Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and SharePoint Server 2010 are bundles of great, efficient, and helpful features. Yes and when talking about its features how can we forget about InfoPath Forms Services, right? InfoPath Forms Services is a server technology that makes it possible for people to fill out forms in a Web browser. By managing forms in a central location, you can streamline business processes and improve relations with customers, partners, and suppliers.
Take advantage of SharePoint InfoPath Form Services and other useful features of SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint Foundation hosting or SharePoint Server 2010 – with shared or dedicated hosting by a SharePoint 2010 hosting provider.
Role of forms in SharePoint solutions
Forms play a significant role in all business process management solutions.
o Form-driven applications start with a form that is used to gather data and add in other SharePoint functionality to process and report on the data including workflows, reporting, custom Web Pages, and external lists.
o Document workflow applications automate document-based business processes. Adding InfoPath forms to workflows lets you gather information from the users at predefined times in the life of the workflow and let users interact with the tasks for that workflow.
o Business data applications start with data in an external system that is made available in SharePoint Server through Business Connectivity Services.
o Ad hoc business processes can be managed by using SharePoint lists. The forms used for creating, reading, and updating items in these lists can be customized by using InfoPath 2010.
o Document information panels use InfoPath forms to display document metadata within the Microsoft Office system client application.
Types of InfoPath forms
o Microsoft InfoPath Designer 2010 is used to create form templates. Form templates define the data structure, appearance, and behavior of a form.
o Microsoft InfoPath Filler 2010 is used to fill out forms that are based on form templates created in InfoPath Designer.
Key features of InfoPath Forms Services
o Custom data validation ensures that users don’t submit forms that contain invalid data.
o Customized layout helps simplify the form-filling experience by splitting forms into multiple pages or creating separate views that are optimized for specific users or tasks. Conditional formatting lets you optimize the form-filling experience. For example, you can show or hide fields in the form based on values entered by users.
o Data connections to other sources such as SharePoint lists or Web services let you pull supporting, contextual data into your forms.
All in all, by using InfoPath forms in your SharePoint solutions, you can ensure that only valid, good quality data is gathered. InfoPath 2010 achieves this by letting you standardize, customize, and optimize the process of gathering data without writing any code.
Do you want to know what you should not do when working with Flash Video? One of he country’s top flash video turners gave these answers when asked questions on what problems his students routinely had. The answers could save you frustration and time.
James Gonzales taught in classrooms, in online tutorials, in books where his experience in getting students to master Flash. A professor at College of Marin, in California, and the author of Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Hands-on Training, published by Peachpit Press, he has also written tutorial articles for InformIt.com
1. Video Capture Is the Real Difficulty. When teaching, Gonzalez often sees that capturing video gives his students far more problems that converting it. Getting the digital video they want into a format that can be encoded is the bigger headache. Often, students approach him with a commercial DVD and ask how they can get the content onto their sites. Gonzalez then needs to educate them about video formats�and digital rights.
…to be continued.
Web applications have changed a lot from their predecessors and so has the process of web application development. The change is quite an inevitable one and, therefore, has been undertaken by each and every company that creates web applications.
Creating web applications involve many aspects other than the primary feature of writing codes. One of the aspects is the requirement of the website and the knowledge of the way in which the created application would be used. A proper knowledge of the requirement will lead to an accurate creation with a high probability of meeting the needs of the customer.
Another important requirement is the implementation of versatility in all the processes of the websites. This is a feature that should be seen by the application being able to perform wonderfully by accommodating different protocols.
Security is another important concern that should be taken into consideration. Cyber crime is now the most prevalent reality in the current world and, therefore, all the applications that are created should be capable of fending off virus attacks and hacking attempts.
This feature is especially important for all the shopping and banking websites which have applications managing monetary transactions on a routine basis. Therefore, the act of web application development should also encompass the need for advanced security features as well.
These are some of the aspects that should be given a good deal of attention while creating web applications. There are many more aspects that need to be considered and one of them is the pre-development research. The need for a good application stems from the fact that the developers should be aware of the primary objective behind the creation of the web application. The next consideration that should be taken into account is the identification of all those unpredictable situations which might land up the functionality of the application in trouble. Therefore, contingency measures should be implemented into the web applications.
The world is quite an unpredictable place and, therefore, unforeseen troubles should be taken into consideration while endeavouring in the task of web application development. A faithful and realistic endeavour is bound to be fruitful with the creation of a good web application.
Even though Web design is a new industry, it’s becoming a basic and fundamental part of every business’s image, and advertising campaigns.
Web design includes graphic design and web development.
Graphic design is the creation of the actual look and the layout of the website.
It is very important to create designs that are attractive and functional at the same time.
The graphic design of the website may include: designing the website itself, designing logos and banners, creating flash animations.
Some of the most used softwares for this purpose are: photoshop, xara and corel draw.
Web development is the creation of the “non-design” part of the website
It includes: coding and the creation of internet applications among other things. Web developers are required to understand everything about web technologies, browsers and programming. The most used softwares for web development are dreamweaver and golive.
Some Important Tips:
* Use small pictures (up to 15kb per picture). Using big pictures may cause your site to load very slowly.
* Do not use too many graphics.
* Use graphics that feat the content of the website.
* Use normal layouts. The 3-column layout is probably the best option here.
* Don’t use too many fonts. Using more than two or three fonts will make your site look amateurish.
* Make sure that your website works on all the most popular browsers (firefox, internet explorer, chrome and safari)
* Don’t put too many ads on your website; if you do it, your readers will not stay too long.
* The ads should feat the graphics and the design of your website.
Web 2.0 is a buzzword commonly used to embrace diverse and novel processes on the World Wide Web. Even though predominately a marketing term, some of the key imputes colligated with Web 2.0 include the emergence of social networks, two-way communication, various ‘glue’ techniques and substantial multifariousness in content types. Although most of Web 2.0 runs on the same platform as 1.0, there are some key divergences. Our aim is to key out the elementary differences leading to the properties of interest in 2.0 to be characterized.
Web 2.0 enamours a combination of conceptions on the Web in recent years. The accurate definition is subtle and it is hard to categorize with the binary label “Web 1.0″ or “Web 2.0″. But there is an uncluttered separation between a set of extremely popular Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and the old Web. These separations are seeable when contrived onto a variety of axes, such as technological structural and sociological.
One of the major differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that the content creators were very few in Web 1.0 with the sheer majority of users merely served as consumers of content, while any user can be a content generator in Web 2.0 and various technological assistances have been added to increase the potential for content generation.
Another difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 can be based on time. The term “Web 2.0″ was coined around 2004 and many of the first genuine Web 2.0 sites started egressing in late 2003 and early 2004. The websites which have modified a little in structure since the early 2000’s and before may be counted as Web 1.0 (such as IMDB).
A key feature in Web 2.0 is that these sites boost users to expend as much time as possible on their site. They offer strong inducements for increasing stickiness on the site. In Web 1.0 most websites have links to external sites and users can easily follow those links to other sites. The primary reason for this is that most of the Web 1.0 sites incline to cover a single topic and do not necessitate users to log in to access them. On the other hand, Web 2.0 sites encourage intra-site activities, usually requiring users to log in and build links to others on the site.
Web 1.0 sites were for one-way communication while Web 2.0 sites build two-way communication medium. Web 1.0 was autocratic and top-down. On the other hand, Web 2.0 is democratic and bottom-up. Rather than the New York Times 1.0 website stating you what the significant stories of the day were, Digg.com, Buzz and Yahoo.com depicts the stories users have voted the most crucial.
Web 1.0 sites were plainly to be read passively. Web 2.0 sites tempt participation, voting for the content up or down, grading it, remarking on it, and submitting new posts. By 2000, Amazon.com was allowing users to review books but nowadays users can take part in many different ways like create lists of products, write product guides and edit wiki articles (Amapedia). In 2000, Amazon was utilizing its sites to sell products it bought in. With Web 2.0, Amazon now lets you list and sell your own new and old books and products through their website.
Web 1.0 sites were static and seldom gets changed where Web 2.0 sites are dynamic and change hourly or even more frequently, pondering all of those user shares. Web 1.0 sites were closed up sites while Web 2.0 sites are collaborative sites.
Below table highlights the distinguishing features between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 and compares how things have changed since the web culture has overturned.
Web 1.0
It was about reading
It was about companies
It was about client-server
It was about HTML
It was about home pages
It was about portals
It was about taxonomy
It was about wires
It was about owning
It was about IPO’s
It was about Netscape
It was about screen scraping
It was about web forms
It was about hardware costs
It was about dialup
It was top-down
It was edited and produced
It was about banner ads
Web 2.0
It is about writing
It is about communities
It is about peer to peer
It is about XML
It is about blogs
It is about RSS
It is about tags
It is about wireless
It is about sharing
It is about trade sales
It is about Google
It is about APIs
It is about web applications
It is about bandwidth costs
It is about broadband
It is bottom-up
It is raw
It is about AdSense
Ajax has taken the Web to a new level by offering an intuitive interactive model that rivals the desktop. To compete with desktop applications, database interaction is necessary to unleash the true power of an Ajax Web application.
In this article you’ll learn how to create database-enabled Ajax requests using PHP and MySQL. We begin by creating the front-end HTML and JavaScript files used to make requests to the server-side. The requested
server-side is a PHP file which bridges the gap between Ajax and a PHP object that connects to a MySQL database and returns results as an XML response to the Ajax engine. To cover this functionality you’ll learn about the concepts from a high level overview rather than focusing on each and every line of code. The complete source code for this sample can be downloaded and is necessary to create a working sample on your personal server. Let’s get started by taking a look at the front-end.
Read the rest of this entry »
Selling and buying is an integral part of everyday life. Its existence is as old as human in different formats. After entering into internet world, where people prefer everything online, E-commerce is touted as one of the most viable online business opportunities on the Web today. In comparison to traditional brick and mortar businesses, e-commerce site requires minimal start-up cost and with relatively low-risk.
However that does not imply creating an e-commerce site is a simple process; neither does it guarantee your future success. Since it had become an integral part of our nature, every time anyone looks for an e-commerce application they have to start from scratch and needs to redo all the work by just viewing any online e-commerce website and thus e-commerce development becomes a typical job as the progress was not being distributed among the developers.
Especially after the occurrence of open source technologies need of a centralized e-commerce application become mandatory. Keeping this in mind few organizations/groups started developing. Now in the market there are many build-in e-commerce applications, os-commerce, Zen cart, Xcart are few very popular build-in E-commerce applications. Build-in applications are very popular and you get a basic structure with all the required functionality of an e-commerce application which you can customize accordingly to make it work for you. Some of them are free while few are paid.
At this stage it has become hard to select any application to start your e-commerce business, below are few tips which may help you to select the best possible application.
Easy Setup of store and availability of contributions and forums: Set up of a store should not be a struggle for you. A good wizard having effusive operational facilities will help you to set up your store in minutes. Since stores are based on a general requirement, you have to modify it to suit your requirements, availability of free contributions, forums may help you to get the work done quickly and efficiently. Data Management: Every online store needs their data to be imported and exported. This facility helps in smooth product management and effortless migration in case we plan to change the hosting service provider. Web Analytic: One of the key to the success of e-business is the web analytic. This will help you to understand the business scope and measure your failure rate.
There is no question that designing an effective web page requires the ability to evaluate and implement a variety of technical applications. Are you going to use cascading style sheets? How do you create them and use them? How about browser compatibility? Will the page work just as well in IE for Windows as it does in IE for Macintosh? What kinds of images will you use and how will they be placed in the page? Are you going to use wrap-around text with your images? What about Flash applications? Printer friendly web pages?
Creating an engaging, effective website does require some understanding and mastery of these techniques and other applications, too.
But wait! First things first. Before you spend a lot of timing downloading and plowing through articles and instructions on the technical aspects of web design, take some time to consider the elements of a web page that would really grab YOUR attention- a web design that would have you pause and look again, that would pique your interest and engage you to read on. Does the page that your imagination conjures up look like the standard web templates that are available everywhere? Hopefully not. Ideally you have envisioned something a bit more exciting, inviting and tempting. After all, web site design is marketing. And successful marketing is separating yourself from the horde. How do you differentiate your site and make visitors want to stay and even better, return?
Originality should be your first consideration. The “stick with what works” approach means your site will fall in line with its competitors and you will have missed a valuable opportunity to break away and engage your target. But keep your eye on your objective, which is to engage effectively. ‘Original’ doesn’t mean crazy, loopy, screaming, goofy or weird. Those are turn-offs guaranteed to drive people away. But stepping away from the computer for a few minutes and taking some time to consider innovative approaches to otherwise standard applications can pay big dividends in hits, sales and returns. Try out an innovative approach on a small group of friends, family, colleagues or trusted users. You may be surprised at how effective an original web design can really be.
Though there are as many variations as possible, a Web application is commonly structured as a three-tiered application. The Web browser, in its most common form, is the first tier. The second tier or the middle tier is an engine using some dynamic Web content technology. Some of these are ASP, ASP.NET, CGI, ColdFusion, JSP/Java, PHP,embPerl, Python, or Ruby on Rails. The third tier is a database. The Web browser, which is the first tier, sends requests to the middle tier, which then services them by making queries and updating against the database then generating a user interface.
Learning about the threats is an important aspect of achieving web application security. Such potential threats that are usually faced by certain applications are being categorized depending on its goals and of course of the true principles behind their attacks. A good knowledge of the aforementioned categories of the unwanted threats can assist you by simply organizing an in-demand security strategies so as to countermeasure these so-called threats. At Microsoft, the acronym STRIDE is used to categorize and learn more about the threats on web application security.
• S stands for Spoofing or the attempt to gain access to a particular system by using false information to represent false user identity. This is easily achieved by simply utilizing stolen user untrue IP address.
• T stands for tampering which basically speaks of altering data.
• R stands for Repudiation which is the ability of a certain user to easily decline specific transactions. The absence of auditing makes this activity difficult to uncover.
• I is for Information disclosure or simply the unwanted or intentional exposure of pertinent private personal data.
• D, on the other hand, is the Denial of service which can be easily done is merely forcing them to be unavailable. Bombarding the server is the most common tool used by hackers and manipulators,
• Lastly, E is for Elevation of privilege which can be done by merely using the identity of a privileged user. Thus it compromises and the entire trusted account or financial procedure.
Strengthening the web application security can be done by counter measuring the entire STRIDE group. One way is by using a much stronger authentication procedure. Avoiding using plain text for passwords can also be very useful. Using tools which are tamper-proof such as digital signature is always a smart idea to combat the effects.