Author: Ajay Sahoo

Why Magento Is The Ultimate Choice For ECommerce Business?

Posted on by Ajay Sahoo

Magento is the most popular platform to implement eCommerce application for online marketplace. The reasons are like it’s highly scalable and provides great user experience with optimum performance.

This is the fast-growing solution for eCommerce development for those who are looking for online marketplace.

It has shown significant improvement over the past few years. Magento successfully integrates digital and physical shopping experiences, to the delight of customers.

According to official website, more than 250,000 merchants around the globe have opted Magento as their eCommerce platform.

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The usage of Magento has increased and it is far ahead from other platforms like Shopify and Big Commerce. Let’s have a quick look at the E-commerce statistics of various platforms.

Ecommerce

(Source: cminds.com)

The internet users are growing day by day and eCommerce business owners are generating more & more revenues. eCommerce can take your business to great success as it has more reachability.

Let’s have a look at the benefits of using Magento for your eCommerce application.

Benefits of Using Magento eCommerce Platform for Your Business

Conclusion:

Magento stands tall as a one of the best eCommerce platform, offering boundless features that grant your business unparalleled flexibility and customization.

This cutting-edge content management system is meticulously crafted to align with the latest trends, driving your website’s SEO ranking to new heights and propelling the exponential growth of your business.

With the CMS, the possibilities for developing your dream app or online store are truly limitless.

Our dedicated developers team is here to support you every step of the way, resolving any challenges that may arise and turning your innovative ideas into tangible realities.

Are you looking to develop a Magento App/Store for your Business? Contact US!

Things You Should Know Before Hiring A PHP Developer

Posted on by Ajay Sahoo

“It’s always cost-effective and secured to go with PHP development and convert your business ideas into reality. Experienced PHP developer can take you to the next level with advance technique. So it’s your time to cross check various aspects, like developer’s knowledge, ability, experience and the hiring process of company/agency while you are going to hire a developer”.

As you know, PHP is one of the most popular and robust framework to develop beautiful and user-friendly websites and applications for any size of business.

The demand of PHP developers are growing now days and their numbers are increasing also. In the mean time you need to choose the right developer for your business.

“The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers”

                                                                                                              – Robert. L. Glass

It’s not advisable for you if you will throw money according to your requirement and discuss with him/her at the end for your output. You need to have few idea/documentation, so that your developer can make it live with code. A good developer has very well future vision and he/she develop website and applications which can be accommodate many of future changes and updates.

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So, don’t be so aggressive or hurry while you are hiring someone. Here in this article we will cover the core things of a developer before or at the time of hiring.

1. Technical Expertise:

A PHP developer must have wide knowledge on various technical aspects like content management systems (CMS), Java Script, HTML/HTML5, CSS/CSS3 and Ajax etc and should have exposure to the latest technology trends. Must have expertise in understanding your requirements.

As a webmaster or entrepreneur you must have goal and what you want to implement in your website or application, but don’t know the exact time frame, budget and scope of work. In this situation an experience developer can be of help and can manage within your budgets.

No doubt you will get thousand of PHP Development Company in Google search but choosing the right one is the key; you can measure them from their previous works.

2. Industrial Knowledge

An ideal PHP developer expected to be on top of the latest technology trends relating to website designing, development and industry experience. Your developer must be aware about, what is going on the industry and how to catch or impress the target audience. Attractive, friendly and engaging information are much needed to grab the attention of users for eCommerce or any other websites.

3. Time Management

Time Management in delivering projects within a specific time frame is one of the most important skills of a good PHP developer. Managing time not only delivers quality output but also estimating and setting up expectation is of most important. This helps keeping up a brand name of company. Sometimes developers handle multiple projects at same time and fail to meet the expectation.

4. Work Portfolio

It’s very important for you to check the PHP Developer company portfolio or previous PHP work before planning to take PHP development service. Portfolio gives clear picture about developer’s previous work and how good are they in the domain.

5. Communication

Communication is the way to represent your thoughts. A good developer must be a good listener and speaker also. Communication with good temperament, understanding the requirement and justifying the action are signs of a developer.

6. Ability to learn Quick and adopting new challenges

A good developer is always a self learner. They do research to get alternative solutions for your specs. If you ask questions to them, you can find they are very much open to adopt or learn the new technologies. Another quality is if he is able to use the researches in the implementations. In such cases you can consider that you’re going with right guy.

7. Work and Hiring Process

Each company’s working process of and hiring developers are different from other and based on a specific model. You need to get idea on their development process and communication options before hiring developers to get good results.

At Andolasoft we follow agile methodology and our flexible engagement models have been designed keeping the exact need of the prospects in mind.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

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We have three different engagement models to hire our PHP developers,

  • Dedicated Developers – You can hire single or multiple full-stack developers to work in your project dedicatedly according to your requirement,
  • Fixed-bid – You can hire developers when your requirements with each module and tasks are clearly outlined.
  • Time & Material–You can hire developers, when project’s scope and specification cannot be defined from the beginning but the requirements keep on changing as the development progresses.

Conclusion:

The demand of PHP developers are growing and it’s completely upto you to choose the right developer and company among the growing numbers. Some companies are still adopting traditional model in their work process and some are adopting new. We at Andolasoft are adopting the best models for you.

Are you looking to hire PHP Developer! Consult Now

Whether it may eCommerce shopping carts development, CMS Development, or CRM Application development, we are the best PHP development company to fulfill your business needs.

Top 5 Reasons: Why You need Business Intelligence

Posted on by Ajay Sahoo

In general, each organization needs Business Intelligence (BI) at some point. For example, when a retail company is started – there was no scope for ERP with minimal business transactions having few employees on the roll.

As the business picked up, I wanted to find answers to some obvious questions like “What is the sales trend over a given period?”, “Which commodity is having more demand during festive seasons?”, “What is rate of growth year-wise?” etc.

Having said that, even the tiniest organizations need some kind of analyzed data, graphical display adds value.

BI – A need for Any Sized Company:

Be it mid-sized or smaller companies (SMBs), they do have same need as the big companies do for using BI.

It is required for better visibility of the business performance followed by corrective decisions. In summary, the intelligence reports are equally important for irrespective of the company size.

Challenges:

The truth is, most SMBs usually use the Excel spreadsheet as a tool for analysis. Every day they enter the data and prepare the report manually.

Several reports created by various employees very often without any real coordination resulting in-appropriate intelligent output.

So, when management asks a simple question like, “What is the percent of growth rate compared to that in last financial year?” and the answers don’t match. In addition to that, it will take longer to deliver the reports.

With time the company increases, with increase in employees, and thereby hike in transactions, it becomes too much to be handled for analysis.

The need for BI is necessitated.

Business-Intelligence-Tool

Solutions:

To meet the challenges to get an accurate intelligence output, the KPI (Key-Performance-Indicators) & key metrics need to be well defined for the business.

These are to be supported by data warehouse and BI reporting tools.

For example, as a retail vendor, we need to analyze our business pipeline over the period of the entire year.

We could get the fact that the most favorable period is December-January and the most slowdown period is March-April.

Based on this intelligence report we plan our purchasing strategy and can minimize the losses.

So, for this purpose we did not opt for any expensive software rather we built our own BI Tool with open source components and interfaces of latest trend.

So, we can agree that, in order for prosperity & growth of your organizations, you must consider to have BI in place so that the performance can be measured and appropriate decisions can be taken based on the gaps found.

Conclusion:

5 reasons to invest in Business Intelligence today

  1. Measure Business Performance
  2. Analyzing Gaps
  3. Appropriate decision making
  4. Minimize loss of revenue
  5. Achieve consistent growth

If you are really interested to boost your business, Andolasoft is committed to provide the high-performance business intelligence through reporting, monitoring and consultation.

Read also : How Business Intelligence can help Direct Sale Organization

It would be a great pleasure for me, if you contributed your informative idea on this post.

Thank you for your involvement.

What’s New In Android L, Windows 8.1 And IOS 8

Posted on by Ajay Sahoo

As all the three major mobile players in smartphone categories  i.e. Apple, Google and Microsoft come up with their latest version of Operating Systems i.e. iOS 8, Android L & Windows 8.1 respectively. Let’s have a look how it is worthy for users to switch over the most-recent OS version based upon the new features.

Android L:-

  • Personalized unlocking features, which make your smartphone or tablet search for familiar Bluetooth’s gadgets, Wi-Fi networks, locations and even voice imprints to deactivate any lock screen protections, letting you jump straight into your phone when it knows you’re nearby. If the device can’t detect any of this metrics, anyone trying to use it will be presented with the standard lock screen.
  • Google is focusing on its stock android keyboard for Android 5.0 Lollipop for adding more personalized and scrapping the individual tiled keys.
  • There is one more exciting feature i.e. “Do Not Disturb mode”, which automatically deactivates all notifications and audio during set times, support for Bluetooth 4.1 and a completely redesigned audio back end with support for USB audio devices.
  • Also Android L is going to introduce 64-bit processor support and  improving battery life with Project Volta. Project Volta includes a new battery historian which will help users work out what a device was doing at any given point in a battery cycle to find out which apps are draining the most power.

Windows 8.1 :–

Microsoft has already rolled out windows 8.1 few months back. Some of the features that were added windows phone 8.1:

  • Cortana, which is very much similar to Siri in iOS device, act as your personal assistant. Cortana notebook features store things that you tell her about yourself and also keep tracks what you like and what you’d like done. It can access apps, set alarms, send messages to specific persons, post a Facebook status, add a tweet, search for something and a lot more.
  • The action center which is finally added, and here you can get all your notifications and other controls such as setting Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.
  • Another interesting feature that added to windows 8.1 was Quiet Hours. Here You can set what time you want your phone to be “quiet,” shutting out noise or notifications coming from it.

There is some other new features like setting up your personal photos as the background on the said start screen, connects you to free Wi-Fi hotspots near you through Wi-Fi sense, transferring files from the internal memory and SD-card seamless through Storage Sence etc.

iOS 8:-

iOS 8 also launched with lots of new features and here I am going to share few of them:

  • iPhone has new feature “Send Last Location” which allows your iPhone (or iPad) to send its last-known location to Apple when the battery drains to a critical level. If you lost your device, it will help you to find the last location of your device even if it’s battery is completely drained.
  • You can now include photos when making notes, to-do lists and reminders in Apple’s iOS 8 notes app.
  • Now iPhone can identify the song due to Shazam integration in Siri. If you ask Siri, “What song is playing?”, it will cause her to listen to the ambient sound, using Shazam to identify music.
  • You can notice iOS 8 has new keyboard with a very smooth predictive type features, which suggests three words right above the keyboard.

I hope you liked this post. What you would like to prefer- Android L, iOS 8 or windows 8.1 and why. Please share your answer in the below comment section

Recommended Blog: Useful features of iOS 7

Looking to make your mobile application dreams come true? Contact us today to make it a reality.

How Business Intelligence Can Help Direct Sale Organization

Posted on by Ajay Sahoo

As of now, Big-data has already created a lot of buzz across all industries. An organization has to handle various types of data like financial, personnel, accounting, sales and lots more.

These lists are endless. To discover information that could help in the better decision making process or to identify new business opportunities from those endless sets of data, is one of the biggest challenges for an organization.

This challenge becomes more enormous for direct sales organisations.

In today’s Business intelligence dashboards, the end users of every sector follow an effective method of gaining greater insights into their business without the need to go back to the IT or business analysts to get more data.

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And those types of data information, business intelligence and knowledge in the hands of the sales and marketing team means growth for those departments.

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is the combination of various technologies, tools, applications and best practices that helps a business to integrate, collect, analyse and present raw data to an actionable and insightful business data.

Business intelligence is prepared with:

  • Data Mining
  • Querying and reporting
  • Analytical processing

The major challenges for the direct dales companies :

  • The business hierarchies need to be on top across all the brands.
  • Taking longer to answer to critical business questions.
  • Lot of person-hours wasted for preparing daily transaction report.
  • Difficult to maintain the inventory for which the customers do not getting the right product in right time.
  • Lack in customer satisfaction without good services.
  • Preparation of the business report for board meeting.
  •  A single application could reduce technical support but impact planning flexibility thereby possibly reducing the performance and reliability.
  • Individual multiple applications could provide the flexibility required by the individual brands but would increase development time, cost and continuous technical support.
  • As per the need, a combined corporate view of actual, budgets and forecast scenarios must be taken care of.
  • Reporting requirements to be based on each brand, zone, categories and time.
  • Collect source files from the third party vendor.
  • Send the report through mail & put into the drop-box.
  • To build the excel report using ‘n’ number of sheets with separate dynamic report headers.
  • Organizations who are struggling with such immense data, Business Intelligence(BI)  is the right option for them. BI can help to identify new opportunities from those massive unstructured information; whose may  be remain unnoticed.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou– Salesmate.

At Andolasoft we provide following supports to our clients.

  • The data-warehouse solution has been implemented in MYSQL 5.1, and incorporates data  from one principal source such as, Daily’s sales/order information.
    MYSQL 5.1 provides extreme performance for large data warehouses, improves  data warehouse performance, availability, and manageability by partitioning large tables.
  • Pentaho(Kettle) used as an Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) tool for loading data into the data warehouse from different data sources: Data consolidated from various data sources such as Flat files(csv, xls, txt) & OLTP databases.
  • The data in the warehouse is being processed for reporting and analysis purposes. The data is accessed through Excel. Data can be captured by stylist, item, store, zone, accounting year, quarter and period, and brand and concept.

Business-Intelligence-2-300x189

Reports:

  • Pentaho, Excel & CSV Add-ons were used for the purpose of reporting and analysis.
  • Reports could be generated for a specific stylist aggregation, i.e. zone, company, concept, brand, for a sequence day, week, quarter, or year.
  • Reports could be generated for a specific time to know the information about the booked item.
  • Reports could be generated to know the revenue income of the organization & compare with current MTD to Last MTD, like that current QTD & Last QTD.

Technologies That We Used:

  • MYSQL 5.1
  • Pentaho (Kettle)
  • Pentaho (Mondrian) as an OLAP
  • Excel & CSV Add-ons

Overall Benefits:

  • Data Warehouse designed for analysis, pattern search and reporting has been created.

How-Business-Intelligence-helps

  • Help to develop and deliver better forecasting: Answer ‘what if’ questions with a click of a button. Forecasting and planning can be conducted by taking existing data sets, applying theoretical projections and estimations to that information, to model and predict future outcomes.
  • Eliminate guesswork: Business intelligence can provide more accurate historical data, real-time updates, synthesis between departmental data stores, forecasting and trending, and even predictive ‘what if?’ analysis,” eliminating the need to guesstimate.
  • Get faster answers to any business queries
  • Get key business metrics reports when and where we need them
  • Identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities: BI allows firms to leverage customer data to build, refine and modify predictive models that help sales representatives to up-sell and cross-sell products at appropriate customer touch points.
  • Manage better inventory
  • See where your business has been, where it is now and where it is going: BI has been very successful at explaining what happened to the business over some defined period of time — for example, how many products were sold, through which party, in which geography, or by which customer segment
  • Integrated budgeting & planning processes in a centralized web-based application.

Read Also: Data-Warehousing for Small & Medium Organizations

Implementation Of BI For A DS Organization

We at Andolasoft have expertise on building revenue, budgeting and forecasting data warehouse(DWH) to take care of the needs of each brand, timezone and category which minimizes both IT support and the technical expertise required by the management.

In the present market, the DWH reporting tools are expensive and beyond the affordability for the medium scale organizations. To cut down the cost, we provide well-formatted .xls & .csv file reports for the top management.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

LEARN MORE

 Conclusion:

One of the goals of business intelligence is to help the corporate executives, managers and other operational heads to take necessary data driven decisions for business.

Most of the companies use BI for cost-cutting, creating better business opportunities and identifying inefficient processes of business.

If you are in search of a better Business Intelligence software development service, you can contact us. Our Andolasoft expertise will help to develop a budgeting, revenue and forecasting data warehouse that helps in your business growth.

Do you wish to add anything to this topic? Share it in the comments section below.

How to install and configure Jaspersoft in Linux Server(RHEL/Centos/Fedora)

Posted on by Ajay Sahoo

Jaspersoft is a commercial open source software vendor focused on business intelligence, including data visualization, reporting, and analytics. It provides commercial as well as open source software, support services and licensing around the Jasper report, Jasper report server, Jaspersoft Studio, i-report and ETL products.

Jaspersoft is offered the communities open source edition as well as several commercial editions with broad support for various databases and data sources, including NoSQL and other big data sources. Jaspersoft’s main related product is JasperReports Server, a Java web application that provides advanced report server capabilities such as report scheduling, permissions, ad hoc reporting, dashboards, and multi-tenancy.

Unlike other traditional BI tools, it allows anyone to easily self-serve and get the answers they need inside their preferred app or on their favorite device. Our platform, unlike desktop visualization tools, scales architecturally and economically to reach everyone.

jaspersoft

Steps to Install ‘Jaspersoft Server’

STEP:1 Install JAVA 1.7 or above

STEP:2 Install Mysql server

# yum install mysql-server mysql php-mysql

STEP:3 Install tomcat 6 or tomcat 7
# yum install tomcat6 tomcat6-webapps tomcat6-admin-webapps

STEP:4 Download jaspersoft war file from “http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperserver” by issuing the below command

# wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperserver/files/JasperServer/JasperReports%20Server%20Community%20Edition%205.6.0/jasperreports-server-cp-5.6.0-bin.zip/download

STEP:5 Unzip zip file and move to “ opt “ directory

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# unzip jasperreports-server-cp-5.6.0-bin.zip
# mv jasperserver-ce-3.7.0-linux-installer.bin /opt/[/sourcecode]

STEP:6 Start Mysql service and Stop the tomcat service.

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# /etc/init.d/mysqld start
# /etc/init.d/tomcat6 stop[/sourcecode]

STEP:7
Go to this directory /opt/jasperreports-server-cp-5.6.0-bin/buildomatic
Then COPY “mysql_master.properties” file from this directory jasperreports-server-cp-5.6.0-bin/buildomatic/sample_conf/mysql_master.properties and Rename the “mysql_master.properties” to “default_master.properties”

STEP:8 Edit the default_master.properties file with vi editor

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# vi default_master.properties[/sourcecode]

Uncomment this below line

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# appServerType = tomcat6[/sourcecode]

Go to Tomcat app server root dir and modify“Catalina home and base “path as below
# If linux package managed tomcat instance, set two properties below

[sourcecode language=”plain”]CATALINA_HOME = /usr/share/tomcat6/
CATALINA_BASE = /var/lib/tomcat6/[/sourcecode]

# Change database location and connection settings setup as your own mysql passwd.

[sourcecode language=”plain”]dbHost=localhost
dbUsername=root
dbPassword=passwd[/sourcecode/]
# web app name
# (set one of these to deploy to a non-default war file name) uncomment as below any one
[sourcecode language="plain"]webAppNameCE = jasperserver
# webAppNamePro = jasperserver-pro[/sourcecode]

STEP:9 Download the mysql connector jar file from

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# wget https://total-pos.googlecode.com/files/mysql-connector-java-5.1.17-bin.jar[/sourcecode ]

<strong>STEP:10</strong> Put the mysql-connector-java-5.1.17-bin.jar file in tomcat directory
[sourcecode language="plain"]# /usr/share/tomcat6/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.1.17-bin.jar[/sourcecode]

STEP:11 Install this file under this directory

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# cd /opt/jasperreports-server-cp-5.6.0-bin/buildomatic
# ./js-install-ce.sh[/sourcecode]

STEP:12 Start the tomcat service

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# /etc/init.d/tomcat6 start[/sourcecode]

STEP:13 Browse in url

[sourcecode language=”plain”]# http://<ip-address>:8080/jasperserver[/sourcecode]

STEP:14 Login username and password
User login: jasperadmin
Passwd: jasperadmin

Conclusion:  Jaspersoft is available under an open source license for use in conjunction with open source infrastructure such as MySQL and JBoss, or a commercial license for enterprise deployments involving commercial databases and application servers. Jaspersoft’s main related product is JasperReports Server, a Java EE web application that provides advanced report server capabilities such as report scheduling and permissions.

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