Web Services
9 Free Web Apps From Microsoft You Might Not Know About
Now a days, it’s really not hard to find free and online web service to perform your daily task but offering really useful and free online web applications from Microsoft is a great step. Today, we are discussing about some web tools from Microsoft. We hope this list will be helpful for for everyone and specially it could be useful for designer to developer, office worker, manager to supervisor, student to home user and so on. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features.
You are welcome to share more useful and free web tools that would be helpful and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
You can use this service for free online storage and document sharing. You can store files up to 5GB, and share with anyone, and collaborate on a single document. It will allow you to view Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from your Web browser.
Microsoft My Phone syncs information on your mobile phone to a storage space on a web site hosted by Microsoft. If your phone is lost or stolen, or if you upgrade to a new phone, you can easily restore the contacts, calendar appointments, photos, and other information that you stored on My Phone to a compatible new or replacement phone. Most phones that run the Windows Mobile 6 operating system are compatible with My Phone service.
Windows Live OneCare safety scanner is a free service designed to help ensure the health of your PC.
Windows Live SkyDrive works well on any Windows or Macintosh computer with Firefox 1.5 or higher, or Internet Explorer 6 or higher. 5 GB of free online storage, available from any computer with Internet access. You can create personal, shared, and public folders and you can decide who has access to each folder.
Office Live Small Business provides your company with everything needed to create a professional web presence for free, including easy-to-use website design and management tools, and 100 email accounts. You also get a free suite of professional business applications that will allow you to manage customers, projects, and documents and easily share information with employees, customers, suppliers and vendors. All this is security-enhanced, managed, and maintained by Office Live Small Business.
With this service, you can keep important files up to date on all your computers, PC or Mac. This will also help you to share folders to sync files with friends or coworkers very easily. There is an option to sign in to the Sync website for remote access to any computer where you’ve installed Sync.
Microsoft® Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows and Mac.
The Microsoft® Translator is a free online translation service for worldwide web. You can type or paste text on the site that you want to translate and choose your translation language before you click translate. The Microsoft® Translator webpage widget allows you to bring real-time, in-place translations to your web site as well.
With Live Mesh, you can synchronize, share and access files with all of your devices, so you always have the updated copy of your files. It’s very simple and easy that you can now access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file. The best of all this service is powered by Microsoft and absolutely free for everyone.
Now It’s Easy To-Do With Ta-da List
Ta-da List is a simple tool that lets you create to-do lists. It’s really useful and absolutely free. Ta-da List is the web’s easiest to-do list tool. You can make lists for yourself or share them with others. It couldn’t be simpler but Ta-da List is the web’s simplest and fastest to-do list maker.
Make lists of things you need to do, your upcoming meet-ups, your homework assignments, people to call back, or anything you are planning to do. You can even share your lists with friends, family, spouses, collaborators, co-workers, or keep them to yourself. It’s up to you to share or not.
Ta-da List works in the most popular web browsers (IE 6/7, Firefox 2, and Safari 2) on the Mac, PC, and the iPhone.
You can use Ta-da List to keep track of…
Thank you notes to write
Restaurants to check out
Household chores for your spouse
Cities you want to visit
Homework assignments
Agenda for the weekly meeting
Famous quotes you don’t want to forget
Things to pack for your trip
People to invite to the party
Points to discuss on the conference call
and whatever you want…
Agility! An Approach to Fight Global Recession
Most of the countries all over the world are going through the phase of economic recession. Many old and big companies have already been brought down on their knees to bite the dust. Many companies as well as countries have become bankrupt or are on the verge of it. Millions and millions of people have lost their jobs. Many people have lost millions and billions of dollars. People in general are scared and fearsome. This is not the first time that the global economy is going through recession and this is also not the last time. There is a pattern involved in it. On an average it is happening after every 8-10 years.
Information Technology industry too takes the impact of global recession and a difference in the average IT investment can be monitored during the times of recession. Analysis of IT investment shows that Information Processing equipment and Software investment increased a modest 5% in 1990 recession before taking a major jump to 15% in 1992. However the 2001 recession, in contrast with the decline in 1990, was much harder on IT spending because there was a great deal of overspending on IT equipment and software in the latter part of 1990s. The need for extra hardware and software for Y2K remediation ended abruptly in 2000. The 2001 recession was somewhat unique in that this huge overhang of excess IT equipment needed to be burned off before investment levels could recover. This intensified the negative impact of the 2001 recession on IT spending. However the current recession bears remarkable similarities to the recession of 1990, which was led by the financial sector. It also bears some similarities in IT spending patterns during the 2001 recession. In either case, over the past 20 years the negative impact on IT spending has never lasted more than two years. Therefore, the analysis shows IT spending will remain weak through 2009, with a recovery in 2010.
IT Agility
A key goal of every IT department is to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver value to the business. To accomplish this, the best long-term trend we have in IT beyond Moore’s law and the power of the Internet is the improvement of IT agility. Increasing IT agility is important because it provides a value innovation and delivery method that harnesses these fundamental advances in infrastructure.
Agile practices enable teams to build less, but return the same value by focusing on early delivery of the features that have the highest business value and not wasting money on the features that don’t.
IT agility is driven by three major innovations: agile development, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Web 2.0 social networks. However, without agility in development and software releases, the innovations of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are elusive.
Agile Process Model
Agile development is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams within an effective governance framework with “just enough” ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders.
The following illustration depicts a typical agile development model.
Agile methods choose to do things in small increments with minimal planning, rather than long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (known as ‘timeboxes’) which typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration is worked on by a team through a full software development cycle, including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing when a working product is demonstrated to stakeholders. This helps to minimize the overall risk, and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. Documentation is produced as required by stakeholders. An iteration may not add enough functionality to warrant releasing the product to market, but the goal is to have an available release (with minimal bugs) at the end of each iteration. Multiple iterations may be required to release a product or new features.
Team composition in an agile project is usually cross-functional and self-organizing without consideration for any existing corporate hierarchy or the corporate roles of team members. Team members normally take responsibility for tasks that deliver the functionality of an iteration. They decide for themselves how they will execute during an iteration.
Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication over written documents, when working in the same location, or in different locations but having video contact daily, communicating by videoconferencing, voice, e-mail etc.
Most agile teams are located in a single open office to facilitate such communication. Team size is typically small (5-9 people) to help make team communication and team collaboration easier. Larger development efforts may be delivered by multiple teams working toward a common goal or different parts of an effort. This may also require a coordination of priorities across teams.
No matter what development disciplines are required, each agile team will contain a customer representative. This person is appointed by stakeholders to act on their behalf and makes a personal commitment to being available for developers to answer mid-iteration problem-domain questions. At the end of each iteration, stakeholders and the customer representative review progress and re-evaluate priorities with a view to optimizing the return on investment and ensuring alignment with customer needs and company goals.
Agile methods emphasize working software as the primary measure of progress. Combined with the preference for face-to-face communication, agile methods usually produce less written documentation than other methods. In an agile project, documentation and other project artifacts all rank equally with working product. Stakeholders are encouraged to prioritize them with other iteration outcomes based exclusively on business value perceived at the beginning of the iteration.
Enterprise agile adoption roadmap
Like any mission-critical systems or initiative, you need a vision and roadmap to steer your adoption and rally the troops. The roadmap for an enterprise to adopt agility is described in the following illustration.
There are three keys to effectively managing this process:
- Work incrementally, in an agile fashion, through the steps and gain proficiency before widespread scaling.
- Develop a vision/roadmap and change backlog with key executives before you attempt to move up to step 3 and beyond.
- Share the vision and roadmap with the entire organization and manage the rollout in a collaborative fashion with complete transparency.
Many of these rollouts have started with a grassroots effort to get to Step 1 and Step 2. With the help of external coaching and parallel tool rollouts, many companies have taken more aggressive, “flash-cut” moves with top-down leadership and investment to jump to step 3 in the roadmap within months.
Flash-cut approaches
Given the pressure and opportunity of this crisis, as well as the increasing number of public proof points showing how large organizations can quickly transition to agile, you might be thinking about your ability to do accelerate your adoption and capture savings in 2009 from your efforts. There are three things to heed while considering this:
- Adopting agile needs complete management buy-in and a true sense of urgency. What is it going to take for your management team to get buy-in to adopt Agile on a major portion of your organization?
- You are going to need a strategic partner to help you manage this organization change effort. I do not know a company that followed the flash-cut approach without an outside coaching or consulting firm. As a result, you will have to budget for this investment and the time to choose and schedule them. These partners will help you build the organization capacity for agile while also supporting the professional development of your middle managers as the organization becomes flatter and leaner.
- This is a whole system change from a world of plan-driven to value-driven ideas. As a result, you will see immediate changes in your process, organization, and technology. This transition will set up a culture of continuous improvement and even drive changes in your overall development and business strategies. To make this transition go well, you are going to need to implement a collaborative project management solution to provide visibility across your development teams.
Conclusion
We don’t know how long or how deep this recession will be. Belt-tightening and staffing cuts almost seem inevitable. You can either reduce costs by just cutting your budget, or you can use this opportunity to make systemic changes in your business. Enterprise IT agility is proven to do that — more so than investments in technology point solutions that only have a point in time savings. Most important, this approach will help ensure the savings from today’s cuts do not create worse problems in the long run.
Guest post by Muhammad Usama Alam, who is a software engineer and web developer with over 8 years of experience in designing and developing business solutions for enterprise. You can follow him on twitter.
SuperSaaS, An Online Scheduling And Reservation System For Your Website
SuperSaaS offers web-based utilities that can be used from any computer connected to the internet without the need to install anything. The first product is Super Schedule, a utility to quickly build a flexible reservation system. What’s special about SuperSaaS is that you do not need to know anything about programming to set these utilities up yourself; you just construct them by picking options from interactive web forms.
You can sign up for an account, the basic version is free. Then build your schedule by simply picking options from a web page and try out the working reservation system, you get a link right away. Put the link on your web site so people can start using it. And you’re done! It is entirely web based, so it runs on any browser and can easily be integrated into your own website.
13 Free Picture Sharing And Image Bookmarking Websites
However you are a designer or developer or technology expert or a regular computer user, you most of the time want to bookmark images you found over the internet for better access in future. This is the post where we are listing out few great free photo sharing and image hosting services, this is an exclusive post for our those readers who want to upload, share or bookmark their photos. But our other readers will also enjoy this post. Don’t forget to bookmark this post for your future reference. This is absolutely a great list of 13 Free Picture Sharing And Image Bookmarking Websites.
You are welcome to share if you know more free picture sharing and image bookmarking websites that our readers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed.
Fotki is a free service for sharing your photos online with friends & family. This is one of the easiest way to share unlimited photos. They also offer free unlimited photo hosting for blogs.
Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely and privately show content to your friends and family, or blog the photos and videos you take with a cameraphone.
MyPicGallery allows you to share pictures from within your galleries, on forums, auctions and personal web sites. You can edit your photos, create photo galleries, share your memories and more.
ImageCave is compatible with all leading web browsers, and requires no additional software to use. Upload image files directly from your computer, or transfer images into your account from a URL from another website!
Hiboox is an easy-to-use free image hosting service for all blog or forum users. It can be used to host, modify and share pics with friends using any imaginable means.
With Smiling Moments you can easily share your photos and videos by sending an invitation through this website to all of your family and friends. They can access your shared photos and videos without registering for an account and without receiving spam email.
Zooomr is a social utility for friends, family and co-workers who want to communicate securely through both photos and text messages in realtime.
Webshot allow you to Store and share 1,000 personal photos + 100 more for each month of membership. You can customize your own homepage. There is an option that you can upload on the go from your mobile phone as well.
Slide is a free photo sharing, image hosting, photo slide show maker. You can also use this service with MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Beebo, Facebook and more…
TinyPic is a photo and video sharing service that lets you easily upload, link, and share your images and videos on MySpace, eBay, Orkut Scrapbooks, blogs, and message boards.
Your free Snapfish account gets you online digital photo printing, free online photo albums, free digital photo sharing services, and fun with photo.
Woophy stands for WOrld Of PHotographY, a website founded by a Dutch collective of photo aficionados and internet designers who believe navigation on internet can be more visual, logical and associative.
This is the fast and easy photo sharing from Google. You can share your photos with friends and family, or explore public photos.
EchoPic Offers Free Image Hosting And Photo Sharing
EchoPic is a photo and image sharing service that lets you easily upload and share your images on your website, blog, or MySpace. The one of the best of this service that there is no limitations and restriction on image size or file type. You also don’t need to register or signup for the service and this is absolutely free.
Thumbizy, An Instant Website Thumbnail Generator
Thumbizy is a powerful & free instant website thumbnail generator that can help you to take snapshot of any website. You will just need to give the url of the website and select the thumbnail size. This is an ajax based web service that will instantly provide you screenshot of your given website.
popuri.us Helps You To Quickly Check Your Site’s Google PageRank, Alexa Rank And More!
popUri.us is a tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking. You can check Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc. as well as social bookmarks like del.icio.us, subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more…
Add Video To Your Website And Build A Video Community At Magnify.Net!
Whether you upload, embed, or invite user contributions, Magnify.net’s platform can power your site’s video experience. The magnifyfree product allows you to gather videos from across the web and build your own video channel for free!
Complete control of your site name, url, page design and CSS, as well as 50% of the advertising impressions delivered to an ad network of your choice.
Features
- Free webpage builder
- Webcam capture
- Video discovery from the most popular video sharing site
- Ten 50mb uploads per week
- “Friending” based social network
- 50/50 ad inventory share
Find Everything About Any Website With Quarkbase
Quarkbase is a free tool to find complete information about a website. You can click on the image below to see the details about SmashingApps.
It is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc.
