effectiveness of the agency. An interesting use case is the City of Chicago which uses Liferay to manage it’s communication with all emergency and disaster workers such as hospitals, EMTs Police etc tec to make sure that knowledge is transferred as quickly as possible and folks need only to visit 1 place for updates.
2. Utilize People in Processes. Governments should separate each agency’s transaction-based processes, like writing purchase orders, from knowledge-based processes that involve judgment and experience, such as awarding tenders. This kind of analysis is required to identify the knowledge processes that would most benefit from collaboration. Making knowledge processes automatic usually hurts an agency’s ability to serve citizens because computers can’t make human judgments, which are often critical to meeting policy goals. Liferay is flexible enough to allow developers to create crude processes as well as manage workflows to automate or ask for human interaction.
3. The structure of Data.  Governments should work toward a new set of enterprise architecture reference models and tools to make data consistent and therefore usable across the enterprise. Oversight is important in processes like fraud detection. At Liferay we allow for all types of structures due to our web based framework model.
4. Identity Management. Establish policies to promote collaboration. Although we don’t need to rip out what’s in place, we do need to create collaboration that allows for workers to collaborate in teams across agencies. A government wide identity system would lead to role-based access control, thus facilitating virtual team building for problem solving. Liferay allows for role based access and can make this process single sign on from any device.
5. Organizational change management.  Agencies must be willing to surrender control over their policy prerogatives and become part of a government wide solution. Change management involves a willingness to accept other people’s data, including data from other agencies and external experts, in the interest of developing the best solution. No single organization can be expected to have all the knowledge needed to make the best policy decisions to solve complex problems.

If Governments embrace the changes of social business they can provide higher levels of citizen satisfaction & interaction while improving their internal processes and managing costs.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 4 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Enterprise based portals employ a desirable set of functional characteristics that provide value any number of ways. While ROI and other business calculators are engaged to offer a compelling business argument to the introduction of a company based knowledge repository, my focus will instead lie with efficiencies derived from penetrating the middleware platform of an enterprise. Several benefits provided through the use of web-based portal services & SOA are what I will explore in this post. There is a dominant, myopic perspective in which enterprise portals are viewed as an information architecture and not for what they are – an application. The architecture establishes the foundation for a common view of the data, applications, and a common management interface for content. However, the real benefit of an enterprise portal comes from the convergence, not from the web based display mechanism. This fusion differentiates enterprise portals from a collection of web sites by offering

1. universal access to information,
2. role-based personalization,
3. cross-application workflow,
4. common content management, and
5. centralized user management.

While organizations are beginning to accept the concept of SOAs, many are struggling with the implementation taxonomy. Portal platforms can be a logical and appropriate initial step towards SOA implementation as their fundamental nature lends itself to SOA’s approach. To be clear, there are several facets that facilitate this transition. Specifically, portals use service oriented concepts through their practice of leveraging web services). By association, there is an inherent comfort zone in terms of portals and SOA. Enterprise portal projects can pull together the disparate groups involved in cross-discipline projects across-enterprises. Portal technology is considered a tangible, secular trend that IT professionals and users alike can relate to. Lastly, a robust portal product provides an off-the-shelf architecture that lends itself well to developing and deploying service oriented applications.

In yet another testament to a portal’s technological versatility, an additional facet includes its capacity to address application developer’s needs. Contextually, value here is defined in terms of its ability to

• replace or augment legacy applications
• create common views of data, and
• facilitate access bymobile and wireless devices.

SOA Cautions and Benefits

Developmentally speaking, the portal – SOA union is in no way the mature stage of its life cycle. Similar to web services, the concept began with the integration of internal projects and evolved into an application that tied together various services. Nevertheless, the
research advocates that integration and reusability remain two of the chief determinants of a company’s decision to move forward with a SOA implementation. There are cautions and considerations to weaving SOA and portal architecture to a corporate environment. To name a few, one should consider the complexities of extending SOA beyond the corporate firewall. Moreover, consideration must be made with respect to the initial capital expenditure. However, these seemingly detrimental points have the potential to be rapidly offset by cost reductions and simplifications of processes by virtue of, as we will soon discuss, SOA’s reusability – or breakout value.

As a business case, the overhead of creating the service must be considered. However, the costs born out of a SOA portal based deployment are mitigated by taking into account the intrinsic attributes manifested in a SOA platform – service or application reusability. Vahidy defines this attribute as breakout value, i.e. self-service customer portals addressing the needs of different classes of requestors. SOA, in this instance, demonstrates its breakout value by its ability to service several stakeholders via its portal. A typical vision of the service oriented enterprise, leverages many of the independent, soloed applications that support diverse departmental needs. Finally, the creation and integration of Services– based Processes would weave, or orchestrate, them together using a Business Process Manager or workflow engine into an overall business process.

Integration with legacy systems is an important strategic aspect of SOA, but this applies to portals and every other client-facing application. The greater the number and diversity of integration points – and the more they change over time – the greater the benefit of exposing them as services. The key is to make the portal and every other client service-capable so that they can leverage the advantage of services without the overhead of additional middleware unless real time data manipulation is required. Irrespective of this value, many companies have not fully embraced the intrinsic worth derived from the SOA – portal blend. AMR’s data set indicates that barely 15 percent of the businesses polled intend on implementing SOA for their companies. To date, the balance of firms continues to cling to pre-SOA technology such as early generation web services and machine to machine integration.

Organizations that remain adamant about staying on the bleeding edge of technology employ portal platforms without fully understanding their limitations, benefits or potential to alleviate functional disconnects often apparent in IT environments. Due in part to the increasing cost of failure, it is highly beneficial to embark upon a feasibility study prior to platform rollout. Such a study targets specific objectives including

• accessing and prioritizing business requirements,
• determining the feasibility of the fundamental concept,
• identifying and weighing the issues surrounding the implementations,
• identifying critical success factors, and
• determining the likely cost of meeting the business requirements based on the priority scheme.

Additionally, feasibility for an enterprise-wide implementation can be demonstrated via a prototype of the proposed solution.

Enterprise portals can offer demonstrable business value. The key lies with having a clear mission. Companies eager to implement an enterprise-wide portal platform commonly overlook or neglect to consider long-term value. Frequently, such firms end up with static content rather than realizing or leveraging a portal’s full potential – the utilization and accessibility of productivity applications and
knowledge sharing.

For all the benefits, no single portal architecture or its variants offers a panacea. Although SOA architecture with respect to portals remains diverse, significant gaps between web services potential and it is current capabilities exist. In sum, the limitations depend on the intent. C-Level stakeholders tout the simpler benefits of using web services solely for tasks such as uploading data to portals. However, the limitations become apparent when more complex jobs are added to the mix. While not unique to web services, portals or SOA technology, distributed systems have the tendency of performing more slowly than self-contained ones as network constraints become limiting factors. As is often the case, it becomes a question of using the right tool for the right job. The benefits of flexibility
and access gained by tying the systems close to the units of work they represent – and to others across the organization – far outweigh detrimental performance hits experienced by the network.

Having evolved from an HTML based collection of documents, successive portal generations evolved into content providers and as application interface tools, to name a few. Dually driven by versatility and necessity, variants of portal platforms include the integration of web services and SOA. With this, the real benefit of enterprise portals comes from Information Technology convergence, and is not strictly based on the prevailing notion of being a uni-dimensional, web-based display mechanism. Regardless of the
potential or realized business value, having a clear mission prior to platform rollout remains critical. While no particular position is embraced, it remains imperative that businesses understand both the challenges and choices these platforms present. Losing sight of their full functionality, many organizations blindly invest in portal technology. Regrettably, these firms instead end up with stagnant content on a portal that barely lives up to its potential – IT convergence in terms of universal access to content and search functionality shared across applications.