CRM – Customer Relationship Management System

CRM is a computer program which gives any company a chance to become a highly organized company oriented on customers having placed them in the center of all information channels related to them and provides sales people the access to the required data. In the customer oriented company sales people will have the access to the whole information which, one way or another, influences their relations with customers. Negotiations, informal discussion, letters, complaints, reclamations, all the information which has been sent to the customer – everything that can influence the ability of the sales people to provide services and, as a result, sell more goods and services.

The customer oriented companies handle clients’ requests more quickly and accurately as the whole necessary information is stored in one place. Thanks to this, the company can have a higher index of client retention than the competitors that are organized traditionally.

Microsoft opens online Windows games store

Microsoft has just announced the opening of the online store Games for Windows Marketplace where game developers will sell their computer games based on the Windows operation systems.

The new online service is reported to have the simple interface and the easy to use navigation system. Users will be able to search for games by names, genres or vendors. If necessary, the service subscribers can download the purchased games several times, for example, for re-installing.

At first, Games for Windows Marketplace will offer about a hundred ‘high quality games of various types’. In future, the range of products will expand.

Among other software development companies that are going to distribute their products via this new online store there are Microsoft Game Studios, 2K Games, Capcom, Rockstar and Warner Brothers. The identification of the service subscribers will be done via the Windows Live ID system.

Games for Windows Marketplace will be launched on November 15.

Mono 2.8 – Development environment .NET

Novell has released the new version of its cross platform development environment Mono 2.8 for web application development based on the .NET architecture. The new version of the platform Mono is a final step on the way to the release of the next version Mono 3.0.

The development environment Mono is an open alternative to the Microsoft tools for the development of .NET applications. Here web developers get all the necessary tools for writing and moving .NET applications oriented not only to the Windows operating system but to the various modifications of Linux or Solaris.

What is new in Mono 2.8? Firstly, its improved productivity of the SGen mechanism for collecting ‘garbage’ in the memory with the dynamic compression of the used memory. Secondly, Mono 2.8 contains a powerful Low Level Virtual Machine used in scientific and financial applications where large volumes of calculations are required. Thirdly, now Mono 2.8 has full support of the new specification of the programming language C# 4.0.

Visual Studio .NET

At present Visual Studio .NET from Microsoft is probably the best (or one of the best) set of tools and methods for software development. Using it developers are able to develop modern applications and XML web services.
Why is Visual Studio. Net so attractive? The main answer is its simple implementation. Moreover, your existing web services can be employed for opening new chances of cost reduction.

Tester’s Day

Today – on September 9 – testers from all over the world are celebrating their professional holiday – Tester’s day! We’d like to congratulate all people who test applications, who fight with various bugs and errors and wish them all the best!

This holiday has its own legend. According to it, on September 9, 1945 when the scientists who were testing the computer Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, they found a real small moth between the contacts of the electromechanical relay and one of them pronounced the word ‘bug’. The scientists had to make a report on the work done where the term ‘debugging’ appeared for the first time. Now debugging is the process of finding and eliminating bugs which lead to incorrect performance of the system and failures.

Software testing is not an easy job. The tester should be able to think as a user, on one side, and, on the other hand, analyze the system’s behavior, input parameters and obtained results as an engineer who takes part in software development.

Happy day, testers!

Background images for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 beta

According to statistics about 45% of people use Microsoft Outlook as email client. About 10% of people use Outlook 2007. So it is a big deal for marketing departments to create and implement attractive HTML emails using Outlook 2007 email client. And it was pretty easy to do using any version of Microsoft email client released earlier Outlook 2007.

Why?

The problem is that both Outlook 2007 and 2010 beta do not support background images for any element except body. So which difference between these two versions leads to this issue? Outlook 2003 uses Internet Explorer to render HTML emails. Unfortunately Outlook 2007 uses Microsoft Office for this purpose.

How to learn any new programming language faster then ever

It’s always difficult to learn something new. Nevertheless, there are some techniques and tricks that can be very helpful for beginners who want to become Java, .Net, php, flash programmers, etc. So using them you can learn any new language easier, faster and more efficiently:

Set your time commitments

Don’t think that you can learn a new language, giving it only half an hour every day. It’s much better (more productive) to read textbooks devoting the whole day to this activity (better 1-2 days a week then 30 min a day).

Use cribs
Cribs may be more valuable than it might seem at the first glance. Writing cribs is one of the most useful methods of learning (they are not only reminders, but also your samples and tips).

Collect all the necessary material
There are many resources for any programming language: Flash and Flex, AJAX, coding for mobile applications and others. Some of them are very good, others are not. Collection of numerous textbooks and internet-sources will allow you to choose the best authors and the easiest approaches. So, use Google and collect guides and manuals for programmers, articles in different media, post in popular blogs and respected forums.
And the last point: make sure that you understand the basis of language, before you will begin to work with examples. You wont be able to built a house without foundation.

Help to understand bugs with CamStudio

Sometimes it is necessary to write a sequence of operations with the program for describing a bug. It helps software developers to increase the quality level as they spend much less time to understand a bug, and one clip can substitute a page of text. For such cases there is a program CamStudio.

Its installation is simple and should not call any questions. The main program features: Region – it is possible to select an area which will be captured in a video clip. Accessible values – region, fixed region, full screen. If select the option ‘Region’ the size of the recorded area will be necessary to set each time anew. ‘Fixed region’ – the fixed size of the area, before the recording begins it is necessary to specify only where it will be located on the screen. ‘Full screen’ means a full-screen mode.

Option-> Enabled Autopan. If you set this mode, the capture area will follow the cursor. At the same time it will be possible to expose the speed of frame moving.

Tools-> Screen Annotations. In this case it is possible to add various notes on the screen in the form of nice images. The image with the text can be placed in the necessary part of the screen and can be recorded.

And finally, in the menu ‘Options’-> Keyboard shortcuts – It’s possible to customize “hot” keys for various operations with the program.

Average Salary of Developers in various countries

The question of the “Salary” is one of the most interesting and also mysterious question that almost every person is taking an active interest in discussion when pertinent time was come. And almost every person wants to know the great secret – salary of his colleagues to compare with own salary (may be boss underestimated his skills and the time to do meeting with boss is come), but how can he ask them?

Salary is also a very private theme to have a talk about. We try to lift the veil of mystery from this question and you will know not only about the salary of your colleagues but will have a possibility to compare your own salary with salary of developers in various countries. I hope you will take a good time while reading this
article.

First of all, let’s gossip about the salary of our neighbours, then will travel to America and the sweetest information about the salary in our country will leave in the end.:)

Microsoft DevDays in Minsk. Visual Studio Team System 2010

My expectations were justified – it was the most interesting part of conference “Microsoft DevDays“: the presentation of the first demo of Visual Studio Team System 2010.

Approximately in a year we’ll be able to see all new features ourselves, but now only announcements and demos. According to the company official information it will be the largest release in the history. All graphic interfaces will be rewritten using WPF. That will allow to accelerate work of visual editors and to reduce the size of required free space. By the way, rumors that the installation will require 75 Gb of disk space, are just rumors.