Leadership vs. Management

Throughout my career I’ve been fortunate enough to have great managers (and not so great ones) from which I’ve, equally, learned something: from the great ones what true leadership means and what it takes to be a good leader; from the not so great ones I’ve learned what mistakes to avoid. This is what I’d like to share with in this short post, and because I believe quotes are the best way to share the wisdom of ages, I’ll use them extensively.

A Leader Is...
“A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.” — John C. Maxwell
This is one of the many quotes that best define what a true leader is, and what differentiate it from a manager. The true leader is selfless in the pursuit of team’s goals and success, often giving up personal goals and aspirations in the process. Be humble and people will notice your leadership more often than if you’re trying to make them aware of your achievements.

Boldness and Courage
"Courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, confidence, compassion and humility." — John McCain
I don’t think there is better way to say it. Courage is about taking (calculated) risks, going where no one has gone before, opening up new paths and trying new things. A true leader is one who doesn’t fear failing, but rather embraces failure because he/she can learn a lot from it. Leaders are those who not only go outside their comfort zone themselves, but who encourage and help others overcome they fear and do it.

Challenges and Difficulty
"Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal." — Vince Lombardi
Those who think leaders are only born are those who seek excuses all the time; excuses for not trying get better, for not searching to self-improve, for not trying new things. The path to leadership is very hard, that’s why those who succeed being good leaders are special and people around recognize them right away.

Character
"Character makes trust possible, and trust is the foundation of leadership." — John Maxwell
Character is the only attribute a great leader can’t learn. You either have it or not. Enough said.

Communication
"Earn the right to be heard by listening to others. Seek to understand a situation before making judgments about it." — John Maxwell
The art of communication is important not only to leaders. I personally believe that everyone should work on being a communicator to be successful in life. It’s incredible how many things one can achieve just by being able to say the right things; make no mistake though: I’m not talking here about being able to deceive others through carefully crafted words, but rather being able to convey to other what you truly hold in your heart.

There are so many other things to talk about leadership, but I promised to myself to keep this short and concise so I’ll end with two quotes that I love very much:

"The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly." — Jim Rohn

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." — Maya Angelou

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Claudiu Tomescu to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

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Point Alliance Team

Exploring NoSQL database. What are they and how do they work?

Most modern applications use databases to store data in what’s known as a Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). RDBMS have evolved significantly since they were introduced in the 1970’s. They do have some drawbacks with certain types of applications. The relational model is too heavy as it has to parse, lock, log, keep track of buffer pools and spawn a lot of threads. In many types of applications however, RDBMS systems are perfect for the task.

NoSQL is non-relational, distributed with the ability to horizontally scale, high performance and highly scalable.

You would use a RDBMS if you need to have structured data, transactions, ACID capability, and simple or complex aggregations.

You would use NoSQL if you need high read/write throughput and unstructured or semi-structured data. NoSQL databases are usually simpler to implement as you don’t need to have an architect to design a relational model.

NoSQL databases provide schema free storage and allow indexing of individual fields for fast data retrieval. Data is stored in JSON (Binary JSON to be more specific). This means that you can store arrays and arrays inside arrays, making it very flexible for many types of applications.

If we were to build a simple blogging application that used NoSQL as a backend database.
We would need to create a Collection (table) that contains the blog information like Title, Date Published, Content, array of meta tags, array of comments by anonymous users.

When loading a specific blog, you have all the data with one query.

A JavaScript like language is used to query NoSQL databases. If you know JavaScript the syntax is easy to pick up.

An interesting fact about JavaScript: You can now write a complete end to end product using JavaScript. Web Browser and/or Apache Cordova for mobile, back end API with NodeJs, Database system with NoSQL.

What really sets NoSQL apart is the ability to distribute the data to multiple servers known as data sharding. Imagine that you have a multi-terabyte SQL database with millions or billions of rows of data in each table. Querying this much data becomes very expensive and tricky on a RDBMS system. You would need to have the right team with the right skillset and a big server or cluster of servers.

With a NoSQL solution, this is much easier. You would need to buy a bunch of commodity servers with lots of memory, and an initial configuration to shard your data. Your millions and billions of rows of data are now distributed between your physical commodity servers. For example, let’s say that you have 6 servers/virtual machines and 6 billion rows in total.
Once your data sharded each server will contain 1 billion rows of data that it can query. There are no changes to the application, your application still sees all 6 billion rows or data due to the underlying architecture of the NoSQL platform. If this was a RDBMS, it would need to keep track of all 6 billion rows of data.

A NoSQL system can offer a lot of ease when dealing with large data to scale horizontally and a quick start because the relational model does not need to be defined upfront (the application logic defines database model).

Some of the popular NoSQL database servers are MongoDB and CouchBase.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Fetbi Irsat to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

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Point Alliance Team

The internet browser challenge

In early 2001 I embarked on a project to build a centralized line of business application for a customer. The customer had numerous decentralized applications of varying technologies across their divisions globally. In an effort to make faster and better informed decisions and ensure no conflicts of interest occurred between their locations, the customer embarked on building a centralized application to serve their needs. Their chosen technology for any application development was java which required installing java and the application on each user’s desktop. This was not ideal, as there were challenges with managing the various java versions and the applications that used them as well as the IT support required to roll out the application and subsequent updates to each user’s desktop which numbered in the thousands. By this time, developers were also finding they could not build new applications using the latest version of java because installing java updates often broke existing applications. Java wasn’t the only one with this problem either, Microsoft (pre .NET) had similar issues. This was termed “dependency hell” or specifically “DLL hell” and ”JAR hell”.

At this time, internet browsers, although in in their early years of maturity, were showing promise as a platform for business applications. Thus the business case was made to build this customer’s solution as a browser based application. The business case looked at a number of factors for example:

• Reduced IT support costs due to (a) Internet browser installed with the Windows operating system automatically and (b) the line of business application didn’t’ need to be installed on the user’s workstation
• Globally accessible
• Centralized business logic, security and data
• Internet browser supported the level of UI required for the line of business application
• Internet browser standards were supported across multiple browser with the creation of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and HTML 4 became an ISO standard
• Eliminated dependency hell
• Cross platform compatibility

Moving forward to 2014, we have followed a browser compatibility road of ups and downs, twists and turns. Even though leading browser vendors have been involved in the creation of web standards since the W3C was formed, these same vendors often failed to uniformly support those standards. This lack of conformity has caused a great deal of frustration for developers and users alike. Decisions on which browsers and browser versions to support have become critical to a project as those decisions can affect the budget of that project. It’s a decision based on whether the cost of development and testing is too high vs. the number of potential users that would be turned away.

Today, considerations are also needed for supporting mobile devices especially with the movement towards BYOD. Some organizations are even providing tablets instead of computers to their employees. HTML 5 and responsive design standards are starting to show promise for improved cross browser compatibility including mobile device browsers. However, HTML 5 and responsive design aren’t always the answer for some browser-based applications on mobile devices as they are too complex in functionality and too difficult to maneuver on a small screen. Additionally, a mobile device can easily be disconnected from their network (cellular or Wi-Fi) and thus the user could potentially lose any data they were entering into the browser-based application. Native applications installed on the mobile device are proving to be the better way to go for some functions including banking. But the diverse mobile device operating systems and their native development languages are providing challenges in containing IT development and support costs.

Organizations are still needing to contain IT development and support costs. Finding ways to help organizations achieve that goal is critical to helping those organizations stay current in their technology and achieving and maintaining their competitive edge. Decisions are still required to be made on which platforms to support. Do you support tablets and smartphones? Do you support Apple, Google, Microsoft and Blackberry? Which OS versions do you support? The emergence of cross platform application development environments for the major mobile device platforms is beginning to show promise with the ability to build one application that can be installed across multiple device platforms.

As technology advances and standards change, we constantly seem to be in a state of flux, never seeming to reach that goal of full standards compliance and cross platform compatibility. However, today we are definitely closer to achieving those goals than we were even a few years ago which provides better opportunities and fewer challenges for organizations wanting to modernize their older applications and web sites leveraging the newer standards.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Jan Crowe to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,

Point Alliance Team

Ease the pain on testing using modern.ie!

As web developers we need tools to test our web applications across all browsers. If you asked the majority of developers which browser causes more issues on debugging, they would say Internet Explorer (No offense Microsoft). But most companies, specifically the majority of big corporations, use Internet Explorer because Microsoft is the only one that offers the most robust enterprise deployment management tools of any browser vendor. Microsoft touted research conducted by Forrester that said that 96 percent of businesses standardize on a single browser because it saves them money.

As web developers, we know older versions of Internet Explorer are still lingering out there, so what do we do now? Aside from installing at least three browsers from different vendors on our PC to test cross browser compatibility, we also still need to test on different versions of IE. Finally, in early 2013, Microsoft launched “modern.ie” to help developers spend more time on innovating versus more time on testing.

The Modern.ie website has a collection of free tools and resources for developers that can be downloaded from the website. The most useful tools that I personally like are the Test VMs for different IE versions.

All the Test Virtual Machines for Internet Explorer are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. These VM’s are a real time saver. You can download all the RAR files that are appropriate for your testing needs and all of them can be loaded in one PC.



You will be surprised, that you can even download a test VM for Internet explorer 6, running in XP!



Another useful free tool that I use from modern.ie is the “Site Scan”. As the name suggest, it scans your site for common coding problems. Just type in the URL on the given input field, and click on “Scan”. You can also download the open source version in GitHub.



This tool will help detect compatibility problems on IE that prevent users from getting a better experience in their web apps. After entering the desired URL for site scan, it will produce results indicating a check mark that means pass or “!” for suggested enhancements.



So now it's been a year since the website modern.ie was launched and I would agree that it probably did saved a million of development hours for web developers out there for testing web sites using the free tools. Less time testing ! more time coding!

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Eleanor Boado to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

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Point Alliance Team

MVC Bundling

The amount of style sheets and JavaScript files included with a website these days is staggering. As you develop solutions, it is becoming important to be aware of the amount of different style sheets and JavaScript files you are forcing the user to download on each request. A simple way of limiting the amount of these requests, while keeping your code separated in a logical way, is to implement bundling in your MVC Project.

If you have 12 different CSS files and 8 different JavaScript files in your solution, it’s easy to combine these into two different requests. In your App_Start folder, create a new class called BundleConfig. Within the class, create a public static void method called RegisterBundles() which will accept a BundleCollection object as a parameter. You then will add a ScriptBundle collection, and a StyleBundle collection to the BundleCollection.

See example below.



Now, in your Application_Start() method within the Global.asax file, you call your bundling provider. A good idea is to enable optimizations only when building in release mode. When optimizations are enabled, the bundle will automatically combine each ScriptBundle and StyleBundle into one request, as well as minify each result.



The last step is to modify your _layout.cshtml file to reference the bundles. In the BundleConfig file that we created, we created a name for each of the ScriptBundle and StyleBundles. You reference these in your layout using the following format.



That’s it! You have now optimized your website, limiting the amount of requests done per page per user while allowing separation of your style sheets and scripts during development.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Kevin Doig to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

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Point Alliance Team

Preventing Data Leakage with SharePoint and Microsoft IRM

For many organizations, SharePoint has become the de facto successor to the Windows File System for managing documents. It offers many features beyond the Windows File System, including the capacity to manage documents through the entire lifecycle from draft, to approval, publication, archival, and finally, disposal. Additional features include access control and version control.

These features make SharePoint a formidable document management platform. However, in today’s security conscious world, companies ask for additional features to prevent data leakage. Reasons include preventing users, even authorized editors, from being able to download documents to thumb drives, or to email documents, to name a few.

This is where Microsoft Information Rights Management technology comes in. Microsoft IRM can be integrated into SharePoint to super-charge its security horsepower. Documents (for example, Word, Excel, or PDF) added to SharePoint are automatically encrypted using state-of-the-art encryption technology. While documents must be downloaded to the user’s computer in order to view the document (in a Word client, for example), it is decrypted on the fly in a process where the document communicates with the Rights Management Server, and provides only the rights, the user is permitted to have, for example, to read, but not print or copy/paste. These rights travel with the document. As such, IRM protected documents downloaded to a thumb drive, for example, are unreadable and useless, when opened outside the organization.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Suthan Sivapatham to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

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Point Alliance Team

Teamwork, what is it good for?

From sending a satellite into space to creating the next mobile app, every extreme goal or dream requires great teams and great teamwork. Without teams that have great chemistry, a sense of responsibility and accountability, no project will be a success.

So how do great teams operate? They have a code of honor!

What is a code of honor? For you gamers out there, I’m not referring to the third person shooter game. A team's code of honor is a set of rules and guidelines we put together as a team to make sure the right expectation is set and there are no surprises.

Why do we need a code of honor?

1. Develop a sense of accountability,
2. Feeling of support,
3. Powerful statement of who you are and what you stand for,
4. It defines you and your goals

When pressure is high, emotions tend to go up and intelligence drops. Having a code of honor will help the team work through this difficult time and guide them to success.

Let’s think of our troops for example. When the troops are under fire, the only thing they have on their mind is not to get shot. If it wasn’t for the code of honor, every man would be for themselves. Instead they follow a certain protocol to survive. The same goes for a project and the team. The code of honor should have line items pertaining to situations when you have a lot on your plate and can’t finish a task, work delegation, attending meetings, training, rolls and responsibilities, etc. This will help build a sense of accountability within the team. The team can refer to these guidelines and know that other team members are there to support them. They will see that the team is trying to achieve one goal; one mission.

It is important to understand that with keeping the team’s mission as our primary focus, each team member’s needs second, and our own needs third; each team member’s needs will be met. Great team members always ask what they can do for their team rather than what their team could do for them.

Just like a sports team, when you are in a project team you need to be wearing the team’s name in front of your shirt and your own name in the back. Your mission is to win and you are all working together to get to this goal. You can have a team of champions or you can have a championship team. There is a difference between the two.

I strongly recommend reading "Team code of honor" by Blair Singer. It’s one book that all great teams need to read and understand.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Sam Vaghefi to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

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Point Alliance Team