If you've heard of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) then you probably either work for one or you've had issues with website performance. Or maybe you believe that there is a potential concern with increasing website traffic and how your application will handle it. First of all, if you're facing the fear of an expanding user base, you've obviously done something right. So how do you avoid being the one left holding the bag while end-users fall off your site in droves? Maybe a CDN is the right way to go...but maybe not.
As a Technical Project Manager for Definition 6, I've had the opportunity to work with clients and projects that require, at least, an initial discussion regarding performance, and others who simply do not. Let me focus on those companies first. If you own a lead generation website that leverages alternatives means for producing sales and receives 2,000 - 5,000 unique visits daily, odds are, you're not going to need advanced performance capabilities. If you are noticing issues, then take a look at your production configuration. Are you on a shared solution? Are you serving up heavy, rich media content? Are your servers out-of-date and unmanaged. Take a closer look and you might find that the potentially expensive CDN solution isn't necessary.
But for website owners that are out of capitol to invest in peformance increasing devices for a struggling system, or for those that wish to provide enhanced, rich media content to users, then look at a CDN as a possible solution to your problems. I recently read a post on www.websitemagazine.com by Peter Prestipino in which he introduced TinyCDN (www.tinycdn.com). If you've researched CDN's, you know how expensive it can be, depending on the size of your content and frequency of delivery. TinyCDN is a good example of a feasible solution from a complexity standpoint and budget concerns.
If you're considering one of these options, hopefully you've taken the time to discover what is causing your website's slow performance. What you don't want to do is spend your budget on improving usability and find out after implementation of those changes that users are experiencing the same degraded performance. Take the time to baseline your performance metrics, from an application and server standpoint. There are numerous tools available that can provide these key metrics. Take a look at your analtyics package as well, what is it telling you? Application can't keep up with continuous requests? Or maybe you've had a dramatic increase in requests to view your new product video. If you're in a pinch, give something like TinyCDN a try. A band-aid solution might not be so bad if it's reasonably priced and avoids the loss of users.
Client Manager, Gabe Rand came across a Marketing Sherpa article discussing 6 steps on how a simple referral process can create a surge in registrations. The 6 steps mentioned in the article include preparing your email servers, building a referral page, building your email message, protecting the information, providing incentives and keeping the process as simple as possible.
Kiwibox's registration process has 3 simple steps:
1. choose a username
2. enter personal information
3. refer friends
After selecting which of your friends will receive the email and clicking the 'invite your friends' button, the registrants are dropped onto the welcome page where they being interacting. A screenshot of the welcome page is provided here as an example.
Login to Marketing Sherpa to learn how Kiwibox, an online magazine and social network for teens, launched a redesigned site and saw an immediate lift in their registrations. Contact Definition 6 to find out how we can help in the website integration process of a new or existing email service provider.
Technical Project Manager, Jason Norton, shares an article he recently came across about how Mozilla looks at the future of messaging...
"The web is an increasingly chatty place. Between following comment threads, checking in with friends on Twitter, reading a few blogs with RSS feeds, and conquering a mountain of e-mail, we have plenty of conversations to keep track of. Mozilla wants to help us on the conversational journey, which is why the company has launched Snowl, a new tool that offers a small glimmer of hope for those seeking communications nirvana.
Announced on the Mozilla Labs blog, the company presents Snowl with a simple question: "Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?" Snowl has materialized as a prototype Firefox extension based on a few key ideas:
• It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They're alike, whether they come from traditional e-mail servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.
• Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.
• A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.
• Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.
For its debut, Snowl only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter messaging, and it offers two UIs for reading. The first is a traditional three-pane setup where feeds and Twitter users are organized in a left sidebar, with a message list above the center column and a preview/reading pane below."
The traditional 3-pane list view
River View:
Definition 6 Client Manager, Andy McCann, recently presented an article to our group on how more and more companies are utilizing SharePoint as their next Enterprise 2.0 platform.
Recognizing Sharepoint's dominance in the Enterprise 2.0 space, many other Web 2.0 companies are now beginning to release and develop Sharepoint Web Parts and features that allow for easy integration into the Sharepoint environment. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's ability to build a huge Sharepoint user base is building a platform for partners to grow upon. This will allow for an even richer experience for Sharepoint users which in turn should help drive even larger adoption of Sharepoint which in turn should grow the number of available tie-ins to Sharepoint.
Andy pulled out three key points from his findings:
1. For many companies, SharePoint is the portal for all their business data - and not just docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, but also browser-based forms that interact with built-in workflow technologies which add business logic to sophisticated online applications.
2. Microsoft and several partners announced new social networking, RSS feeds and other Web 2.0 technologies that allow integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 so users can integrate internal company data with outward-facing applications like external customer and partner communities. Awareness Inc., NewsGator Technologies Inc. and WorkLight Inc., for example, are all announcing updated versions of their Enterprise 2.0 tools integrated with SharePoint. Microsoft will also announce nine partners that have released or will release Enterprise 2.0 tools integrated with SharePoint.
3. Nine companies have recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology. Here is an example of how NewsGator launched their SharePoint add-on
To read the article in its entirety, go to: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sharepoint_to_run_enterprise_2.php
Contact us today to find out how Definition 6 works with clients to build and deploy Microsoft’s SharePoint applications.
Companies are scaling back on their IT staff and supporting the often necessary multiple fully loaded FTE’s to monitor, manage and maintain their sever infrastructure. This is often seen as an expense they could more easily outsource and reduce costs on.
What We Deliver:
• Hosted or remote managed services for web and general Windows server infrastructure and most key network appliance devices
• A full range of per device monitoring and management services on a monthly basis. It can be done by hosting the devices with us or remotely, leaving all of the devices and network where they currently reside
Estimated timeframe for delivery: Monitoring services can begin in less than a week, management typically in less than 2 weeks. Contact us today for more information.
Systems integration has evolved over the past decade, but it is still based on distributed concepts that have remained relatively static. The idea of a “proxy” on the client side to make a call to a “stub” on the server side – these constitute the “contract” made between the client and the server. There is data that gets “marshaled” between the client and server according to that contract. All middleware and distributed systems – be it CORBA, .NET, J2EE, or the next big thing – will be based on this concept of remote invocation of an API.
EAI has failed in the past because a failure to come up with a common language for the “marshaled” data. XML has solved this, and through the introduction of SOAP and web services using XML, true heterogeneous interoperability is now possible. To come up with a strategy that leverages this technology advancement, we need to focus on integration between processes, services, and information, and for these types of initiatives to succeed – they will require sponsorship at the C-level…preferably including both the CFO (for the value proposition) and the CTO (for the technology direction).
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