AutoTestFlash, Badboy and Big Brother

AutoTestFlash Record and playback tool for UI tests in Flash applications from Tiago Simoes

Badboy Capture / replay tool with performance and regression features. Most uses are free. Source code available. Vendor is Bradley Software.

Big Brother Command-line link checker for windows and UNIX. Source code available. Binary is available for Linux.

Flash Books

Test Automation Books

Unix Books

Intelligroup Award

Intelligroup, Inc. has received the 2009 Supply-Chain Technology Management Excellence Award from the Supply-Chain Council (SCC), a global not-for-profit trade association and owner of the Supply-Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model.

Intelligroup's recognition is based on a recent integration solution for a global high-tech company in which Intelligroup seamlessly integrated both in-house and sub-contractor supply information into the supply-chain planning process. This solution delivered an immediate and significant return on investment for the customer, increasing both the performance of the supply chain and the overall business.

"The Intelligroup project provides a great example of integrating shop floor execution between subcontractor and manufacturer with clear mapping to SCOR mega processes in order to gain process and data visibility of the upstream and downstream supply chain," said Dr. Tom Janoshalmi, Chair of the SCC Technical Development Steering Committee.
Winners of the Supply-Chain Excellence Award are selected by Supply-Chain Council's Technical Development Steering Committee. The awards are judged based on the following criteria:

-- Accurate demonstration of the implementation of SCOR model
-- Nature and complexity of the project
-- Ability to objectively demonstrate value
-- Ability to characterize the project and effectively communicate its
significance

"Intelligroup is proud to have our supply chain expertise and value recognized by the Supply Chain Council with this prestigious award," said Hiren Bhatt, Vice President of the Oracle Practice at Intelligroup. "The award reflects the importance we place on listening to the distinct needs of our customers and then leveraging our practice knowledge and the adoption of the SCOR model and methodology to deliver tangible business value."

Supply Chain Books

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) , has released research findings from independent analyst firm Nucleus Research comparing application development in the cloud with traditional on premise application development. The results of the research, an in-depth analysis of 17 companies that had developed in both environments, found significant and quantifiable savings in time to development and ongoing support costs with Force.com. Specifically, the research showed that developers found they could deliver applications 4.9 times faster on Force.com than on JAVA or .NET.

"Companies are accelerating their adoption of the cloud for application development," said Marc Benioff, CEO and chairman, salesforce.com. "The benefits of the Force.com platform for enterprise cloud computing are immediate: CIOs get a real-time global infrastructure that enables application development and delivery five times faster at half the cost."

"Our in-depth analysis shows that cloud computing is dramatically changing the cost and time equation for custom application development," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president, research, Nucleus Research. "Given the rapid time to value, lower cost, and greater ongoing flexibility, Force.com is likely to grow in popularity as an option for custom application development."
"We used the Force.com platform and our expertise from publishing more than 120,000 book titles to develop a system that is transforming our business," said James Stanley, CIO of Author Solutions. "Our Force.com projects came in under budget and ahead of schedule."

Force.com: A Proven Enterprise Cloud Computing Platform for ISVs and CIOs

Force.com is the only proven enterprise platform for building and running business applications in the cloud. Unlike a stack of disparate client/server hardware and software products, Force.com unifies the development and deployment model from the database to the device, allowing developers to easily assemble applications with clicks, components and code, and then instantly deploy them on salesforce.com's trusted global infrastructure.

The Force.com platform powers the Salesforce CRM applications, more than 750 ISV partner applications like those from CODA and Fujitsu, and more than 110,000 custom applications used by salesforce.com's 55,400 customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE and Sprint Nextel.

Research Methodology

Nucleus Research conducted an analysis of 17 Force.com projects and found significant savings in time to development and ongoing support costs. In selecting the companies analyzed, Nucleus only included companies that could accurately compare development times in both Force.com and JAVA or .NET environments. In its interviews with developers, Nucleus discussed the details of the projects as well as developers' estimates of the time, in terms of total developer hours and total time from selection to deployment, each project would take to develop in Force.com versus a JAVA or .NET environment. The analysis included:
-- Companies that had moved existing applications to Force.com
-- Companies that had evaluated both traditional (JAVA and .NET)
development environments and Force.com and selected Force.com
-- Systems integrators that had worked with customers who selected
Force.com
-- ISVs that had evaluated traditional development environments and
selected Force.com

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

Tableau Software for StrategicOne

Tableau Software (http://www.tableausoftware.com/), has announced that StrategicOne implemented Tableau to provide client-facing business dashboards and customer relationship management (CRM) analytics. StrategicOne is a proven leader in CRM analytics and serves clients including The Salvation Army, American Red Cross, Focus on the Family, Hallmark, Payless ShoeSource and Coca-Cola. A free seminar titled "Implementing Effective and Affordable BI" (http://www.tableausoftware.com/strategicone) will take place Thursday May 7 in Overland Park, Kan. to showcase how StrategicOne leveraged best practices in data visualization and rapid BI deployment to provide better results for clients.

CRM Books

Radcom in Asia Sale

RADCOM today announced that one of Asia's top cellular services operators will be offering its corporate clients RADCOM's QLocate LBS (location-based system) application for localized promotional purposes.

This cellular services operator bought RADCOM's Omni-Q service assurance solution, a comprehensive, next-generation network testing, monitoring and performance quality management system, to monitor its UMTS cellular network end-to-end. It has now purchased RADCOM's new QLocate application.

QLocate is an add-on application to RADCOM's Omni-Q that offers a direct communications channel of localized messaging, thus providing the operator's corporate customers with a valuable business advantage and proving the operator's commitment to superior service. QLocate delivers precise user location information to the operator. This information can then be used to send welcome messages to both GSM and UMTS subscribers roaming in individually targeted locations, such as particular buildings or specific commercial areas.

"We are thrilled with the possibilities that QLocate opens up to the business world, and this operator's rapid adoption of Omni-Q's new application is very gratifying, and proves their satisfaction and confidence in RADCOM's products," said Eyal Harrari, RADCOM's VP Products and Marketing. "QLocate enhances the solution's offering, providing unprecedented opportunities to shape a new business model and leverages our award-winning monitoring system in a way that promotes customer satisfaction more than ever."

Mobile Communications Books

Localization Books

Telecommunications Books

ITIL Books

More books on ITIL

Japanese ITIL Exam

EXIN, the Examination Institute for Information Science, is to take part in the ITIL(R) V3 Qualification Scheme as the first Japanese Manager's Bridge exams enter the pilot phase in March 2009. This pilot will be the next step in a year-long project to translate the core ITIL(R) V3 examinations into the Japanese language. For the translation of the ITIL(R) V3 Foundation, Foundation Bridge and the Manager's Bridge exam in Japanese, EXIN has enlisted its network of EXIN Experts to contribute to a quality translation of the examinations. The ITIL(R) V3 Manager's Bridge exam is available for candidates who are already certified for ITIL(R) Service Manager or for candidates who have earned at least 12 credits based on Practitioner certificates.

Pilot testing
In a partnership with The APM Group that began in February 2008 with the production of the translations for ITIL(R) V3 Foundation and Foundation Bridge, EXIN Japan has recently completed the translations for the ITIL(R) V3 Manager's Bridge examination questions, based on the Japanese version 3 glossary. After the review of the exams by external experts who are members of the Japanese EXIN QA Panel, the exams will now be made available to the Accredited Examination Institutes. The APM Group, as the official owner of the new exams, will officially approve the exam material after a pilot period. These pilot sessions are scheduled to begin by the end of March 2009.

Connex 30 Passes ISO

Advanced Control Systems, Inc. (ACS), announced that its Connex 30 substation manager has successfully passed the ISO New England DNP3 conformance testing, which includes DNP3 2009 Level 4 functionality. The Connex 30 meets all of the Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) specification requirements as a replacement for the obsolete Remote Intelligent Gateways (RIG) currently in use by ISO-NE market participants.

The specifications define the requirements for communication between the ISO New England Communications Front End (CFE) System servers and the RTUs owned by market participants. The existing proprietary RIG infrastructure used by ISO-NE is being replaced with a DNP3-based CFE and RTU system. ISO-NE tested the ACS Connex 30 using the actual configuration with market and reliability data from a current market participant. The tests fully demonstrate the Connex 30's ability to provide secure and reliable data transfer between the systems.

ACS' Connex 30 solution includes all of the core RIG functionality currently in use, so market participants can be assured of a smooth and seamless transition from their legacy devices. More importantly, the Connex 30 provides users with several advantages over competing RIG replacement solutions:

- This critical application demands a field-proven solution. The
Connex 30 has an impeccable reliability record, with over 400
installed units to date.

- The Connex 30 is a network-enabled, high-performance data management
platform that can be deployed as an intelligent electronic device
(IED) gateway, protocol translator and conventional RTU.

- The integrated Human-Machine Interface (HMI) module provides users
with graphical monitoring capabilities that go well beyond a simple
anunciator panel.

- The Connex 30 offers fully-compliant DNP3 2009 Level 4 functionality
(available in selected configurations).

- With 34 years of experience as an RTU manufacturer and innovator,
ACS can provide a turn-key solution for ISO-NE market participants,
providing installation, configuration, point-to-point testing and
support services - all from a single vendor.

The modular and flexible Connex 30 platform is also an extremely cost-effective retrofit option for legacy RTUs. This means that ISO-NE market participants can utilize the same Connex 30 RIG replacement platform as an upgrade kit for many aging RTU models.


ISO Books

Hansoft 5.3 to be Launched at GDC

Hansoft, launch Hansoft 5.3 during GDC in San Francisco next week. Hansoft 5.3 contains a number of improvements. One of the most significant is the asset pipeline tool.

"We have had in-depth discussions with studios for quite some time on how to take the heavy manual work out of managing asset pipelines. Many teams are also experiencing that it's hard to combine an agile process like scrum with the linear nature of asset creation. This became a large and very exiting research project on our side and we are now releasing Hansoft 5.3 where art pipelines can be created in parallel with sign-off workflows to make asset creation more lean," said Hans Andersson, Development Director at Hansoft.

Developers in over 20 countries are using Hansoft for collaborative scheduling, agile, bug tracking and workload coordination. Hansoft is also used on multi site projects, to keep close contacts and daily discussions between teams, even though the geographical distance may be large.

"Every day we get large amounts of great feedback from clients that we use to continuously make improvements of Hansoft. Some updates are small but significant for the everyday user experience and some are large. Like the new report generator. That was originally based on feedback from QA managers that wanted the reporting in the bug database part of Hansoft to be more powerful," said Hans Andersson.

Amazon Test

Project Management and Games Development Books

Games Development Software

Project Management Books

Projects

Service Management

Service Management- -A set capabilities hat are a) specialized and b) organizational that provide value to customers in the form of services.

ITIL Organisations

ITIL Intformation Technology Infrastructure Library

CCTA Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency

OGC Office of Government Commerce

Office of Government Commerce Government office that promotes best practice including IT Service Management. Ultimately owner of ITIL

itSMF IT Service Management Forum

IT Service Management Forum Not-fo-profit organization for the support of development of IT Service Management. The group is international and has national chapters.

APM Group Company contracted to manage ITIL rights, ITIL certification exams and training organization accreditation.

AutoMate and Automation Anywhere

AutoMate Platform for automation testing by simulating GUI activity via a browser. Supported features include HTTPS, Excel, event database and native terminal emulation. Does not need script as tests written with drag and drop interface. Vendor is Network Automation

Automation Anywhere Web automation tool offering over 180 different actions. Uses SMART Automation Technology. Supposedly works with any websites including those with Java, Javascript, Ajax and Iframes. Scripting is via a point and click editor. Link checking is available. Remote deployment enables tasks to be automated acrossu multiple machines on a network. The capture/playback can take into account website changes. Vendor is Tethys Solutions