By: Shannon Margolis

Microsoft’s .NET technology is a technology designed to connect. What to connect? Well everything that can be connected through software – people, systems, computers, and other things and devices.

A more thorough definition of .NET would be that it is a top level domain, initially designed to be used by Internet Service Providers, but now it has expanded and everyone can make use of a .net domain. It uses the Internet DNS (domain Naming System) and it is an abbreviation of the word ‘network’.

.NET can hold servers that provide web services or the tools needed to create these services.

What are Web Services and their benefits? Well they can be called enhancements that help businesses expand and connect with their customers and partners. Their benefits are that they make the communication between business partners much easier and even increase the profits by making a business known and available to much more people through the help of the Internet.

An Important part of the .Net technology and framework is the ASP.net set of technologies. These web development technologies are used in the creation of Websites and Web services usable on the .NET infrastructure.

ASP.NET was built by Microsoft from one of their older technologies and web programmers can use any programming language they want to write ASP.NET, from Perl to C# and of course Visual Basic.NET and any other language understood by the .NET technology.

The advantages of the ASP.NET technology are that it makes building Websites, Web applications and Web services very easy and with less code that older languages. Also, the applications compiled in ASP.NET run faster and with less errors

You can find many free tutorials and documentation about how to use the .NET framework and about the ASP.Net platform so getting started in this domain can be pretty easy. You can also find many examples amd articles about things that are easy to make and that you can study and use for learning and understanding. After learning a little you will be able to create easy-to-build applications that allow users to organize their own page’s appearance.

Also, if you’re going to use ASP.NET applications you should get one of the specially designed software packages for ASP , like Visual Studio.NET or the ASP.NET Web Matrix.

So the .NET and ASP.NET technologies are very popular and have an extremely large number of business-enhancing uses and applications.

A good place to start learning more about how people-ready applications and systems can be built using the .NET 2.0 framework is the Microsoft Practice section of www.unitekconsulting.com.

By: Andrew Karasev

Microsoft Business Solutions is Microsoft subdivision and historically it is joining several products development companies under one roof: Great Plains Software, Navision Software, Microsoft CRM (this one was developed by MBS), Solomon Software, SMS: QuickSell 2000 – which is now Microsoft Retail Management System.

Let’s first look at your ERP system selection (without Retail Solution). Your options are:

Microsoft Great Plains. If you remember successful mid-size application – Great Plains Dynamics, pioneered on Mac and Windows graphical platforms in the mid 1990th. This is now Microsoft Great Plains, Great Plains Standard and Microsoft Small Business Manager (scaled down Great Plains version, using the same technology – Great Plains Dexterity). Currently it is version 8.0, the only database platform option is Microsoft SQL Server/MSDE. Ctree and Pervasive SQL were abandoned, the last version, supporting these platforms was 7.5. You should consider Microsoft Great Plains if you are in: USA, Canada, Latin America, UK, South Africa, Australia – these are markets, where former Great Plains Software had successful penetration

Microsoft Navision. This product had success on European market and was developed by Navision Software, Denmark based software development company. In our opinion Microsoft bought this product in order to get European market share, especially continental Europe. Then, Microsoft Business Solutions realized that Navision is a good fit for countries with tight government regulation: taxes, chart of accounts (France and Russia), government reporting, etc. You should consider Navision if you have light manufacturing (we believe that Navision will be the base for future Microsoft Manufacturing suite) or located in the following regions: continental Europe, Russia, Brazil.

Solomon. This product has excellent Project Management solution and you should look at it if you are in the USA and have professional services or construction company.

Axapta. There are many different opinions about Axapta. We would like to withhold our opinion here and just tell you Microsoft Business Solutions opinion from Moscow – in Russia Axapta is successful and has approximately the same number of installations as Navision. Axapta is probably MBS stake on large enterprises market to compete with PeopleSoft (now Oracle) and SAP

And finally let us give you Retail Management System and CRM hints. Microsoft CRM is the only CRM option from Microsoft (in Navision you have Navision CRM module option – so this is an exception) and please, feel free to choose Microsoft CRM if you would like to try CRM from Microsoft. This CRM will be loved by your IT department, because it does use all Microsoft recent technologies: MS Exchange, .Net, MS SQL Server, Active Directory, BizTalk (integration with Great Plains), C# and VB.Net based MS CRM SDK.

Now – retail management. In the case of Navision – again you have retail module there. In all the other cases – you should try Microsoft RMS.

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

By: Shannon Margolis

A SQL (Structured Query Language) server is a complete system designed for the purpose of database management, development and administration. With the help of the SQL server software, users are able to create and handle large relational or structural databases and develop applications that increase the effectiveness of their business.

Microsoft SQL Server has always been the best database platform. It provides secure storage and when it comes to working with large databases no other product can be compared with SQL server. It is also very closely related to Visual Studio and The office suite, so it’s perfect for both database administrators and people who work with smaller and simpler databases

SQL servers have a large number of powerful tools that facilitate database maintenance, and administration. Among the most important ones are the Enterprise Manager, the Service Manager and the Query analyzer.

The Enterprise Manager allows its user to manage all the SQL server installations on a network and control all the databases from it. The Service Manager is responsible for controlling the processes and services of an SQL server Finally, the Query analyzer processes all the queries against any of the SQL databases.

The first version of Microsoft SQL server was released in 1993, the same time Windows NT 3.1 came out on the market, and after a few years, Microsoft SQL server 2000 was released. Compared to its previous versions, SQL server 2000 brings a lot of improvements and interesting new features, like XML support, functions that can be defined by the users themselves, indexed views and new data types. Also, some of the features that existed in the previous versions were enhanced in Microsoft SQL server 2000. Among the features that were enhanced you can find the full text search feature, the DBCC and. the backup and restore processes.

The last version of Microsoft SQL server was released in 2005 and it was, of course, called Microsoft SQL server 2005. This version is quite faster than SQL server 2000 and in the five years that passed since the first one was released a lot of new improvements and enhancements have been done. SQL server 2005 is not only a database administration tool, it also contains Messaging technologies, OLAP and Server integration services. It has a large variety of management tools integrated also and its security and database encryption systems have been seriously improved.

T-Sql has been implemented in order to handle errors better and the XML integration has gone deeper, now allowing XML to be stored in databases.

The new features of SQL 2005 are too many to enumerate, so we’ll just take a look at a few of the most important ones:

Database mirroring – if a database fails, the application connects to another database from a secondary server, and transfer isn’t interrupted Snapshots – if loss of data occurs or someone just made a mistake and modified some important data everything can be recovered because SQL server periodically takes ’snapshots’ of the database and uses them to restore the data Support for 64 bit processors Business Intelligence features built into SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services Significant security upgrades Enhanced encryption capabilities .NET CLR, and Visual Studio integration

..and many more other useful features

SQL server 2000 and SQL server 2005 are the best and the most complex database management tools on the market, and they can do much more than just managing and administrating databases, so they are the best choice if your company needs database administration and maintenance.

A good source for more information on how to install, customize, and make the most use of a SQL Server implementation, visit the Microsoft practice section of www.unitekconsulting.com.

By: Michaela Cernescu

Web 2.0 is considered the new generation of websites. It stands for websites that are interactive with its members, allows its members to dynamically change the sites, add content to them, and interact with other members of the site like never before.

This is a huge shift in mentality. In Web 1.0 my website was only mine and nobody dare to touch it! In Web 2.0 my website is like a huge forum where people are active, add content and really interact with each other.

We can divide The Web 2.0 sites in these categories:

• Social Bookmarking
• Social Networking
• Video sites
• Pod Casting

Some people add Blogs as a distinctive category of Web 2.0 sites because of the openness and conversational nature of Blogs.

1) Social Bookmarking.

Includes sites in which people store, classify and share links. Examples: del.icio.no, Digg, Furl, Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, Flicker, Simply, Technorati, Blinkflip, Blinklist, Squidoo, Stumple Upon, Mywebtop, Bloglines, Fark.

The best tool I know, a social bookmarking services, is onlywire.com. You can submit with a single click your site to multiple Web 2.0 sites.

Sometime Social Bookmarking and Social Networking are consider one single classification, I think the separation I made, the definitions and the examples I provide will show a clear cut, and implement the idea that they must be treated separately.

2) Social Networking.

It is about being able to group people into specific groups – online community of Internet users. As soon as you are granted access to a social networking website you can begin to socialize with the people in the group. Social Networking is usually open memberships where you begin to create your own network of friends.

Examples: MSpace, FriendFinder, Yahoo 360, Facebook, Orkut, FriendWise, Friendster and so on. Social Networking sites are extremely popular, easy to use, and easy to navigate. You have to register but the majorities are free to use: Yahoo 360, MySpace.

The aim of Social Networking sites is to meet new people on line, get access to free video music, get assess to free blogs. The most popular is MySpace with over one hundred million members and growing. Orkut is Google’s social networking website; it is very easy to use.

3) Video Sites.

They exploded in the last year, it is the idyllic way to get your videos in the search engines quickly by tapping the video with specific keywords and put them in videos description.

Examples: YouTube, Google videos, BlipTV, Flurt, SelfCastTV, Bott, ZippyVideo just to give you a couple.

4) Podcasting. It is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet and listened to when listeners wish to. Podcastingis a convenient digital method of distributing updated audio info that can be listened to at the listener’s discretion.

Podcasts can be played by iPod, digital audio player or a computer with an audio playing software. The beauty is that independent producers can be you and me, anyone, and there are not any regulations about creating Podcast. This is freedom and people really enjoy it! My belive is the Podcasting has a great potential in future they will include content as well, not just audio and video even though now is an audio format.

There are also specialized podcasts which become more popular. Examples:

• Autocasting – is automatic generation of podcast from text
• Vidcasting – is podcasts using video
• Godcasting – is religious podcast
• Palmcasting – is podcasting to Palm OS Based devices
• Learncasting – is able to deliver instructional content by RSS
• MediaRSS – is media file syndication used by Yahoo
• Skypecasting – is recording Skype text, voice or video conversations

All of those are part of the big umbrella of Podcasting even though they a specialized.

We got so far that we have now podcast directories: podcastdirectory, digitalpodcast, podcast, yahoo.com and so on.

All those directory have a lot of podcasts to choose from.

As you can see, the Web 2.0 is already established and this is the direction in which I think the development will go.

If other people have more info and more experience in this direction in which web is going, I’ll be glad to read your comments and happy to learn more.

Michaela Cernescu is an Education Specialist trained by eBay, Internet Marketer, Digital Products Writer, Affiliate, and honest Joint Venture partner.

http://www.mc-ebay-resources.com/MyVideos.html
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