Intranet: Connectivity At Its Best

Internet has flooded the world with information and it has been consistently adding new dimensions to our lives by empowering it with innumerable virtual features and functionalities. On the other hand, Intranet has redefined the way people connect and disseminate information on a corporate level. Lately, Intranet development has emerged as the new buzz word among corporate houses across the world. They have been looking forward to get the best in information sharing platform – for their employees. Over a period of time, intranet software has also developed a lot. New software come empowered with latest tools and features. In fact, most of the tools and features have been borrowed from the Internet.

A well conceptualized intranet design offers the best in features and functionalities. New intranet platforms offer innovative ways of information sharing. Now, employees can write blogs and participate in online discussions. In fact, all the leading news websites and wiki websites can be incorporated into an intranet interface.

Do you really want an Intranet Installation?

If you are toying with the idea of having an intranet application in your organisation, you must be clear about the costs incurred and the usage of this software. Intranet development is not a child’s play but it needs a lot of time and effort to design and come up with the user friendly application which is useful for your business requirements.

The professional agency who is supposed to install the intranet software in your organisation will sit with you and work day and night to analyse the user specific model and the proposed intranet design and execute it with utmost perfection. And needless to add, all of this effort will not come cheap, this will certainly cost a bomb and you should be ready to part with a good amount of your money. You need to do a self analysis of your business model to know the specific intranet requirement in your business before going for intranet installation. It should not come as "applying technology without introspection"

The year of AJAX, REST services, and Alpha Five

Once again we find ourselves nestled in the sweet pocket between Christmas and New Year's. The pre-holiday hustle is behind us. The focus is on friends, family, and the future. Our lives feel a little slower, cozier, and less stressful.

As 2009 and the decade come to a close, we exhale, reflect on the year past, and wonder what the new year will bring. I believe two things are certain. One, 2010 will be a better year, economically, for America and the world. I'm not expecting a return to boom times, but the worst appears to be over.

And two: 2010 will be the year of AJAX, REST services, and Alpha Five. I imagine many of you are nodding in agreement regarding AJAX and RESTful interfaces, and thinking I'm a little overzealous in including Alpha Five among 2010's big trends. Maybe I am. But I have some good company.

That would be Martin Heller, who writes the Strategic Developer blog for InfoWorld. In his latest post, Heller reveals he has decided to make a strategic commitment to AJAX and REST services.

The development platform he has chosen? Alpha Five Version 10. Needless to say, after I first read Martin's column, I double-checked my eggnog to make sure it wasn't spiked. (It was, but I had only just started sipping it.)

Those who know Heller know he is an exceptional and uncompromising programmer. He's covered application development for several decades, and speaks everything from assembler to JavaScript and everything in between.

For him to choose Alpha Five to build AJAX- and REST-powered cloud-based apps is a high honor, and speaks volumes about the appropriateness (and timeliness) of our investment in Version 10's Codeless AJAX technology.

As Martin says in his current column, he's made such a commitment only a few times over the course of the industry's history: when the existing development paradigm appears to have reached its end of life when a fork in the developer road appears when the old is about to be eclipsed by something new and greater.

We've reached just such a tipping point for the industry, as the considerable financial, operational, and user benefits of rich Internet business applications are becoming available to any business, regardless of size.

And for developers, Alpha Five Version 10 is a complimentary tipping point, giving you the the opportunity to earn and build more of these next-generation apps in less time, with less pain.

You don't get fired for choosing Microsoft or Java or some other conservative platform. But you don't get ahead, either. There are times when the unconventional path is actually the smarter direction. As Martin writes in his blog, one such time for him was when he decided to commit to Windows development when many others thought OS/2 or DOS would reign.

Today that unconventional path is Alpha Five Version 10, when you consider where the IT world is going. It's going to the cloud. It's going to be powered by AJAX, in the main. And it's going to be integrated RESTfully.

If Alpha Five Version 10 has the muscle to power apps for an experienced enterprise developer (and critic) such as Martin Heller, it's certainly worthy of consideration and a trial download by anyone now using any other top-tier development tool, language, or platform. I think it's fair to say that you might be doing yourself, your business, your users, and customers a disservice if you don't give A5V10 a serious spin.