Let me give you a quick update regarding my project with outsourcing: the agreement is signed and the work is in progress. I am pleased with the way things are going and I am looking forward to the first batch.
What I love about this way of doing business is the enormous commitment from people you have never seen and the feeling of trust it creates.
Last week at Liones we started a custom front-end project for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and I am one of the developers working on the project. It is my job to write a library around the web service which MS CRM provides. The service itself is pretty easy because it contains only 7 methods:
The difficult part is to get the queries right because it is hard to determine how entities are related to each other if you don’t know the system. However I found a really useful tool to do this for me: FetchXML Wizard.
This is just a short post, next time I will tell you more about my adventures with MS CRM.
Hello and welcome back to my series of post about my first experience in outsourcing content transformation in India.
In the first week we (the company in India & Liones) discussed the specs of the projects and we sent some sample file.
This week we finished the discussion about the specs and I got some samples back to check against those specs. At first glance there seemed to be a problem in a date field but it turned out to be a bug in my PDF reader tool. I was impressed by the quality of the work the Indian company delivered.
They were able to give me a sharp quote, which I could pass through to the client; they even were able to give an exact turnaround time.
We are currently finishing the price negotiation.
As I told you I am working on an outsourcing project currently with a company based in India to process a lot of content for us.
Today the representative contacted me using Skype (which worked much better than the phone connection). He asked me about the amount of content and told me that the specifications were crystal clear. We did a little chit chat and gave me an indication of the price but he needed the exact amount to provide me the final quote. He said that I would receive it tomorrow.
Skype rocks for this kind of work, it works faster and better than any other form of communication.
Update: I just received a sample based on our specification and it looks really promising, I am going to test it tomorrow to see if it is fully compliant with our specification. 2 days for a sample: OCR + format everything. That is just plain fast.
Yesterday I wrote about my first day in an outsourcing project for which I am the lead developer. Yesterday I contact a representative of a company in India for a quote for processing a lot of content. We agreed that I would send him the speciffications.
Today I finished translating the specifications and I sent it to him around 16:00 GMT+1. I didn’t expect an answer from him within 18 hours or something because it was 20:00 india time GMT+5 but I received a response within the hour telling me that someone was working on the specifications already. Impressive!
After some research I learned that the company worked in 3 shifts 24/7, so they always have people working. That is quite remarkable compared to businesses in Holland. He promised me that he would send me the quote tomorrow.
Okay, let’s assume that your website is up and running, you have a steady visitor flow. Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing know how to find your website and acknowledge you as a valuable source of information. You add new content on a daily basis and your content is valuable to your visitors as you can see in your statistics tool. Your banner positions are filled and revenue is coming in, time to sit back and let the money come to you right?
No, for one single reason: the competition will eventually catch up with you. You have to keep improving continuously to prevent competitors to catch up with you. How? Listen to the demands and wishes of your visitors! You have got to remember that they are in charge of your site, not you! Why? They are not loyal, they don’t love you and they have a choice to go to a new player on your market or an innovating competitor.
How can I learn what my visitors want, you ask yourself?
I am sure there are a lot more advices to give and I invite you to add your own to this list as well as comment on the current ones. I started this post with the idea of improving the internal search engine of websites but I didn’t have the time to do it yet. Don’t worry though; I will post a follow up about that subject as soon as I can.
In the mean while I hope this advice helps you to improve your website’s visitor count and your revenue!
Today at my work I started my first project with outsourcing for a client we need to process a lot of content and we decided that it would be best to do that processing in India.
The first step was to contact the business representative of the company in India, I sent him a e-mail about a request for proposal. He phoned me back in about 2 hours, which was pretty impressive considering it was 19:00 in india. The representative spoke English fluently, like I expected. The only thing that was a bit annoying was the phone connection: there was a lot of noise.
Anyway, I briefly spoke to the representative about the project and we agreed that I would send him the specifications and that he would make a quote based on those specifications. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to translate the specifications today, so I will continue tomorrow.
At the moment I am building a new script engine which is consists of text and expressions embedded in them. Those expressions are basically calls to functions and have any number of arguments. The implementation of those functions is done in C#.
At compile time I don’t know which methods are going to be called so I have to invoke them at runtime. The most obvious way to do that is to use the reflection API of .NET to do a late bound method call. Although, IMHO, this is a perfectly valid solution to this problem it isn’t exactly fast.
System.Reflection.Emit.DynamicMethod is a better alternative for late bound method invocation when it comes to performance. Although it requires you to write Intermediate Language (IL) it is actually quite easy to use.
Last week I encountered a problem with the source control software we use at Liones. The locks on some files became corrupted, which caused that I couldn’t delete those files. This problem (it is solved now btw) made me realize again that a working source control software is the foundation of any software development company.
My preferred source control software is Subversion, simply because it is reliable, fool proof and widely used. There are plenty of others available. It doesn’t really matter which one you pick as long as it is reliable!
I just added two of my old articles about the Windows Template Library:
WTL Resourceless Dialog Toolkit
You can also find these articles on the CodeProject and CodeGuru.
