public Window1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}

private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
RemoveControlBoxes();
}

[DllImport("User32.dll", EntryPoint = "GetWindowLong")]
private extern static Int32 GetWindowLongPtr(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 nIndex);

[DllImport("User32.dll", EntryPoint = "SetWindowLong")]
private extern static Int32 SetWindowLongPtr(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 nIndex, Int32 dwNewLong);

private const Int32 GWL_STYLE = -16;
private void RemoveControlBoxes()
{
IntPtr hWnd = new WindowInteropHelper(this).Handle;
long WindowLong = GetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_STYLE);
WindowLong = WindowLong & -131073 & -65537;
SetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_STYLE, Convert.ToInt32(WindowLong));
}

Let me explain this to you. Any entrepreneur, CEO or MD of a company would want to grow business exponentially through expansion and resource management. In the process, the work only gets obscene and therefore one would find project managers or group leads or team leads managing beyond their capacities, clients more than 10 or specialists more than 20 at times. That makes it 30 business relationships to manage. We all know it is not humanly possible for one person to run the show this way, delegation is important. Once work is delegated, monitoring is important. Likewise, managing resources, clients, documents and mainly the task or project in hand to make the business successful is something every manager struggles to cope with in work life.

With your latest acquisition of your gadgets and gizmos your 10 hours at office have now increased to 16 (perhaps) and taken your weekends too. Oh boy! What a life? You may think. Then again, you are happy because you have something to flaunt in your social circle which you probably wouldn’t have invested on otherwise.

At the end of the day, despite of all the luxuries your company has showered on you, what you are taking back home is Stress.

Have you ever wondered why? The answer to this is communication management. No matter how great interpersonal skills you may have but to manage, organize, discipline, delegate, monitor, track is not a ball game. Gadgets and gizmos have their limitations and too many of them only add to clutter. You need technology that is far superior to bridge communication and grow relationships.

With a realization of this basic understanding, half your stress will be gone. Really!

Communicate. Organize. Information. Three important rules of any business game.

If there is no communication, lack of communication or miscommunication, you will Assume (make an ass of you and me).

If there is free will to organize data or style of work, you will lose track and information.

Information, either excessive or scattered can bombard you and leave you in a dilemma

In my many years of work life, nothing has changed. There is clutter, too much information, different mind sets, miscommunication, wastage of time and more. Probably, in my next job I will see it happening all again.

I say stop. There is something called a communication and document management software that can help evade problem that every manager faces in work life. Tasktrek is one such recommended software that helps simplify work, encourages seamless communication, formulates standards or templates for team members to follow, minimizes communication channels to cut the clutter and keeps you updated anytime and anywhere. Other basics such as delegation of task, monitoring and reporting are other important in-built tools of this software.

I have not given up my Blackberry or laptop yet. The day this new age technology will spread its wings in the Indian business scenarios, there will be an environment friendly and stress free environment for sure. It is communication which ties in people, projects and fate of any business.

Preeti Juneja

Communications Consultant

Communication is the best possible remedy to NOT spoiling your project and relationships with your client.

Points that we follow at work:
1. Atleast reply to your client with “Ok” to every email.
2. Document everything, a great tool to help you document everything is TaskTrek here: http://www.tasktrek.in it helps you by taking out the obvious out of the way.
3. Teach your team members to communicate with you, don’t just train them, train even their subconscious mind to communicate.
4. Hire good resources, even if they cost more. You won’t make much money initially, but then when your client’s appreciate your work, they will bring the cash flow with them.
5. Keep in touch with your client, believe me this is the second best thing you can do, next only to to doing the best job.

Regards,
Dheeraj Juneja

In today’s world when people can communication through all sorts of media, chat clients, emails, social networks, telephones and what not, there is a need to bring all communication back into one one place. You cannot let the information be scattered all over the place or someone will end up in trouble, either by spending hours to look for what was agreed or biting the bullet and doing what was NOT agreed upon just because they cannot find the communication anywhere. Larger the projects, larger the penalty.

There can be no doubt as to the critical importance of effective communication management in terms of successfully facilitating not only the ultimate success of any particular project, but the meeting of criteria as far as planning, cost and deadlines are concerned. Most project managers would admit that around eighty percent of their time is spent communicating in one form or another with the various members and groups within the project team.

This means that a project manager has to manage communications effectively before being able to organize the smooth and efficient progress of any project. With a greater than ever number of people tending to be involved in large-scale projects and a far more diverse range of methods of communication, this is no small feat. Added to this is the very real probability that many of the related parties advising on or developing aspects of the project might be based many miles apart – even on different continents.

Another issue which will have to be addressed is the screening of communications, and this may also require a range of means by which data can be screened. Clearly, some communications will be of a more critical nature than others will, and it will be necessary for any communications management program to be capable of prioritizing information and ensuring that it is delivered to the right person, in the right format, and with the appropriate priority handling.

Naturally, it is not simply the collation and screening of communications which will need to be handled effectively, but the distribution of that information to the various parties who will need to be informed. Any project manager may admit to being partially little more than a glorified errand boy, passing notes from one party to another!

However, the complexity and dynamism involved in large scale, international projects can result very easily in breakdowns in communications, and it will be crucial for any project manager to know that the chosen system will be capable of handling multiple streams of information, in multiple formats, delivering that information to the right person, in the right format, and all taking into account the priority for each transmission. It’s a great deal to expect, but entirely necessary, since the likely success of any project is necessarily reduced the greater the frequency of communications errors, delays or failures. The importance of this issue makes the selection of software programs a fundamental issue in managing any project, especially a large-scale one.

Today we bring such a solution for people who would like everything back in one place, not only for project management, but for communication management, information management and once again be able to find everything in one place, which is simple enough to search.

A lot of tools are available, but they are far more complicated than what a small company would need, they only need a simple solution which brings the information required by any team member accessible when they need. Cut down on relying on emails to communicate and cut down on time spent on making people remind of what was already communicated to them.

The solution is going to be available very soon, i.e. by end of december, 2009. We shall keep updating this blog with the progress…

Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, point to Configuration Tools, and then click SQL Server Surface Area configuration.

On the SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration page, click Surface Area Configuration for Services and Connections.

On the Surface Area Configuration for Services and Connections page, expand Database Engine. click Remote Connections.

click Local and remote connections, click the  Using both TCP/IP and named pipes, and then click Apply.

Note Click OK when you receive the following message:

Changes to Connection Settings will not take effect until you restart the Database Engine service 

1. On the Surface Area Configuration for Services and Connections page, expand Database Engine, click Service, click Stop, wait until the MSSQLSERVER service stops, and then click Start to restart the MSSQLSERVER service.

On the Surface Area Configuration for Services and Connections page, click SQL Server Browser, click Automatic for Startup type, and then click Apply.

Create exceptions in Windows Firewall

Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, point to Configuration Tools, and then click SQL Server Configuration Manage

In SQL Server Configuration Manager, click the SQL Server (MYSENIORCENTER) service in the right pane, right-click the instance name in the main window, and then click Properties

On the SQL Server (MYSENIORCENTER) Properties page, click the Service tab, locate the binary path, and then click OK

On the SQL Server Browser Properties page, click the Service tab, locate the binary path, and then click OK 

Open windows Firewall from Control Panel

Click on add program

Do the following process

Creating ODBC data source on Windows XP System

Effective communication means that each and every project team member should be fully apprised of the project status (at least on a macro level) at all times. Some detailed information may not be shared with all team members if they are very individual specific, but the big items should always be shared among the entire team. Communication can also take the form of regular updates to the assigning party as to status of the project and/or specific components of it.

Today a lot of tools exists which can help you and your team manage communication and effectivly be able to access that information whenever the need arrise.

We have checked and used a lot of tools in past, i shall write about our experience with different tools here soon.

SaaS refers to software that is accessed via a web browser and is paid on a subscription basis. Different from the traditional model where a customer buys a license to software and assumes ownership for its maintenance and installation, SaaS presents significant advantages to the customer.

SaaS is a new way of using software. There are no hardware, implementation or acquisition costs involved to run the application from the customer’s side. It’s the responsibility of the SaaS vendor (us) to manage and run the application with utmost security, performance and reliability.

Since customers pay a subscription, they have immediate access to the new features and functionality. Unlike traditional softwares where upgrades would happen once a year or once in 6 months (with the vendor coming to your office with a CD), the SaaS vendor continuously pushes new updates, fixes to the application, which is immediately accessible by the customer. This reduces the length of time it takes a customer to recognize value from the software.

That being said, all this benefit does not comes without any challenges:

Technical challenges

The traditional enterprise applications available in the marketplace are usually not architected and designed to run on the SaaS platform for the following reasons:

• They do not have a built-in functionality that is required to support the subscription based hosted service. This functionality includes billing, monitoring, support, and performance related functions.
• The data store of the application is not architected and designed to isolate data of multiple tenants [ tenants are group of clients using the service ]
• The application is not built to support customization of its user interface, business logic, and database by configuration through the browser in such a way that different tenants within the same hosted instance see different behavior of each of these three layers of the application.
• The traditional applications usually do not support security of the sensitive data, which becomes necessary if the application data resides outside the firewall.
• The applications are usually not built to scale for a large number of users. The application scalability is important to cater to the load created by users from multiple tenants of the application using the single runtime instance.

SaaS is still in its growing years and vendors are gearing towards meeting all these challenges. Not only software companies, even hosting companies are growing up and facing the challenges of huge amount of data getting transfered to and fro.

Looking from the past experience, its very clear that we will get solid solutions built and provided to clients in near future.

SaaS can be lucrative for companies who are not technology centric and technology centric alike, with a difference that technology centric companies can still do with using their existing infrastructure to run the application. The decision they need to make is that are their current resources free enough to maintain the software and if they are that free, do these companies even need to carry that burden?

Resources do not come cheap, while a well designed SaaS and a good company running that application can actually come at the fraction of that cost.

To pick up a SaaS vendor you need to ask the following questions:

• Is our data safe with that company?
• Are they capable enough to sustain their business?
• Do they have the infrastructure to keep your data available?
• Do they have enough experience and staff to manage your data, for you?
• What kind of support do they provide?
• Are they open when you are?
• Is there a setup fee for getting started?
• Do they offer customization of the product for you?
• Will the prices remain same in future?
• What about the security of the data?
• What is their data backup policy?
• Do they provide option to integrate their solution into your existing applications, if yes how much do they charge?
• Is there a SLA? What happens if the SLA is not met?
• Whats the exit policy if tomorrow you do not want to continue their service?
• Do they have a backup plan, if their server(s) fails?
• How well do their support staff understands the applications?
• Can they help people or they can only understand the application from the IT perspective?
• Who manages their infrastructure? Do they do it themselves or they have a professional team to manage and ensure smooth operations?
• What kind of compatability features do thier solution offers?
• Is the solution easy to use, do they provide training, if yes, does it costs, if yes, how much?

Well these are some questions that will get you started to dig deep into what the vendor has to offer. Once you have tested the vendor and you are comfortable with working with them, it does makes a lot of sense to go SaaS way:

Minimal Initial Investment

Generally SaaS applications come with Pay-As-You-Go price model i.e. you pay as much as you use, it can’t get better than this. You start up with little to no expense, and pay only for the resources you use. When you start using the application seriously and start to depend on that application, it means the application is of a great value and then you should be paying for the hard work the company has put in to make the application come close to your business and is helping you grow. Even then the solutions generally present in the market are far more economic than building and maintaining one for your own personal use.

Reduced operations cost

You don’t have to employ people to manage servers, good resource comes at a premium and good people will be sitting idle 75% of their time because a good person knows who to get the job done in that time. On the other hand, cheap resource generally means you will be sitting idle 75% of the time without the data that application is supposed to provide you.

Available anywhere

These applications are generally designed to be available through a general web browser, which means your data is available to you 24*7 without you being stuck in office for that long. It makes a huge difference in today’s world that information be accessible to you when you need it. Ask your vendor, how do they handle small screen mobile devices?

I will continue from here in the next part of this blog, I hope this helps you to get a basic idea of how it can be helpful for you to go SaaS and how to choose the correct vendor to be a part of your business.

1. Freshens up, shaves (if required) and reaches LoginWorks. Sa re ke sa re ga ma ko le kar gaate chalein…
2. A gang of 7 people will board the scorpio at around 5.00 a.m. Everybody is expected to travel light, as everyone will be carrying their own luggage so please take back packs and NOT suitcases or hard top luggage… Koi coolie nahin hoga, toh baad mein mat kahna ke bataya nahin…
3. Ab luggage kee baat ho hee rahi hain toh, kuchh details abhe hee le lo…Checklist kinds

a. As days are likely to be bright, shining, and pleasant, we need not worry much about the day times clothes…It cannot be more hotter than Dilli kee garmi…Kyun?
b. Toiletries such as soaps, tooth-brush/paste, shaving kits, Towel etc… I won’t go into details K
c. Nights…Ahan… Woh bhee camp mein! Daring group, I must say. But, woh kya thha..darr kea age..kya thee…Jeet? Yesss…
d. Do carry sunscreen lotion; tanning ho gayee nahi toh photo mein Sri Lankan lagogey.
e. Carry T-shirts and shorts (preferably synthetic) for rafting; non-synthetic clothes, when wet becomes heavier.Helmets and life-jackets will be available at the camp itself.
f. Retainers for spectacles; the rapids in the ganges throw you up and down so le lena…Main seriously advise kar raha hoon.
g. Camera and batteries to capture the Kodak moments J Not sure about the electricity facilities over their so keep your mobile phones fully charged and use judiciously so that they last long. Carry additional mobile battery if you really want to stay connected with rest.
h. Flashlights (hand held), torches etc. Agar yeh nahin, toh Happy DentWhite
i. Personal medication; carry generic first-aid box in any case. Adventure sport kar rahein hain toh first-aid toh chahiye hee na.
j. Last but not the least; feel free to experiment and carry whatever funky, jazzy, sporty outfits, caps, sunglasses,etc. you want to carry. After all, first, it’s an outing, second, it’s just our team, third, it’s an adventure trip, fourth, we are young, fifth, pictures fundu aayengee …

4. The Car will be having a music system as we need J
5. Stop for breakfast at some highway dhaba to have some paranthas with loads of makhan, followed by a especiallassi/chai…uske bina kaise chalega yaar..hamara petrol hain na woh…
6. All through the journey, we can munch snacks if someone still has the appetite and/or needs more fuel to continue singing songs on popular demand….
7. Reach the Jungle/Beach camp at around 11.00 a.m. in the morning…
8. Take charge of your tents at the camp. Just to make you feel at ease in the middle of the night where animals can wander, each tent will be shared by 2 people.
9. Freshen up and get together …
10. Lunch Time: Indian vegetarian/Non- vegetarian meals; shaadi types – paneer,chicken varieties…
11. Khane peene key baad toh…neend…oye….nahin…koi sona-wona nahin hain…. Where is the time to sleep, when there is so little time to play..so back to another interesting games….Olympics… Shhhh… Just remember, these are a must to prove that we belong to the team that enjoy challenges…
12. Retire for brief beauty nap…I’m sure you would need it after a fun-filled day…
13. Yahan kuch clear nahihai kya karna hai but ye clear hai k masti karni hai….
14. Ab thoda kaam kar lein.? Set up a bonfire, and grill some tandoori paneer and chicken tikkas..thoda peena-sheena bhee possible hain as long as it is within limits….we don’t want a hangover….have dinner (finally, non vegetarian stuff too), dance, masti, till you crash in your respective beds…
15. The night will be dark and silent; sleep well. If you are lucky, you might have a wild animal giving you a wake up call at dusk…Relax. Bhul gaye, Kaun see team se ho.

Saturday, october 3rd:

1. Freshen up. Ab kids nahin khelengey toh kaun khelega..toh phir ho jaye, ek Volley-ball ka match?
2. Breakfast lag gaya hain..Jaldee se aao….phir hamein rappelling karne hike par jaana hain..jaldee karo….jaldee… oh haan..no jaldee…ASAP!
3. Now, the big one…return and get dressed for the RAFTING ACTION!!!
4. Briefing session by experts as to who, what, and how of rafting before we hit the stream….make sure to listen to each instruction seriously and make sure you follow what is said….
5. With mentally and physically all set, we board respective rafts in groups.. and set for the truly most memorable experience of our lives…Greatwhite water rafting in Ganges for about 22 Kms…Pheww!!!!!
6. While we are on rafts in water, we will be part of some water games and too…Majaa aayega!
7. The sail will start from the base camp and reach Rishikesh…
8. Ab thoda kaam kar lein.? Set up a bonfire, and grill some tandoori paneer and chicken tikkas..thoda peena-sheena bhee possible hain as long as it is within limits….we don’t want a hangover….have dinner (finally, non vegetarian stuff too), dance, masti, till you crash in your respective beds…
9. The night will be dark and silent; sleep well. If you are lucky, you might have a wild animal giving you a wake up call at dusk…Relax. Bhul gaye, Kaun see team se ho.

Sunday, october 4rth:

1. Freshen up. Ab kids nahin khelengey toh kaun khelega..toh phir ho jaye, ek Volley-ball ka match?

Monday, october 5th:

1. Freshens up, shaves (if required) and reaches LoginWorks.
2. Join work on Monday by 11.00 morning.
3. Continue good work, share the moments, and look forward to setting standards in whatever you do, wherever, whenever…