Educational Software Companies

Writen by Jimmy Sturo

Educational software companies were among the first software developers in the early days of desktop computing. They recognized the potential of using computers for learning purposes, and were quick to develop products that helped make this happen. But because of market changes and fast-changing technology, these educational software companies have to face unique challenges now more than ever.

Problems facing educational software companies

The costs of education are running high, and this its toll on educational software companies. Schools are now hesitant to install additional infrastructures such as networks that are needed to run school-wide educational software.

The peripheral expenses involved in implementing educational software are getting higher, and schools usually can’t afford to squeeze them into their already tight budgets. And even when administrators do request for budget realignment or additional funding from the state boards, their requests are denied more often than not. This is because state boards usually have budgets strictly set well ahead of time, and is almost never any room for deviation.

External financing is the obvious solution, but it may take years for schools to find this kind of money, if at all. Meanwhile, educational software companies suffer the losses and scramble to find viable financial means to subsist while schools that have already signed up to buy their educational software systems find ways to raise the funds to pay them.

The future of educational software companies

Companies that develop educational software are on shaky ground. They are very easily disturbed by downturns not only in the software and web industries, but in the educational system as well. The overall sales of both school-wide educational software systems and individual CD ROM-based systems has significantly decreased because of major changes in all these three stimulant industries around the year 2000. This is why many software companies have either closed or downsized.

Educational Software provides detailed information on Educational Software, Childrens Educational Software, Free Educational Software, Educational Software Companies and more. Educational Software is affiliated with Discount Embroidery Software.

Brand Your Website’s URL With a Favicon

Writen by Mario Sanchez

Have you ever noticed that when you look at your browser favorites menu or the address bar, some entries have their own little icon beside their URL?

It’s called a “Favicon” (a graphic file with a .ico extension) and it’s placed in the root directory of the web site. Everytime you bookmark a site that has its own favicon.ico file, it is added to your browser, and it will be visible from then on in the favorites menu and in the address bar.

At the beginning, only large websites had a favicon, but now you too can create one and use it to brand your website. The first thing you have to do is to create your favicon. To be displayed by browsers, it must have a size of 16×16 pixels. To create one, you can use a graphics program called Icon Forge (you can download a free trial version in CNET):

http://download.com.com/3000-2195-10128559.html

You can either create an icon from scratch, or import a 16×16 ‘.gif’ or ‘.jpg’ file and save it as a ‘.ico’ file.

You will then have to save your icon with the default name of ‘favicon.ico’, and upload it to the root directory of your website (where your index page is). Finally, after that, you must associate your icon to your web page. You do that by including the following HTML code immediately after the HEAD tag of your page:

link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico”

Once you’ve done that, that’s it. To try it out, go to your web page and add your page to your favorites. You should be able to see the favicon next to your bookmarked page title. Also, the next time you type your URL in the address bar, you will see your favicon to the left of the URL.

(Favicons work with Internet Explorer 5 or newer, and with recent versions of Netscape.)

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About The Author

Mario Sanchez lives in Miami, Florida, where he publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ) a website and newsletter that gives you free advice on web design and Internet marketing.

Great Plains Dexterity History and Programming Overview

Writen by Andrew Karasev

As of now – Great Plains Dynamics/eEnterprise is transformed/renamed into Microsoft Great Plains and Microsoft Business Solutions is in process of merging all its accounting applications: Great Plains, Solomon, Navision and Axapta into somewhat granular: Microsoft Financials, Microsoft HR, Microsoft Distributions, Microsoft Project Accounting, etc. So the original design of Great Plains should be deemphasized. But even now – Great Plains is written on the programming language and technology, created in early 1990-th, named Great Plains Dexterity. And the graphical interface looks very user friendly and nice – these are all Dexterity forms and screens.

The original architect of Dexterity, Tim Brookins, pursued several goals, the main are these:

1. Engine, supporting graphical interface, which is computer platform independent – if you remember those days – the main competition was between Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Mac was graphical and very popular, but Windows, backed by IBM cloning/platform openness was very dangerous competitor. The new engine was targeted to work on both: Mac and Windows. On the other hand – nobody could look at the future far enough to be sure that other competitors from both Hardware and Operating Systems sides not going to take over. This is why the graphical platform independent engine was required for the new type – Graphical accounting/ERP system: Great Plains Dynamics.

2. Database platform independence – initially Great Plains used Ctree (available for both PC and Mac) and Btrieve, later on with Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Great Plains relatively easy introduced it as a new alternative: Dynamics C/S+ on SQL Server. Again – nobody could guarantee which DB will be a winner. Technically Dexterity could easy provide DB switch. Unfortunately – the necessity to support “cheap” databases, such as ctree forced Dexterity architect to use cursors or loops instead of providing aggregation, available on all SQL blends.

To resolve these goals, and following popular those days believe that C programming language is platform independent, C was chosen as the low level language to write dexterity itself.

This was the story, now to the practical side. You can install Dexterity from Great Plains 7.5 or 8.0 CD #2. Obviously it requires a lot of learning / training, but it allows your custom piece be seamlessly integrated with Great Plains interface.

1. Native Dexterity Cursors. Dexterity was designed as platform independent programming language and so if you want your code to be operable on all currently supported databases – you use Dexterity ranges and loops to manipulate the records

2. Great Plains Dexterity with SQL Stored Procs Nowadays, most of Great Plains installations are moved to SQL Server – so you can use Dexterity for custom forms drawing only and make the buttons run SQL stored procedures.

3. COM Objects calls. Beginning with version 7.0 Dexterity supports COM objects – you register them as libraries in Dexterity. Refer the manual. This technique allows you to call such nice things as web services across the internet.

4. Dexterity Forms – if you like VBA and are comfortable to do all the business logic in VBA – you can use Dexterity as new forms creator/editor. This is OK – but you have to purchase VBA/Modifier and Customization Site Enabler from MBS.

Some restrictions. Great Plains is actually integration of multiple dictionaries: DYNAMICS.DIC, ADVSECUR.DIC, EXP1493.DIC, etc. In your Dexterity customization you can deal with one dictionary – DYNAMICS.DIC. If you need cross dictionaries customization – consider using SQL Stored Procs for crossing dictionary borders and pulling data/making changes in the other dictionary.

Happy customizing! if you want us to do the job – give us a call!

About The Author

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, based in Chicago, California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New York and having locations in multiple states and internationally www.albaspectrum.com, he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.

akarasev@albaspectrum.com

Restaurant Inventory Software

Writen by Jason Gluckman

Marketing is the buzzword when talking about restaurant inventory software. Marketing starts with the determination of consumer wants and ends with the satisfaction of those wants. The concept puts the consumer both at the beginning and at the end of the business cycle. It stipulates that any business should be organized around the marketing function, anticipating, stimulating and meeting customer requirements. The customer, not the corporation has to be the center of the business universe.

Restaurant inventory software cannot succeed by supplying products and services that are not properly designed to serve the needs of the customers. It proclaims that the entire business has to be seen from the point of view of the customer. In a company practicing this concept, all departments will recognize that their actions have a profound impact on the company’s ability to create and retain a customer. Every department and every worker and manager will ‘think customer’ and ‘act customer’.

The other distinguishing feature of restaurant inventory software is integrated management action. Integrated management action simply means that all the different functions of the business must be tightly integrated with one another, keeping marketing as the pivot. This is essential because every function has a bearing on the consumer, and the aim is to see that all the functions lead to a favorable impact on the consumer. For this to happen, all functions have to be integrated and properly aligned with marketing.

In organizations that do not practice integrated management, the different functions of the organization are preoccupied with the optimization of their specific activities, often at the cost of optimization of the overall result. Consumer satisfaction, which is a major theme of restaurant inventory software, is again not an end in itself. The concept does not preach that a firm must generate consumer satisfaction and forget the other goals of the organization. Instead, it treats consumer satisfaction as the pathway to the attainment of all the goals of the organization.

Inventory Software provides detailed information on Home Inventory Software, Inventory Accounting Software, Inventory Management Software, Inventory Software and more. Inventory Software is affiliated with Fleet Maintenance Software Reviews.

Microsoft CRM – Consulting in the Post-Recession Time

Writen by Andrew Karasev

New post-recession era has new features, which didn’t exist in late 1990th during high-tech boom. This will be in our opinion on new directions for Microsoft Business Solutions products consulting, including Microsoft CRM. New features:

1. Overall cost reduction campaign. We see general direction, when companies hire new executives who specializes in cost reduction, work force reduction, secondary departments functions outsourcing, etc.

2. Computer ERP systems literacy among mid-management. If you look back to 1950th when management consulting was booming, then for now it is included in all the MBA university programs and managers themselves know the subject. The same happens with ERP systems – managers have general knowledge and can learn the new system, applying their education, experience and intuition

3. Databases Support cost reduction – today we would dare to say that IT department can easily support such databases as the ones, sitting on Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle is also following the idea of zero support efforts. You don’t have to hire DBA with 10 years of experience – this means that even small business could move to industry-strength database platforms

4. Software Customization and Development cost reduction – well – many of us probably like to purchase cheap and reliable goods from department stores, manufactured in China. The same happens with software development. Now if you have your software product designed – you better find the company to do real coding somewhere in Brazil or India. We do not want to judge – is it good or bad – this is what is going on with our market.

5. Increasing Demand for Quality – this is not a secret that in the era of internet boom – late 1990th – consulting companies had to hire college graduates to do highest complexity assignments. And market was tolerating this – not any more. All these features will enforce the consulting companies to reduce cost, seek nation-wide clients via remote support, web sessions, abandon traditional software leads generation techniques and move to internet sales, increase the quality of their consultants (we don’t know the answer how)

Happy implementing! if you want us to do the job – give us a call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.

Microsoft Business Solutions Customization Options – Overview for Programmer

Writen by Andrew Karasev

Several years ago Microsoft purchased Great Plains Software, then Navision (Denmark based software development company). At this time Great Plains Software already was active ERP applications consolidation player – it already acquired Solomon Software couple of years prior. Then in 2002 Microsoft released Microsoft CRM (Client Relation Management system). Also Microsoft decided to attack retail marked and acquired QuickSell (now Microsoft Retail Management System/ Microsoft RMS).

At this time Microsoft had robust package to automate business processes for small, midsize and large company and it formed so-called Microsoft Business Solutions (at the earlier stage the official name was Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions – later Great Plains words were dropped)

We would like to make brief review of customization options for such products as Microsoft Great Plains, Microsoft CRM and Microsoft RMS

Technology overview. Microsoft Great Plains, Microsoft CRM and Microsoft RMS have similar database platform – Microsoft SQL Server. There are differences in the tables design between three – due to the fact that they were originally developed by three different companies. Great Plains has Great Plains Dexterity core (this is Great Plains Software proprietary c-language based technology and development environment), and as it was primarily targeted to be platform independence – Great Plains has old-fashioned UNIX style of tables names: RM00101 stays for customer master file, GL00100 – account master file, etc. At the same time Microsoft RMS and Microsoft CRM have more natural language based names: Microsoft CRM: Account, Activity, Contact, Lead; Microsoft RMS: Customer, Transaction, Tender, Register – we believe that these structures are self explanatory.

Now to the Customization Options:

• Great Plains Dexterity – please install Dexterity from CD #2 and take a look at its manuals – this is again legacy and proprietary Great Plains technology. We have described it in this article: http://www.albaspectrum.com/Customizations_Whitepapers/Dexterity_SQL_VBA_Crystal/DexterityCustomizationOptions.htm

• Microsoft CRM Customization – this is the whole topic – we would like to reference you to our posting: http://www.albaspectrum.com/Customizations_Whitepapers/Dexterity_SQL_VBA_Crystal/MSCRMCustomizationOptions.htm

• Microsoft RMS. Please review this article: http://www.albaspectrum.com/Customizations_Whitepapers/Dexterity_SQL_VBA_Crystal/GPRMSIntegrationOptions.htm

Happy customizing! if you want us to do the job – give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

About The Author

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, based in Chicago, California, Colorado, DC, New Jersey, Washington, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New York and having locations in multiple states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM; akarasev@albaspectrum.com