What is XNotify™?

XNotify™ is the first native mobile engagement platform that enables apps to receive extended push notifications. Extended push notifications contain events, photos, videos, documents, newsletters, surveys etc. along with the regular notifications. We are all very familiar with push notifications in apps. They are great at capturing a mobile user's attention. XNotify™ takes push notifications a step further by allowing you to push content along with push notifications.

XNotify™ is available on both Apple and Google stores for download. The app version on the store provides groups anyone can join to start receiving notifications from these group administrators. For those who would like to create and administer their own groups, http://www.xnotify.com provides an easy to use web interface for creating and managing groups and various types of notifications. Smaller group sizes can use this services for free as the subscribers get 1000 free push credits per month.

App developers can take advantage of the XNotify™ SDK to create a notification center within their apps. The notification center enables rich push notifications and displays all the content natively within the app. User engagement can be achieved depending on the type of content being pushed to the users.

Software Development Outsourcing to India

For over a decade technology companies around the world have been outsourcing their software development needs to Indian IT companies. This practice has made a lot of fortune 500 companies extremely successful with their software products and services by getting excellent quality, huge cost savings and faster time to market by following the Sun. Due to the evolution of this huge outsourcing market in the software industry, a lot of small to medium sized businesses have also turned towards offshore to get the similar competitive advantage that has been enjoyed by large multinational organizations for several years. The most significant challenge faced by companies stepping into the outsourcing arena is to find the right outsourcing partner.

Just like all the other business models, offshore outsourcing has its own tradeoffs. In this model the relationship between the client and the vendor is more like a strategic partnership and both the parties must understand and respect each other’s challenges. A true outsourcing model can only work if there is a solid mutual understanding of the issues involved with this business model. For a company trying to outsource its IT needs to an offshore vendor for the first time, this can become a very frustrating experience very soon if the onsite company is not fully aware of the cultural and infrastructure related challenges involved in working with Indian companies. This is where starting the relationship with the right offshore vendor is the key to maximize the potential of this business model. A good offshore vendor usually has solid experience and understanding of business practices on both sides of the world and is usually an expert in setting the expectations right from the get go.

Signing off on an offshore contract should never be a hasty decision. Finding a good vendor is an evolution and it is practical to set at least 3 months of evaluation period to narrow down on the right vendor. Finding the lowest rate is not always the best criteria to decide on the right offshore vendor. Cheaper vendors may not be able to provide the level of global project management required to make this business model work for you. Even though offshore outsourcing brings a significant amount of cost savings, the saving should always be evaluated in comparison to the cost of doing the project onsite. It is a common mistake to think of outsourcing to offshore companies as a cheap replacement of onsite workers. Offshore outsourcing is definitely cost effective but only if it is done right.

A few things to consider while choosing your offshore vendor are as follows:

1. Offshore outsourcing can be very effective if your outsourcing vendor also has an onsite presence. Outsourcing to a company with no onsite presence can be extremely challenging and the relationship is most likely to fail within a month or two. The difference in time zones makes it essential to have a local contact in your own time zone so you can discuss the day today issues and other work related stuff, at your convenience.
2. The offshore vendor must be willing and capable of providing onsite staff deployed within your facility to assist with offshore communication and help with global project management. This will usually add to your budget but is one of the most important investments you will make in an outsourcing partnership.
3. There must be a minimum commitment from the onsite company to make this work. It usually takes 3 – 6 months to develop a good working relationship with the offshore team. A good offshore vendor will communicate these minimums to you in advance. This model is cost effective only for those who have an ongoing need for software development. If you are just looking to outsource a small one-time project then this is not the right model for you. You would be better off working with a local company that has offshore ties so they can give you a lower price.
4. A good offshore vendor is open to sharing the profiles and resumes of its team members. They are also willing to open the communication channel for the client to communicate directly with the offshore team if they want.
5. There must be a timesheet reporting mechanism in place to get daily reporting of the work by the members of the offshore team. A good vendor will make this a transparent process for you and will also be willing to go for weekly approvals of these timesheets by you. This way the payments can be tied to the hours approved on the timesheets thus ensuring maximum productivity and daily accountability by the offshore staff.
6. The global project management and delivery mechanism should be a highly streamlined process and the offshore vendor should clearly be able to demonstrate the practices and processes it uses to manage globally and deliver according to the schedule of the projects. You can be sure of your vendor’s capabilities by evaluating the systems in place. A good vendor will have robust web based tools to facilitate project management, delivery tracking, testing, bug tracking etc.
7. Outsourcing relies heavily on documentation. It is difficult to manage projects in a global environment if the documentation on projects is poor. A good offshore vendor will demonstrate its documentation practices and standards used to maintain consistency of the quality of deliverables throughout the project.
8. Lastly, the cost is also a huge consideration. You must make sure that you are saving at least 50 - 60% on the cost of doing the project onsite.

“Offshore outsourcing is the best way for fulfilling long term software development needs but choosing the right company to work with is the key to your success”.

All New Minutes of Meeting Lanuched on February 17th 2010

We are pleased to announce the launch of the revised version of Minutes Of Meeting application. The new version of site offers enhanced functionalities and a brand new look and feel for ease of use.

Our work does not stop here and we are working on a new set of features to release a more improved version of Meeting Minutes software in our next release. We would like to thank all the users of this application for their continued support.

Check out the all new improved Minutes of Meeting.

Upcoming features of Minutes of Meeting

Our great success of the free online version of the Minutes of Meeting program inspired us to add more features to the application. We also received several requests from all over the world with people requesting various new features. Although it is impossible to accommodate everybody's request, we have tried to pick the ones that were most common and have added it to the application.

Some of the upcoming features in our next release this month are:

1) Allow the user to assign an action item to a meeting attendee

2) Automatically create a task for an assigned action item and make it available under a separate task manager

3) Added a date field to capture the date and time for the meeting. (The current version assumes the current date/time as the time of meeting)

4) Added features to the task manager, such as marking the task as complete, sending task reminders etc.

These new features will improve the functional aspect of the application and will make it more useful to its users.

In the coming months we are going to be adding more features to the minutes of meeting application. We are also planning on releasing customized versions of this application which will be more specific to an organizations working style.

I would personally like to thank all the users of minutes of meeting for believing in our product and using it for your day to day meetings.

We will ensure that you continue to find it usable and useful for your businesses.

Use the application at http://www.minutesofmeeting.net

Minutes of Meeting

Meeting Minutes is the document used by organizations to record the items discussed during any business meeting. Most organizations have a predefined template for this document and the the captured information is formatted using that template. The minutes of meeting document is used for recording meeting notes and is usually sent out to the meeting attendees to maintain a proper documentation of the items discussed during the meetings.

Usually one of the meeting attendees is responsible for taking down notes and converting those notes to Meeting Minutes. The items discussed during a meeting are usually classified under two broad categories:

1) Meeting Notes

2) Action Items

Meeting Notes are any kind of notes that are captured during the meeting and have a significant relevance to the agenda for the meeting.

Action items are the type of notes that specify a certain task to be accomplished by certain date by a certain person.

Apart from the notes and action items the other important sections of a meeting minutes document includes the meeting agenda which is sent prior to the meeting and the list of attendees for the meeting.

It is very common for organizations to create a minutes of meeting document using a Microsoft Word template. A lot of less organized companies just type the minutes of a meeting in an email and email it to the attendees and any other relevant person.

Sounds like a very simple exercise but is often the most useful outcome of business meetings. Meetings without a meeting minutes document are usually very unproductive because there is no record of what was discussed and there is no way to track and follow up on the items that were discussed.

Now imagine being part of two to three meetings a day and keeping track of the meeting minutes for all of them. That would produce between 40 - 50 meeting minutes document a month. That is a lot of document to manage and keep track of. It is nearly impossible for a person to go back and refer to those documents for important notes as the amount of meeting minutes keep increasing on a daily basis.

We were dealing with similar challenges of managing the meeting minutes produced at our company. It was also a huge challenge to keep up with the number of meetings and record the meeting minutes in a well formatted document each time. Maintaining the document format in itself was a time taking endeavor and the formats were never consistent because these documents were created by different individuals with different writing styles.

Finally we found a way to record consistent looking minutes of meeting where all we focussed was on taking down the notes for the meeting. You must be wondering how?

You can get the answer at http://www.minutesofmeeting.net