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Our Business Automation System

Monday, April 27th, 2009 by Gene Averbuch

I thought I would write about a useful feature we just added to our business automation solution.   It was an expansion on the time tracking functionality that we already had in our project management system (one of our enterprise 2.0 solutions) that was specifically geared toward businesses that need to account for all of their employees’ hours.  Not simply the fact that they were spent working, but rather what they worked on, who is the client, how much that client was billed for that work, ratio of billable work to bug fixes for every client, project, and feature, and so on.

What’s more, the employees and managers can actively monitor anyone’s progress and efficiency.  At the end of the month, a development manager can instantly get data on how quickly, efficiently, and bug free any given developers work is.   The per project information also helps determine which projects are more or less profitable, which in turn lets us determine which project should be looked into (if development and efficiency needs to be improved).

The last piece of the new functionality deals with performance bonuses.  The system is designed to automatically determine performance and show each employee if they have a good chance to receive a bonus for any given month (including the estimated bonus amount).  All settings dealing with what is a good/efficient month are 100% configurable and can be changed any time (depending on who is using the system).

This is saving Intechnic a lot of time in administrative overheads and it has given employees an additional incentive to do a better job.

Requirements To Use a Website

Thursday, April 16th, 2009 by Gene Averbuch

This blog is not about having the right operating system or the right browser to make sure that sites look and function correctly, but rather about the actual computer. Even 5-7 years ago, as long as you had an average or even older computer, 99% of the time any site would load without a problem, provided you had the right software installed. This has definitely changed in recent times to a point where you may need a top of the line computer just to view some sites’ content. For example, we have an older (Pentium 4) computer with an integrated video card in the office for testing purposes and there would be no way that we could use it to watch high definition videos because it just simply can’t handle them. It’s just too slow and all videos end up being very choppy and sometimes unwatchable. The same goes with websites that have very nice flash presentations or extensive java script. That’s not to say that those sites are poorly made.

The point here is that a lot of times they are designed with only the latest hardware in mind. So why not have two versions of the site? Google is doing it with gmail where you can switch to html-only if the regular interface is too slow – something that’s very useful if you are browsing the web on an older computer or on a less powerful tablet (for example: Nokia N810 – which is what I have). That’s not to say that the entire site has to be redone in a slow-computer-friendly way, but definitely some of the elements. As an example, the tag cloud to the left of this blog is done in flash, but it will automatically switch to simple html if flash is not supported on your browser.

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