If your business depends on your web application/website then even a small downtime can also cause big losses in businesses and worse customer trust. 

Recently we have designed a practically deployable architecture for our client for non-stop high availability of their web application. 

We have proposed two architectures based on complexity and cost influence. 

The architecture shown in diagram 1 is most robust option and ensures that web application has maximum uptime in case of some of the components goes down or in case of high traffic situation.

Diagram 2 proposes a second option which is less complex and requires fewer resources hence cheaper than option 1.

DIAGRAM-1

DIAGRAM-2

What is changed in favour of cloud computing

Availability of bandwidth is the most important enabler in favour of cloud computing in recent times. Traditionally computing in businesses was revolving around in-house infrastructure but since the high Internet bandwidth became common across the geography, it changed the way we do use computing for business. 

So, now bandwidth and connectivity issue is more or less solved, we seriously have to think about how to leverage cloud computing to maximize business efficiency.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced general availability of Node.js, though it was in preview since December last year, it is now being offered as stable and out of beta.

In this release AWS has added several new features that developers can use include bound parameters, streams, IAM roles for EC2 instances, version locking, and proxies. 

According to AWS, the SDK simplifies the coding by providing JavaScript objects for AWS services including Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, DynamoDB, and Amazon SWF.

Mobility solutions for tomorrow’s organisations

No other technology has caused disruption as much as mobility has caused in last few years. Recent figures indicate that mobile devices has overtaken PC shipments globally, this clearly indicates the dominance of mobile technology in today’s world. 

Businesses so far have been slow in embracing mobility compared to consumers but that is being changed slowly. 

We have posted a nice article on our Live Chat website carecoll.com on how to implement live chat on your website. 
The article covers some interesting points such as:

• How to train your staff
• Focus on key business hours
• How to personalize customer experience
• Using proactive chat triggers

Read more on carecoll at http://www.carecoll.com/en/how-to-effectively-implement-live-chat-on-your-website 

It has been couple of weeks since we made our Live Chat service CareColl live in beta mode.

Team is working hard to implement some really cool new features which are unique to CareColl. The main idea behind creating our own live chat service was to create a comprehensive customer communication tool that can engage customer’s with ease and does not put any overhead on business in terms of cost or human resources.

Check our Why Live Chat article on CareColl.com for our views on the service.

Online business has many advantages but it suffers from a major problem, a potential customer is always disconnected from the sales staff.  A traditional business does not have this problem since a potential customer is always greeted by a real sales person, questions answered immediately. A Live chat system on your website solves this problem for online businesses and in turn it also affects the bottom line by measurable increase in the sales and customer satisfaction. Here are the major factors goes in favour of live chat system that helps to improve the efficiency of your sales staff and achieve greater success in sales efforts.

Nowadays growing companies are experiencing exponential data growth. Companies are collecting as much data as they can and storing into their live database to do various kind of analysis and reporting.

Organizations are capturing a lot of new data types such as website comments, visitor analytics, communications, transaction history, during the course of the business flow, a lot of documents are generated and stored within the system, these data are important and provide a competitive advantage.

Government regulations about data retention for customer transactions and communications are also driving up the amount of data companies must store in order to comply.

Windows 8 is out and now is the great time to start building your Windows 8 app. If you never had time to go through tidbits of app development before here is what you need to know before you take a plunge. 

Remember that Windows 8 comes in two flavors:

Windows 8 – Runs on Intel processors just like your Windows 7 and will also run most of your Win 7 applications too.

Windows RT – Similar to Windows 8 in look and feel but runs on ARM processors just like most smart phones and tablets, and it will NOT run any of your Windows 7 apps.

What is Sencha Touch?

"Sencha Touch was the first HTML5 mobile JavaScript framework for web applications that feel native on Android, BlackBerry, and iOS. Our extensive tutorials, screencasts and resources are a great way to learn the framework." - Sencha.com

What is JQuery Mobile?

"A unified, HTML5-based user interface system for all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design." - Jquerymobile.com

If we read the definition carefully, we can see that Sencha is a Framework, that means it provides a complete development stack, including in built composite UI controls, also it has its own UI designer app (commercial) which gives you a kind of WYSIWYG interface for building apps quickly. 

While on other hand JQueryMobile is not a framework it's a user interface system in their own words, it does not have its own tools for UI generation (however there are third party web based tools) or their own composite UI controls (may eventually come).

What is NoSQL Database?

It is a set of next generation of databases those are addressing points being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontally scalable. The original intention has been modern web-scale databases. The movement began early 2009 and is growing rapidly. Often more characteristics apply such as: schema-free, easy replication support, simple API, eventually consistent / BASE (not ACID), a huge amount of data (a.k.a. Big Data) and more. 
"NoSQL" is a misleading term, the community now translates it mostly with "Not only SQL".

There are several types of NoSQL databases to serve different purposes but mainly categorized as:

Having a website and not using website analytics is like running a shop blindfolded. You would absolutely want to know how many visitors are coming to your website and from where and what they do. Frankly, otherwise how would you decide which part of website to improve to attract visitors let alone decide marketing strategy? 

Google Analytics is one of the most well-known and highly-regarded Analytics package out there, with a very powerful statistics and insights mechanism, accompanied with an equally powerful dashboard.   It is being used by half of the top one million websites of the world! 

How many times you have seen a decent looking website on your mobile phone (or tablet) and you got amazed? That's because they are either optimized to look great on mobile or they are specifically made for mobile devices.

Here at Intellial, when client comes to us asking to make his website look good on mobile devices, we guide him by presenting various approaches available and discuss which is most suitable for him in terms of both cost and efforts. Here I give you some highlights of which approaches we follow:

Node.JS is currently riding the hyperbole, there is no second thought that the technology is really cool, easy to learn and at the same time easy to deploy. Now that will easily tempt us to use it for a production project, but what are the good use cases where we can really gain by using Node.JS? Remember it's still a new technology which still needs to be mature and production projects involve serious money so we have to think and evaluate.

What is Node.JS?

According to nodejs.org (official website) it is "A platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications". 
Core part of Node.JS is Google's powerful V8 Javascript engine which powers Chrome browser, hence the performance.

Believe us, we have reviewed Orange HRM before building this app, in fact we would not build this app if we found what we were looking for. But sadly there are no enough options availalble which fits our criteria. 

The basic criteria for us were:

• Application should have a software based attendance + time tracking system integrated.
• Easy to manage timesheet module.
• Easy to manage leaves module.
• Easy to manage Salary module.
• Informative reporting with chart.
• Easy to use Performance review module based on KPI
• Intuitive notification system (for birthday alerts and so)