Amazon is making the deal sweeter this holiday season for its countless customers. Amazon Web Services has just tied up with Adobe Systems Incorporated to offer better services by adding the availability of Adobe Flash Media Server 4 software on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
For many customers, Adobe Flash Media Server is the perfect solution for applications such as streaming video and a host of other social media applications. With these being the “hot” things nowadays, the addition of the functionality is simply another way that Amazon Web Services is trying to attract more clients and retain the existing ones.
One of the biggest advantages that Amazon Web Services offer is their pay-as-you-go model, making it a very affordable alternative for any enterprise. With the market being as competitive as it is today, this model makes sense for a lot of businesses. Amazon Web Services has received its share of flak due to some down time, but it has made some adjustments to its offerings by adding more services and enhancing their servers hosted in its data service centers. For the pricing model and the features, Amazon certainly has an edge. As long as they are able to maintain the stability of their services – which is quite likely – this development is sure to save a lot of entrepreneurs on operating costs whilst equipping them with the means to provide high quality services.
This latest tie up will bring more advantages such as:
- Multicast and live packaging with HTTP Dynamic Streaming for high quality playback experiences
- RTMFP technology; this reduces bandwidth usage
- Real-time interactive applications
- Peer-assisted communication
Remember that Watchfire was acquired by IBM early this year? Well, they sure aren�t wasting time as they will now officially release IBM Rational AppScan 7.7. This new improved Web application security tool is based on Watchfire’s AppScan. This product basically identifies, validates and reports on gaps in Web applications. However, the latest version has new features (i.e. Scan Expert and State Inducer) designed to make the product more user-friendly for those who have not much background in application testing. It also includes recorded Web-based training (now that one is useful to me) to instruct users on application security and industry standard compliance.
Source: Eweek
The US local governments are encouraging residents to help cut on CO2 emissions by using council web services instead. How? Well, the answer is quite logical. Instead of using transportation, whether public or private, residents with internet access to make use of the services offered in the government web sites and therefore saving the planet from �millions of air miles in carbon emissions.�
The Department of Communities and Local Government commissioned environmental specialists Best Foot Forward to conduct an independent study report.
The report states that city councils could save 80,000 kg of CO2 each year or 14,000 tons of CO2 nationally. Not only that, online services turn out to be more cost efficient. Staff time is used wisely and resources and supplies such as paper are also saved.
Source: Computer Weekly
Build it and they will come! But it is very important that you know who are the visitors to the SharePoint site and where do they spend most time. To make this task easier many known software companies have come up with web analytics tools to help users find which content is popular and which is not. Likewise, SharePoint 2010 too has integrated a Web Analytics feature, which helps you collect, report, and analyze the usage and effectiveness of your SharePoint 2010 deployment. To put it in simple words, Web Analytics reveals which content is most popular and which is not.
Take advantage of SharePoint Web Analytics tool and other useful features of SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint Foundation hosting or SharePoint Server 2010 – with shared or dedicated hosting by a SharePoint 2010 hosting provider.
Web Analytics Reports
In SharePoint 2010, the Web Analytics reports that are available out-of-the-box provide insights into the behavior of users of your SharePoint sites. There are three categories of reports that are produced which are as follows:
* Inventory Web Analytics reports: Inventory Web analytics reports provide key metrics of the inventory of your sites:
1. What is the total disk drive space user (Storage Usage);
2. How many sites exist (Number of Sites);
3. Top Site Product Versions, Top Site Languages, etc;
* Traffic Web Analytics reports: Traffic Web Analytics reports provide metrics such as:
1. How much traffic your site gets (Number of Page Views);
2. Who visits your sites (Top Visitors);
3. How visitors arrive at your site (Top Referrers);
4. Daily Unique Visitors, Top Destinations, Top Browsers, etc;
* Search Web Analytics reports: Search Web Analytics reports give you insight into what users are searching for. For instance:
1. How many times users searched (Number of Queries);
2. What were the most used search terms (Top Queries);
3. What queries have high failure rates (Failed Queries);
4. Best Bet Usage, Search keywords, etc;
Custom Web Analytics Reports
It is possible to create your own custom web analytics reports by using the Customize Report button under the Analyze tab in the Ribbon. Clicking this button will export the data contained in this report to Excel. Excel is a power analytics tools and makes it easy for non technical users to add your own charts, set specific filters, and combine data from multiple reports. In addition, the data within Excel is refreshable, which means that, once you customize the report, it will always be up-to-date with the latest data.
Features of Web Analytics Tool
Best Bets Suggestions: Best Bets allow search administrators to determine what the most relevant search result is for a given keyword. Now administrators can simply look through each of the Best Bet suggestions and easily accept or reject them. To access the Best Bet Suggestions, go to Site Actions, click on Site Collection Web Analytics Reports, and the click on Best Bets Suggestions on the left navigation.
Web Analytics Web Part: The Web Analytics Web Part is mainly created for Site Managers. This new Web Analytics Web Part is an end-user facing Web Part that can be easily inserted into any page on your site. It can be configured to display the ‘most viewed content’ or the ‘most frequent search queries’ in the site. The data in the Web Part is continuously refreshed as new content or new search queries become more popular.
All in all, Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010 will help you better understand what users want from your site, what are the popular content on your site, etc. Web analytics tool will help you customize your SharePoint farm to best meet their needs.
A H.R. 404 bill which was passed July of last year is now pending before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to clarify accountability language. The bill that was sponsored by Mr. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, focuses on customer service performance of different government service agencies. This includes Web interaction services. The bill, if approved, will eventually require the White House Office of Management and Budget to develop a system of performance metrics that would ensure citizen satisfaction. One incentive of H.R. 404 is that it would allow agency heads “to pay a cash award … to employees for demonstrated excellence in customer service.” Agencies will have to post customer-service guidelines and customer-service contact information on their public Websites.
Ooh… and who said the internet isn’t exciting? RBN (Russian Business Network), a notorious Russian online gang which has recently closed their St. Petersburg IP address (but has apparently established themselves elsewhere in cyberspace, yet continuously moving to avoid detection), is said to be linked to a November iFrame injection attack of Monster.com an online employment service company. The attack, caused by a NeoSplit or a malware tool, inserted code into pages that then caused systems to download a virus. Monster.com has reported that they’ve already cleaned all the affected Web pages and is now working with law enforcement on the matter.
The information search engine, Ask.com has released AskEraser, a new tool that can be considered as the first step (of many) in handing over the rightful control of privacy to its users. According to EPIC’s Marc Rotenberg, this cool tool prevents from storing any search data. It can completely delete search queries and any other associated information from the site’s servers. This includes complete texts of queries, IP addresses, user ID’s, and session ID’s. Users can find the link for the AskEraser tool on the upper right corner of the search engine’s homepage and search results pages and can be turned off anytime. AskEraser is available now in the U.S. and in the UK — and will be deployed globally.
Sun Microsystems Vice-President for Software Rich Green stroke away on how Java presents a high-quality virtual machine which enables running all digital life applications possible. Green didn’t discuss anything about this new applications reliance on establishment of services.
They also claim that they prioritize the users among others. A distinct impression is that enterprises had grown to be a bit of an addition with the Java braintrust.
Sun seems to have a clear view of how they want their customers’ digital life stands in the near future. It still remains a mystery for how to back up enterprises with development problems they have today.
With the several hundred or so web services being offered out on the internet, haven’t you wished that there was an easier way to browse them all side by side allowing you to choose easily, well Flock is here and it’s here to stay. First hailed a another web browser, Flock has been wooing fans getting them hooked onto the rising social browser. It incorporates features that allows the user easy access to twitter, Facebook, Friendster and many more services making it ideal for those hooked onto the many social networks. (more…)
Image Source: petewarden.typepad.com
Yahoo recently opened up its Web mail platform. It aims to encourage external developers to create their own plug ins, simple utilities and applications that can further enhance Yahoo Mail user experience. The announcement is a big news for the developers. It is to note that Yahoo offered unlimited storage capacity just last May of this year. The plan to open up the platform was under way since September of last year. So that developers can tweak and come up with their own applications specifically for Yahoo Mail. And the tools are now available at its website, Yahoo Developer Network. Yahoo has same development tools for other services like photo sharing site Flickr and the Yahoo search engine. It believes that opening the platform for third party developers will undeniably benefit them. Because these developers will certainly come up with useful and innovative applications for their online services. Yahoo has taken it further by offering incentives, monetary at that, $10 specifically, for every account created in the Yahoo Mail Plus because of its referral from an approved developer.
