With Google Buzz is being increasingly hyped as Facebook and Twitter-killer, it awaits yet another rival in Microsoft Outlook 2011. Google’s concept to merge public broadcasting (buzz) with private service (Gmail) was received with lot of heat, especially over its privacy flaws. With some mixed reactions, Google Buzz is still awaiting a consensus for full-fledged acceptance of its imbued social media. However, Google’s concept of integrating social networking with email platform is not unrivaled. Microsoft takes a similar approach to combine messaging and social networking with social connectors for its email service Outlook 2011.

Google started addressing the privacy concerns tweaking the service multiple times over the past week.  Given the privacy issues, Buzz still needs to overcome its dependency on Gmail. Those using Gmail as their primary email client will have Buzz as their natural extension of that application to incorporate your social networks or least your Google contacts and Twitter.

Office 2011 is expected to be launched by the end of this year. Currently we have the beta version of Outlook 2011. Microsoft had already announced a new feature called Social Connectors.

The Reading Pane in Outlook has an expandable People Pane. Expanding the People Pane shows a complete messaging and communication history for the given contacts – emails, attachments, calender events, activities and status updates.

Distinct socializing approach

The Google Buzz offers a more social approach. You might be able to participate in an ongoing thread directly from within Gmail.  Going a step ahead of Twitter, it allows microblogging status updates without the 140-character limitation.

Buzz turns email platform into new social networking tool, while Outlook 2011 offers social connectors an efficient way to manage their existing social networks.

Managing the updates

Google buzz seems overcrowded and dunks the inbox with a steady stream of comments and status updates. In case you don’t manage the privacy of your comments and threads, you are at a risk of exposing information to parties that you don’t even know. The Buzz posts are somewhat like Twitter that are primarily public. However, Buzz looks more organized than Twitter as they present a message thread.

Microsoft adopts a contact-centric approach that enables you to quickly and easily view all content related to a particular user, including their recent Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, or other social networking interactions. What’s more relevant Outlook 2011 doesn’t overwhelm your inbox or dump loads of irrelevant communications on you.

Tying with other networks

Google Buzz allows tying to Google contacts and a single Twitter account into the Buzz network. Outlook 2011 social connectors is a more open platform. Outlook 2011 social connector is a more more open platform.

Microsoft has created a software development kit that enables the programmers to create add-ins for Outlook to tie in any other network.

Users feedback

Most of the Google Buzz users are complaining against the addition of Buzz to Gmail saying that it leads to a huge distraction.

Outlook 2011 social connector has a much less chaotic and more functional approach, especially form business perspective.

Microsoft would be officially launching Office 2011 within a months and the social connector features is not yet available. Still Microsoft seems to adopt a more efficient and productive approach for social networking with social connector that would certainly benefit the business professional, as they mainly rely on Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. This could be an advantage for those who are interested in integrating social networks beyond Twitter. It remains to see whether Microsoft’s concept could fill in the fissures left by Google Buzz.

“Your generation created this problem, you better fix it!”

“There is a time when panic is the appropriate response” – Eugene Kleiner of KPCB

BTW: KPCB is investing 200 million dollars in green technology based companies.

Even software companies like us can go green by reducing electricity consumption as much as possible by using fluorescent lighting, encouraging and facilitating car-pools, shutting down workstations after work etc.

Each of us should do our bit, not only at a personal level but also by trying to influence policies, to help environment and in turn help our children to live in a cleaner and safer world. And you can also make a profit out of your effort like Walmart.

BTW: Personally I am looking for efficient solar panels to use some of the massive amount of solar power freely available in Kolkata, without much luck so far. Any ideas welcome.

This online conversion tool doesn’t require any registration or installation. Moreover, it’s easy to use to get the files converted within a few steps. Follow the steps below

Step 1:

First go to the site

Step 2:

Browse for the specific file from your local drive that you want to convert

Step 3:

Provide the email address that you want to send the converted files into

Step 4:

After the conversion is completed you will get the converted file in your specified email address. The time for conversion of file depends on the file size you want to convert.

The converted file might not retain exact appearance of the original tables. It can maintain all the important formatting including the font size, styles, colors and etc in a neat XLS format for reuse. For more you can produce output files that are compatible for working Google Docs, OpenOffice and other word processing applications.

After having done with the best free affiliate tracking software we decided to do with the high-end software that can be used to track or manage a myriad of affiliate marketing activities. Unlike the free affiliate tracking software the paid ones are bundled with advanced features to streamline the entire process of affiliate marketing. The software enables the users to easily track conversions created by their affiliates and reward them the monetary credit based on their efforts. It enhances the affiliate marketing through performance based tracking and ensures that the advertisers (or merchants) only pays for actual leads, sales, and conversions.  It provides an effective way to achieve more sales and more traffic. If you are confused which affiliate tracking software to use we assorted a list of 7 best affiliate tracking software for your convenience.

1. Directtrack.com

It’s a powerful, accurate and feature-rich web-based affiliate marketing and tracking software. DirectTrack offers leading edge functionality that include better scalability, mobile ad serving and next generation APIs. It features an exclusive ad-sharing portal, integrated PPC functionality and certified-accurate hybrid tracking methodology. The software is private labeled, custom configured and scaled around a diverse range of business models and verticals. Directtrack has a fully customizable and translatable User Interface. In addition, the software offers a number of Affiliate Management Tools.

Link

2. Post Affiliate Pro 4

Post Affiliate Pro has been designed to automate your entire affiliate program. It helps to recruit and manage your affiliates. It offers the users a comprehensive choice of marketing and promotional tools to promote your business. You can select your theme and customize templates. It features an unlimited number of tiers that can be set according to the requirements. Additional commissions options can be added to the software using the plugins. The affiliate features of includes a forced matrix for multilevel marketing that compensates affiliates not only for product sales they personally generate, but also the sales of sub-affiliates they introduced to the affiliate program. The tracking features in the affiliate software include

Link

3. HitPath.com

The affiliate tracking software has a skinned Affiliate interface that can match the look and feel of client’s website. The software is fully scalable with flexible hardware architecture that can be adjusted according to your growing business. HitPath allows multiple process tracking that ensures not a single hit or sale is missed. It offers redundant real-time campaign tracking. HitPath backs up its database tracking with cookie-based tracking for the most accurate tracking in the industry. It’s advanced API reporting ensures greater and faster access to stats.

Link

4. Affiliate Pro 3.2.9

This affiliate tracking software can be easily integrated with your website/shopping cart. It features pay-per-Sale (%% from sales), pay-per-sale (flat rate), pay-per-click (For unique visitors), payout percentages adjustable per affiliate and adjustable recurring duration (per individual sale). It allows you to group products and adjust setting as per the group. Affiliate Pro can effectively manage unlimited affiliate and adjust payout amount per affiliate (%). It’s integrated mailing system allows the admins to send mails to approved/non-approved affiliates. The admin can adjust the 1st and 2nd tier affiliate commissions. The built-in PayPal module makes it easier to pay commission.  It has the ability to create printable version of reports. All its pages are written in PHP and it is MySQL database driven. Evidently, Affiliate Pro can be installed on virtual hosting account

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5. iDevAffiliate

It is one of the best affiliate tracking software for those with a strict budget. It charges no monthly fees and offers free upgrades for one year.  iDevAffiliate offers extensive payout options including pay-per-sale(%), pay-per-sale (flat rate payout), pay-per-click (unique visitors) and pay-per-lead. For each payout you can create up to 100 payout levels. With a built-in affiliate marketing design all linking codes are automatically generated. It allows unlimited ads, text links, email links, banners and an offline marketing module. The advanced security features in iDevAffiliate includes triple redundancy tracking – IP, cookies, sessions. Additionally, the software allows options for payment to your affiliates with PayPal.

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6. Linktrust.com

It is a web based affiliate tracking and lead management software with continues to add in features too often. Linktrust allows unlimited affiliate accounts that can be edited, tracked and suspended.  Some of its leading features include conversion tracking, pay-per-call tracking, lead and co-reg management. The online management center allows you manage your campaigns, leads, affiliates, merchants and acquire all reports. It’s merchant/lead buyer tools organize and store information about who is buying your data.

Link

7. FreeFiliate

It is a great proposition for small merchant. It’s Standard Account offers a fully functional and easy to use affiliate tracking service. Although its not quite free, but can be operated cheaply. FreeFiliate supports the pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, and pay- per-sale models, and it integrates with the PayPal Mass Payment system for easy payment of your affiliates. Some features exclusive features in FreeFiliate are free online support, online statistical reporting and tracking, two-tier functionality, customizable affiliate sign-up page, and a shopping cart system. It also allows the ability to send personalized e-mail to the affiliates. The affiliates are allowed to link with either a text link or using four different banners. There is a limit of one destination URL, so if you are offering multiple products, they will all have to be highlighted on the same page.

The set up for FreeFiliate is smooth and can run a pay-per-click program without technical integration required. For pay-per-lead and pay-per-sale you need to embed a special HTML image tag into your Thank You page to the programs.

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A picture speaks better then thousand words. As far as technologists are concerned Firefox browser is a clear winner by a wide margin with 49% of the market share. Overall Mozilla group has 57% of the market share.

Note: This statistics are from my website. It averages around 120, 000 page impressions per month these days. Be careful if you are extrapolating the results for a wider audience. My primary audience are technologists.

Internet Explorer 5 (2%) and 6(35%) have a combined market share of 37%.

Previously, on February 10th, I noted that Mozilla browsers already increased its market share to 51% with Internet Explorer browsers lagging behind at 39%.

In these months Firefox has increased its share by 6% whereas IE shares minimally went down by 2%.

For quite sometime I wasn’t sure whether this trend among technologists was fluke or for real. Today I am fully convinced that technologists prefer Firefox over Internet Explorer by a wide margin.

Admitedly it is a view from my microcosm of the web. However I have heard similar observations from others.

No wonder Microsoft decided to fast-forward (read resurrected) release of a new browser. Let’s see how much IE 7 can do to reverse this damage.

A bigger question is how long before this trend is reflected in the general population. They will invariably follow the technologists and thought leaders. However the adoption rate will be much slower. It may take another year or two before Firefox dominates over the market at the current rate of adoption. Let’s see if IE 7 can reverse this trend.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is suffering from rendering issue or scripting error on some web pages you visit. What better can you do except to send an email to Steve Ballmer asking for a solution. lol. If not exactly that now you can take on your complain about IE web browser to Microsoft. The company would be providing a Report a Webpage Problem Internet Explorer Add-on. The new addition will allow the users to submit their report to Microsoft for webpages that have rendering problems, scripting errors, or any other type of problems in IE8. However, the add-on might be removed from the Microsoft Download Center at any time.

After installing the plugin, you need to restart the IE 8. With the installation Report a Webpage Problem Internet Explorer Add-on appears as a toolbar button. In the Tools menu you can see a Report a Webpage Problem. In order to submit the a malicious website to Microsoft click on the toolbar button or choose the menu item. The add-on ActiveX control takes a screenshot of the web page that you are currently viewing and opens it in a new tab with a report submission form. At the bottom you will get a scaled version of the screenshot.

The user can choose to add a full-sized screenshot to the report. In case, you wanna avoid it choose No for Include Screenshot. Further, the users are allowed the choice to select the category that represents their more precisely. For this they can type in a 1000 character limit report in the text field provided.

The report sent to Microsoft include additional data provided below :

In Windows Vista, the IE runs in protected mode. You must allow the Microsoft Applications Error Reporting to open outside protected mode to carry out the submission. The add-on will be available for a short span after the IE 8 RTM.

Download Report a Webpage Problem IE 8 Add-On from Microsoft Download Center

OR

Download the direct set up link

Key Features

Deployment

It offers two options for deployment – on demand and on premise, which seems to be designed to cope up with dynamical business environment.

The on-demand deployment would be a great option for those considering affordability, and more streamlined way of implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. The on-premise option comes with unlimited customization and integration and can be an advantage for those with a Microsoft infrastructure.

Sales Automation

This offers good support for sales with embedded Microsoft Office capabilities. The sales reports can be created by any user and not just the administrator. The sales representatives can create their individual customer Quick Campaigns using this dynamic CRM.

As the sales reports can be individualized the managers and sales reps can access different set of data. The manager can view the statistics of entire sales force, but reps can only view a part of it that’s important to them. the leads and tasks can be assigned automatically from a single system that captures and tracks all the data. The intuitive dashboards helps to keep track of the key performance indicator.

Marketing

Delving into the marketing feature reveals that this dynamic CRM software assists in simplifying the execution of campaign. The Mail Merge functionality allows instant communication with a large group. It’s eassy to set up the product catalogs, price lists and discounts for lucrative offers. It optimizes, manages and tracks search-engine marketing efforts.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers mobility to create campaigns with any mobile Web enabled device remotely. The marketing analytics is highlighted through the key performance indicators.

Customer Service

Microsoft CRM  provides a broader view of the customer base. The CRM has an intuitive user interface to make things easier for the agents. It helps to create a distributed knowledge base that helps to share staff expertise. It enables the agents to resolve customer related issues steadily.

Pros

Ease of use

Microsoft edges the other rivals when it comes to installation and ease of use. Microsoft is sure far less intricate than Siebel. This could save a lot of time for an administrator.

Flexibility and ease of use

When judging a CRM software flexibility of use is an important criteria. One of most agreeable features of Microsoft dynamic is its flexibility of use. A user can work with it within Microsoft Office Outlook, a Web browser, a Microsoft Office SharePoint portal, a custom portal, or even a mobile device. The customized workspaces that allow users to create, save, and reuse favorite views of customer data.

Integration

Microsoft Dynamics offers direct integration with MS Office applications. Dynamics allow the users to use customer data in Word and Excel.

Cons

Microsoft lacks some of the standard features. It doesn’t feature a power dialing. There are no voice messaging facilities that would allow the agents to record a sales message and make a call back to customer.

Competitors

When you are looking for a feasible CRM, it’s important to draw comparison with other products.  If you consider the mid-market you can see that Oracle Siebel and SAP are moving down in the market, and Microsoft is busy with efforts to extend the customer base. Siebel’s scores high when it comes to functionally rich CRM applications and first rate interface.

Conclusion

Microsoft dynamic CRM seems to have bright prospect with the mid marker companies, but it is far from being a market leader.

It needs to mature with its functionality. Microsoft should include more effective business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales features.  Let me know if you have something more to share on Microsoft dynamic CRM

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Last week was an interesting one as hot debate raged over Joel Spolsky’s article on enterprise language, Hani rightly bashed copious logging of open source software and my article on hacking attempts from Caltech topped the list of most read articles. We released Anaconda, a beautiful 3 column WordPress theme and version 3 of Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress.

First let’s go over Joel Spolsky’s article on programming language for enterprise application development.

Language Wars

Joel rightly pointed out that pretty much there are four (he mentioned 3.5 but I don’t understand his issue with Python) language for enterprise development – Java, C#, PHP &- Python. He expressed concern over Ruby’s slowness &- scalability. Frankly if I were to develop an enterprise app today, I would have the same concerns too. Java, C# &- PHP have all proven their merits. I am not much into Python so I will refrain from commenting on it.

Ruby &- RoR needs to be validated with large scale enterprise applications. His personal preference for C# is understandable as he has long experience with Microsoft product. However if you are not famed Excel manager, Joel Spolsky and you are not strongly biased one way or another then I would suggest that you go for Java. Again the core competency of your team is crucial in decision making.

BTW: Here are my answers to Joel’s questions.

“What is it with opensores and logging?”

Hani has, in his entertaining but vulgar style, criticized open source logging style with specific reference to JBoss &- Spring.

He has gone one step further and offered to go over their applications for free and send them a patch to remove all their spurious startup messages. I agree with him. Sending out reams of logging messages can only confuse your users. It also shows sloppy programming, keeping debug messages enabled. And Hani got married. I am not sure if I should congratulate him or rue the loss of yet another bachelor to the altar of marriage.

Simple Thoughts beats Joel &- Hani

That sounds sensational, doesn’t it? In reality my article on brute force ssh hacking attempts on my server was the most read article on JavaBlogs last week, ahead of Hani &- Joel’s.

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress 2.x Blogs

Last week was extremely hectic for us as we released version 3 of our popular Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress 2.x blogs. It provides automatic machine translation of your blog in eight different languages – German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. It is search engine optimized, supports WordPress widgets, uses nice permalinks, super-fast (cacheable), provides tremendous SEO boost and lots more.

Anaconda Theme for WordPress 2.x Blogs

However that isn’t all. We also released Anaconda, a beautiful flexible CSS based 3 column WordPress theme. Anaconda uses flexible 3 column layout which is designed entirely with CSS. The center column and left sidebar are flexible and adjusts to browser size. Anaconda comes with inbuilt support for 15 popular WordPress plugins out of the box. Anaconda also provides 17 WordPress widgets for you to extensively customize your site without writing / modifying a single line of code. Anaconda works without any configuration out of the box. It is also extensively customizable for those who need it.

That’s all, my friends.

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Should my title be “decline of Adobe Flash Empire“?  Adobe acquired rival Macromedia to establish its monopoly over Web standards. With the emergence of new Web standards, especially HTML5, Adobe’s Flash is fast losing its grip on Web. The top brass of software companies are in no mood to cooperate with Adobe Flash. We had already discussed Apple’s apathy over Flash support in iPad. Some of the software majors like Microsoft, Sun have already waged a anti-Flash campaign. Now Open Video Alliance that includes Mozilla, Kaltura, Miro, and Yale Law School have joined hands to introduce Flash-free video on Wikipedia.

Open Video Alliance had launched a extensive campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. They are supporting several community-based projects to support collaborative work. They are also working on a Participatory Culture Foundation to release a free video conversion app for Windows and Mac. However, its unfortunate for Adobe that none of the projects will add Flash support, instead they will rely on the open standards HTML5 and Theora.

Apple has already marginalized Flash in its devices and with Google’s YouTube and Wikipedia supporting open video, it seems the days of Flash are numbered.

So the main doubt was over to people who are working for Google. Especially as Google boasts of their attractive packages like #1 Place to Work According to Forbes and Free Gourmet Food and Unlimited Sick Days and We Want You to Be Googley! and many more. Are they retaining it. While researching over the net about this more, it was striking to see the scenario so different. People working at Google have complained about inequality, overtime and no leave at all. Many are secretly laid off even now and others are really searching for another job if its negotiable to Google’s.

There is a point after which you don’t need the money or the stock more than yourself. Google must understand that automating machines is a cool thing, but its not exactly so when you turn men into human machines.

For Facts and discussions, You may visit them,

If you have something to say, do not wait but speak up. Give us your feedback. Google may not be that good as it looks from outside. Do I mind? No. Do I care for Google? No. But I do for the people working there.