When you begin a search to upgrade your website or CMS, there are loads of options and frameworks which will ultimately mold and give shape to your Digital Experience, what you will eventually become.

Drupal is one such free and open source content management framework written in PHP, which web developers work on.

There are a few things a procurement manager looks into when taking in a team to change the current technologies, but many a time the question arises as to “What are the roles of a Drupal developer”?

Mostly for organizations that work to help augment your staffing needs, will migrate your website to Drupal if it is not already built with it.The team might use a new or fresh Drupal install or use a distribution and make it exactly like the organization wants it.

The Publishing industry biggies mostly use Drupal behind their sites.

“What does Drupal do”?

According to the needs of the platform, drupal developers make use of the configuration pages of the Drupal to develop functionalities like polls or blogs or internal systems like project submission areas.

When a content is published online in a leading publishing company, it goes through many checks and reviews before it is approved to be Published. It is known as the Workbench suite, it provides authors, editors, and publishers with a unified interface for managing content relevant to them. It allows people to focus on content because after all, that is what your employees are supposed to so when you are a Publishing entity.

Mostly, all of this can be done by click and drag, drop and save. So why the hype? Well, a skilled Drupal developer and architect knows which modules to use for the functionalities, and they know how to make or customize one to suit the requirements, even if they have not used it before. They configure to make a workable site.

That is the introduction to a Drupal developer’s profile. This is like making a house, before choosing the floor type and wallpaper you choose the number of floors the walls, rooms and that is why an experienced Drupal developer is known as a Drupal Architect. And there is a lot to learn on the path to becoming a Drupal Architect.

You want to let us know what your content would be like, how the end user would consume the content, how it would interact with other third party applications. How the performance of your website is in-tune with the experience you want to provide to your consumers. How you would integrate with Social platforms, how would your fetched data look from other website. How you would increase the performance to get in line with the newest versions that match with other modules made for the latest versions.

What does the pack comprise of?

A Site builder is the one who creates functionality with plugging and configuring various modules, a Developer writes custom modules to make new ones and a Themer makes awesome designs that act as the face of the project.

The Drupal community follows a best practices standard with Drupal Website Building.

In short a Drupal development team is the perfect package for an all-in development.

Image Courtesy

Inspirations

What do you mean by Single Sign On? Why do we use it? When do we use it?

Single Sign On is an authentication service that allows users to use one set of credentials i.e(username and password) to login to multiple sites. For example you are creating a main website for an university and there are ‘n’ number of websites for ‘n’ number of departments in the same university. You can login to main website, that will allow you to login to the respective department sites as well.

For SSO, there are two main parts namely, IDP (Identity Provider) and SP (Service Provider).

Configuration of SimpleSAMLphp on Drupal 8 may vary according to IDP such as Shibboleth 1.3, A-Select, CAS, OpenID, WS-Federation or OAuth.

Relevant: Configuration Management in Drupal 8 vs 7

Here we going to see how to setup SSO using SimpleSAMLphp using Shibboleth in Drupal 8.

Requirements:

1. SimpleSAMLphp library (Latest Version is recommended. My version in simplesamlphp-1.14.8).
2. Drupal 8 (Latest Version).
3. SimpleSAMLPhp_auth module (https://www.drupal.org/project/simplesamlphp_auth).

SimpleSAMLphp configurations:

 For the site which is acting as the Service Provider, following are the configurations that need to be done.

1. Download the SimpleSAMLphp library from (https://simplesamlphp.org/download).
2. Put the folder in the level of your docroot.
3. In docroot directory, create a symbolic link (named simplesaml) that points to simplesamlphp-1.14.8/www directory in the DRUPAL_ROOT directory.

4. Command to create symbolic link is :

   ln -s simplesamlphp-1.14.8/www ./simplesaml (here my version is simplesamlphp-1.14.8)

5. To generate certificates, create cert folder inside the simplesamlphp-1.14.8 folder as (DRUPAL_ROOT/simplesamlphp-1.14.8/cert)

6. Run the following command inside the cert folder from terminal:

    openssl req -new -x509 -days 3652 -nodes -out saml.crt -keyout saml.pem

7. It will create two files saml.crt and saml.pem.
8. Configure config.php which will be inside DRUPAL_ROOT/simplesamlphp-1.14.8/config/config.php

9.  

   • Change the ‘store.type’ as ‘sql’ 
   • ‘store.sql.dsn’ as ‘mysql:host=localhost;dbname=db_name’ here the host will differ according to your server and dbname will be the your database name.
   • 'Store.sql.username' as ‘server database user_name’
   • 'Store.sql.password' as ‘server database password’
   • Enable this functionality 'enable.saml20-idp' => true, this setting is to receive the IDP request.
   • Change the ‘auth.adminpassword’, ‘technicalcontact_name’, ‘technicalcontact_email’ as per your requirement.
   • Add this snippet after config = array(); (i.e) at the last line. 
         $config['baseurlpath'] = 'http://'. $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] .'/simplesaml/'; (its mandatory).
   • After this step you can hit the above url.e.g:(example.com/simplesaml)
   • Login as admin and type the password which you have assigned to ‘auth.adminpassword’ and the screen will look like the image below:
   • Goto Federation Tab and copy the SAML 2.0 SP Metadata and send it to the Identity Provider site administrator. SAML 2.0 SP Metadata will look like:

10. Paste the IDP metadata which you will receive from your IDP Provider inside /simplesamlphp/metadata/saml20-idp-remote.php. SAML 2.0 IDP metadata will look like:
11.  Now configure the authsource.php inside config folder as shown, inside default-sp array you need to write the following code:

Drupal Configuration:

1. Download the Simplesamlphp_auth module.
2. Run composer drupal update command so that all the library required for simplesamlphp_auth module gets downloaded in the docroot/vendor folder.
3. Enable the module.
4. Navigate to Administration > Configuration > People > Simplesamlphp_auth (http://yoursite/admin/config/people/simplesamlphp_auth) 

   • Basic Settings: tick the  Activate authentication via SimpleSAMLphp. This should be checked to activate the simplesamlphp integration with Drupal.

      

   • Local Authentication:

      

   • User Info and Syncing:

      

5. Add the following snippet to .htaccess
6. After saving the configuration add the following snippet in settings.php. It is mandatory

Now hit example.com/saml_login (SP Site) it should redirect to your (IDP Site)url. After redirecting to the site which is set as IDP, you need to login using (name and password).Hit the Sign in button,you will be again redirected to your (SP Site).Now if you go to you IDP Site you can see that you are logged in to that site too.

This is what SimpleSAMLPhp all about.

Related: 

Configure Apache Solr with Drupal for better content search

Building Configuration Form in Drupal 8

Configuring Memcache with Drupal 8 to reduce database load

The need to cut down costs and increase efficiency in operations has become the need of the hour. Technological improvements are driving Digital Transitions and business decisions are becoming the point of change to make or break your company's history.

Large companies often embark on pilot projects to judge out whether increasing in-house capabilities will be something practically possible. In today’s world, falling behind the curve can lead to a disaster. Organizations rely on legacy systems which are outdated and could cripple a system and that is when outside help comes into play.

The best systems which I have come across that large firms prefer is one of staff augmentation - it gives you additional skills, same team without shouldering the costs of nurturing full time employees and reduced risks of outsourcing a whole goddamn project.

Companies may ramp up and down to adjust with changing demand. Ensure that the company you are hiring to complement your in house staff gives you a taste of their task with a two week or so pilot project so that you understand each other and check whether this works for you.

A typical technology project should involve these :

Phase 1 : Planning & Strategy Development

The augmentation team studies the client brief, understands end results, problems and ensure that right goals are set, as that would build a strong foundation for the project and a detailed brief would be a good checklist for future. 

Planning would also include gathering information from the client, reviewing content, creating a project schedule along with timelines. Since the team becomes a part of your in-house team they discuss strategies and timeline as that would help them to map project’s progress. A well defined strategy would include performance goals, user experience creations, analytics and insights.

Phase 2 : Budget & Resource Allocation

After the strategy is in place, the parent company will use it to understand the budget in terms of time that will be taken to complete the project and the resources which are being utilized to do each task.

At this stage, accurate costing and resource allocation becomes essential. Time is of an essence, thus, clear expectations should be drawn in terms of time allocation, and it should be accounted from both the sides. Not taking into account the time required by the client's team can be a key contributor in web projects going over budget. A well defined scope of work and a good understating of resources being used will help you set a realistic budget.

Phase 3 : Designing The Concept

A design speaks a lot about the work. Design includes style, tone, user interaction, and user interface. Once the visual concept is agreed upon, the design is applied. A well designed visual concept would result in a good user experience. Which will of course depend upon your requirement.

Phase 4: Development

The team - in house plus outsourced needs to have all in place, gather elements from the prototype and implement them to make a functional project.

Phase 5: Testing & Launch

Testing is required to ensure the functionality of the website and to detect compatible issues, if any. Tests will be conducted to ensure that the website is compatible with other browsers. After testing is done, the site will be hosted and launched.

While building a web project, it becomes easier if there is a process to follow and these guidelines will help you work better by keeping you focussed on each stage. The process flow for developing a web project remain the same: learn, plan, design, develop and launch.

Just make sure that while selecting a vendor, you choose and get settled upon the one you can trust to, who takes the time to understand your goal, timeframe and deliver the tangible result.

Image Courtesy : https://www.xpandcorp.com/images/staff.jpg

Once again we hop on the journey to create a series of articles and this time we take on the challenge to deal with the topic DX - Digital Experience. We know about it but a very few speak about it. You get promised to get it delivered, but a lot of elements get left out in the process to seek and find.

More often than you realize Digital Experience delivery becomes a less important “thing” than other preferred things that gets decided during procurement like pricing and revenue optimization.

We fail to realize that an engaging, synonymous digital experience holds the key to the code of holding your consumers with you. is the key to effective engagement in today’s integrated digital world. Companies are able to customize digital experiences for their employees with personalized, targeted content for fully connecting with customers, coworkers and Business Partners in the most powerful and productive way.

Digital experience solutions empower users with instant access to the information they need — when they need it. Accessibility is based on the user profile and is supported by all device types. The digital experience yields greater overall organizational efficiencies from target marketing to anticipating customer issues, to breaking down communication barriers, and more.

What does Digital Experience mean?

For your people

Your employees and others who contribute to your content go through the hassle to create, edit, analyse that goes on to get displayed on the screens worldwide in all kinds of devices. You might have a number of platforms and a lot of contributors for all, and there are times when an article created on one platform needs to be put on another, what do you do then? You ask them to recreate. Does that go smoothly for them? No.

Just like how your end users need a digital experience designed and customized just for them, so do your employees. The authoring experience should be tailor made for them so that it is hassle-free and they concentrate on what they do best, to create.

Digital experience for your employees mean how well you can communicate, how seamlessly you can use analytics tools for all of your websites and how easily can consumers interact with content that is on display with social sharing and mobile web delivery.

For you

Most Publishing establishment that runs web platforms are large with lots and lots of pages and content running live. There are business decisions that need to come into action, there are questions your resource team asks you.

But are you able to evaluate what is it, that is best for your business? Should you migrate? Should you use the current CMS? Should there be customizations? Does that reduce manual working time? 

For your consumers

Your consumers are the easiest chunk of people to please, you know what they want. An intuitive and immersive experience that is same for whatever screen they use. And isn’t that is one of the things that your vendor promises you?

Because Digital experience is fundamental to everyone’s everyday life, we will talk about the things that fall under this category the next time. What makes up “Digital Experience”?

If you like this, you might want to check out this series about Cloud

Image Courtesies : http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/solutions/digital-marketing/digital-analytics/images/bg-analytics-forrester-web-analytics-940x364.jpg

http://www.investirparaviver.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Contas-Digitais.jpg

https://www-01.ibm.com/software/collaboration/digitalexperience/img/XDX_Landing_5roles_940x211px.png

http://www.sociallyawareblog.com/files/2014/06/20-BN.jpg

http://iwriten.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Effects-of-Technology-on-…

Happy new year!

2016 has been quite an year with all the hustle bustle around, lots of changes on its way to the next year. We recently celebrated Christmas with Joy and welcome 2017 whole heartedly.

We did a lot of articles, hands on trainings session and hope to bring more things to learn. We wrote about Cloud, Big Data and a lot about Drupal 8 including Migration and developer productivity.

Here are some of the most viewed and discussed posts from the past year. We have made a list for you so that it gets easy and you can also have access to other related posts.

1. How to send mail programmatically in Drupal 8

Sometime it is required that emails be sent on certain events e.g. for a blog website or a news site. We may need to send email after creating new article or blog or in case of e-commerce site. We might need to send confirmation mail after successful completion of an order.

This article is written by Aditya it shows us how we can use Mail API in Drupal 8 programmatically for sending emails.

2. Drupal 8: How to create a custom block programmatically

This article by Jaywant tells us the steps to follow to create a custom block in Drupal 8

In Drupal 8 Blocks are made up of two separate API. Block Plugin API, is a reusable API and Block Entity API, use for block placement and visibility control.

3. How to create Custom Rest Resources for POST methods in Drupal 8

One of the biggest changes in Drupal 8 is the integration of Rest services in the core. With use of Views it become very easy to create RESTful Services.

But there are certain situations when you need to create your own custom REST Resources. There are documentations available for creating a GET request using Views and using custom module. However there isn’t much documentation available for creating Rest Resources for POST methods.

In this article Malabya shared, how to create a REST Resource for POST methods.

4. How to Create Breadcrumb in Drupal 8

This post tells us how to create breadcrumb in Drupal 8. In Drupal 8, service is introduced as new concept to decouple reusable functionality.

Also to make these services pluggable and replaceable by registering them with a service container. For a developer, services are used to perform operations like accessing the database or sending an e-mail

5. Drupal 8 Commerce is on the Way! DrupalCon New Orleans 2016

Drupal commerce module to Drupal community, which took drupal to a different level in the CMS world.

Commerce 2.x which is the Drupal 8 version of drupal commerce. As like any other drupal developer / architect, Rakesh says “I  am also excited about Commerce 2.x”

6. How to build your Drupal 8 theme using Bootstrap & Less

This tute by looks into initiating your own custom theme using Drupal’s Bootstrap base theme. The Drupal Bootstrap base theme bridges the gap between Drupal and Bootstrap framework.

According to the 2016 RightScale State of the Cloud Report it is found that AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and IBM SoftLayer are among the top public cloud providers.

Projections from leading technology research company, Gartner, states that the public cloud market is expected to grow more than 17% by the end of 2016 to over $208 billion.

We have been writing a series of articles, one among which states the various cloud service layers. Among the three the ones that are most popular cloud services are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), this offers virtual computing resources via the internet, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), this presents a platform to make, run, and manage applications.

Going for one Service over another will depend upon what the customer specifically needs and what supporting infrastructure or staff they have or why they need the service at all. It is quite common that large organizations have different vendors or service providers of the same field who have designated separate tasks to them.

The hotshots of the Publishing industry seems to have sided with AWS, Guardian for one says “Two or three years ago, before we were ready to move to AWS, we had to refresh the hardware in our data centres,” said Graham Tackley, director of architecture at The Guardian, speaking at the AWS Summit in London today. “We decided to build our own private cloud based on OpenStack. I would say it was a complete and total disaster. We invested a huge amount of effort.”

Writing for The Guardian's website in 2013, senior systems integrator, Stephen Gran, said OpenStack was chosen for the “best mix of features and developer mindshare”. “It has an EC2 API that is complete enough for our use cases, and offers an awful lot of flexibility in the native API and in deployment strategies,” he said.

How will you choose a service provider for Cloud Services?

There are a few things to consider, we have taken the most popular three of the market.

Evaluation Criteria

• Baseline Criteria and Computation

AWS offers 40 max CPUs, Ma memory upto 24 GB, credit for 1+ minute downtime, 30% max credits, and uptime SLA 99.95%. Google offers 32 CPUS and memory upto 208 GB, Credits for 5+ consecutive minutes downtime, monthly credits up to 50% and 99.95% uptime SLA. Azure provides 32 CPUs and 448 GB memory, credits for 1+ minute downtime, monthly credits up to 25% and 99.95% uptime SLA same for all three.

• Storage and Database

Azure offers archive storage, block storage, file storage, objecti storage and physical data transport which is offered by Azure as well. Google offers archive storage, block storage, file storage, object storage

• Security and Access

AWS offers AD as a service, Certificate Management, Dedicated HSM, IAM, Key Storage and Management, Security Assessment, Web Firewall. Google offers IAM and Azure for AD as a service, IAM,  Key Storage and Management and Security Assessment

• Service Offerings and Network

AWS’s core computational services include autoscaling which Azure offers as well, additionally AWS offers Dedicated Hosts(virtual), Temporary VMs while Google Cloud Platform offers Autoscaling, Customizable VMs and Temporary VMs

• Data Analytics and Applications

AWS and Azure offers data and analytics services like Batch data pipelines, Machine learning, search and stream processing, while Google Cloud platform provides Batch data pipelines, Machine Learning and Stream Processing.

• Price and Billing

The pricing totally depends upon use case scenarios. These are the areas where the decision has to be made. Whatever seems promising.

We have tried to paint a picture with the comparison metrics as we have spoken above, the competition is strong and with a focus on better service and ways to attract customers, pricing is getting down and becoming affordable. There are also a lot of other providers in market.

With this we end the series of Cloud Computing for Publishers.

Further reads : Rightscale

http://cloudacademy.com/blog/public-cloud-war-aws-vs-azure-vs-google/

They will tell you that their mission is to take excellence in support and customer experience to the next level. They will promise and that will have words like scalability and agility in that. But does that work for you?

We know you must have gone through enough projects over time so to be able to understand and list out the areas that you should focus on before you take on a new vendor or switch from one to another.

What exactly do you look for while selecting a vendor?

Size

Does the size of an organization really matter? You might get hold of a local 10 people company where they wholeheartedly work for your project. They are enthusiastic, hardworking and waiting for opportunities from someone like you. You can hire them for trying out a long term project as a test case.

Generally you meet the CEO, he shows you the office, you meet the team they explain you things with jargons you probably miss, but then you get a mail from the 300 people company you had been working with who come in a quite expensive and are mostly impersonal. They use their standard email formats and it takes a lot of time to get things done.

And then you find the ones that come in between these both, they have more than a few people to work with, they are structured and they know their bit. Mostly it's these kinds of companies that seems to work with the most companies looking to get their work done.

Experience

How much work a company has done can give you a rough idea of the experience they have, the number of years is mostly a secondary factor. A case study or examples of the work they have done can show you actually what they are capable of.

Their websites might show you content that speaks volumes about the work they have done, but always for sure look into the previous experience and profiles of developers. Work out with them to run a test, do they go ahead and walk the extra mile?

References

Who has the company worked for? Do they have the kind of expertise you are looking for?

Talk to someone from a former project they have worked on, know about the team you are evaluating about. They will of course come with recommendations and references, check with them

Location

With project management tools and remote options becoming easier and of a lower cost than onsite ones, you should seriously consider hiring a remote team.

No resource drainage and a lot of revenue gets saved that you can put into better use. You do not have to worry about proving laptops or tea or coffee or sharing office space.

Management

How the company or the team that you would work with can make or break your project. Communication is the key to anything good.

While productive and quality work is a very necessary element when you outsource a part of your project, management of that work goes hand in hand.

Employees

Happy employees will have a lot less to complain and where positivity is high so is productivity, work will get done faster and changes will happen quicker.

Find out how the employees are rated, how they are treated, will give you an idea about how your project will be handed. It is nothing extraordinarily different in there.

Open Source Contribution Score

If your company deals in open source or you are into using FOSS, make sure to check their contributions. That speaks volumes.

May be at times experience might fall short of what you were expecting but if they score a goal here, it is of worth to give it a shot.

How does the industry speak of them?

Mostly companies who deal and work with FOSS need to have an online presence in the community, there are companies who are spoken highly of because they know the value of collaboration.

They give back, and they have a diverse range of tasks added to their profile as a badge of honour. Generally there will be founders who speak fondly about them and founding companies who showcase their tasks. What more to be vouched by the very people who own something that they work in.

With every vendor you will find it works like the Yin-Yang, there will be something good in the bad and something bad in the good. Your focus should always be work, but of course you will need to find what is worth compromising for. Check out if you still have doubts. Do not miss the next, we get into the nitty gritties of CMS for your website, cuz its all about content!

Migration has now become much easier in Drupal 8 compared to other previous Drupal versions. Because migration modules are in Drupal 8 core now, and it gives more flexibility to migrate the data into Drupal 8 from the previous Drupal 6 and 7 versions.  

User Migration in Drupal8 With migrate_source_csv Plugin.

In that, user migration is very important, especially if you are migrating from a Legacy system. For that, we are having a simple solution to get the users details as CSV file from the legacy system and migrate to Drupal 8. Here we are going to do the user migration from a CSV file. For doing that we need to do the following steps.

Step 1. Install the Contributed Modules required for the Migration.

We need to install Migrate Tools, Migrate Plus, Migrate Source CSV. By using drush and typing following you can install the module.

drush en migrate_tools -y 
drush en migrate_source_csv -y 

Step 2. Prepare the CSV file contains the User's data.

Here our CSV is...

Step 3. Create the Migrate configuration file and import the configuration

Create the migrate configuration files as like the following,

In migration, There are three things are the very important source, process, and destination.

Navigate to Administration > Configuration > Development > Synchronize (admin/config/development/configuration/single/import), select Migration under Configuration type and enter our migrate configuration into the Paste your configuration here window (note the absolute path to the .csv file) , and click import button.

Step 4. Go to terminal and run the following Drush commands.

  drush ms 
  drush mi demo_user_migration

No you can go back to the site and see the users by going to the path "admin/people"

Note:- When the Legacy users trying to log in, Force them to reset their passwords.

Please read more about password...https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/api/migrate-api/migrate-destination-entityuser

Other Resources : https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/upgrade/using-the-migrate-source-csv-plugin

FAQ:- Drupal 8 User Migration csv, How to add multiple role to a user?

Here our CSV is...

Create the migrate configuration files as like the following,

If you need any help to Upgrade Drupal 7 to 8, Feel Free to Talk to Us for your Enterprises

A great percentage of users utilize tablets and smartphones to access news and other information as compared to desktops and laptop computers. This makes it essential for a media companies to have an appropriate layout for both tablet and smartphone users, so as to not miss out on potential and existing consumers. 

A well designed website should allow an user to easily search the website for what he/she is looking for. But making a compact and yet readable version of a complex website which media companies have, is a challenge. Mobile apps and mobile friendly website may look similar at first glance and choosing between the two or both depends on a number of factors like target audience, purpose, required features etc.

Before determining the right one for your company, you should evaluate the key differences between the two. A mobile friendly website contains the same content as the desktop version, it consists of the browser-based HTML pages accessed over the internet. The distinguishing characteristic from a desktop version of the size is that elements are placed in way to make it readable to the user in a smaller screen. Responsive web design is becoming a standard for new websites and also an important feature. The mobile friendly site can display the same content as on the desktop version, complete with text, images and videos if any. Additional features like click-to-call or location mapping can be added to the mobile friendly website.

Apps are applications downloaded and installed on to the handheld device, it is not rendered with a browser. Users visit app stores in order to find and download the app they are looking for. The app can pull data from the internet, similar to a website or it may download content so that it can be viewed without accessing the internet. 

If the primary goal is to market or publish communications and articles, a mobile friendly /responsive website is going to make better sense is should be the first priority to reach out the handheld device users. A mobile friendly website has broader accessibility, compatibility and is cost effective as compared to an app.

Let us consider some key advantages of a mobile friendly website:

• Mobile websites are instantly available to users via browsers across a range of devices. Even a basic phone with access to internet can access a mobile friendly website. Apps on the other hand require particular system specifications and cannot run on devices apart from smartphones with the required features. Also, not all users are going to download apps for a specific media publication company and would prefer apps that congregate and compile news altogether for them - a significant barrier between initial engagement and action/conversion. It has a broader reach as compared to an app.
• Mobile websites can be upgraded instantly without asking users for permissions. It is more dynamic in terms of flexibility to update content. Changes done on a website are immediately visible on the mobile site too. Apps update according to the user’s preference and may need user’s permission.
• Finding a mobile website or a website in general is easier than finding an app. This is because of SEO and of course google search. More conversions happen via searches as compared to apps. It has a broader reach as compared to an app.
• It is easy to share content from mobile websites by simply copying the url or the shareable link which might sometimes not be available for all the types of data on an app. Copying any type content from a website is a feature available in all smartphones and handheld devices.
• Mobile websites cannot be deleted, they are always available. According to a recent research, the shelf-life of an app is pretty short (30 days), so unless the app is something truly unique and/or useful to the user, chances are that he/she will eventually delete it for more space.
• With the trend of responsive websites, mobile friendly websites are cost effective and easier to develop as compared to a mobile app. Also the investments considering the troubleshooting, maintenance and updates, it is easier and more cost effective in the case of a mobile website.

So many negative points about mobile app? Do you really need one? Let us consider when a mobile app makes sense.

• User interactivity: when you want the user to heavily interact with a particular set of information you are displaying, For eg: games, quizzes etc. apps make more sense.
• For regular users when you want to provide them with personalized data.
• When you want to provide the user with an option of saving content to the device or provide access during unavailability of an internet connection.
• If you are providing the user with data that needs complex calculations, data manipulation, reports etc.
• Access to camera.

Conclusion: The app vs web remains a confusing consideration for many organizations seeking to establish a mobile presence. If your goals are marketing driven or if the aim is to deliver content to a wide range of audience, which is easily maintained and easy to share between users, a mobile friendly website is a better option.

On the other hand, to provide a unique user experience with the use of specific programs and features like access to camera, saving content, offline access, a mobile app is a better choice. Plenty of organizations have both mobile friendly website and apps.

Most publishing enterprises are considering a Digital Transformation initiative and vendors across the world are mushrooming to take the leap from baby steps to actually helping out organizations in need. If the shot hits the bull’s eye you get to score, get nice commendations and all is good to go.

Companies these days are gearing to open up digitally evolved and advanced roles, as consumers are shifting focus from paper to the web. A research by MIT Sloan finds that despite the proliferation of digital roles and responsibilities, most executives recognize that their companies are not adequately preparing for the industry disruptions they expect to emerge from digital trends. Nearly 90% of respondents to a 2015 global survey of managers and executives conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte anticipate that their industries will be disrupted by digital trends to a great or moderate extent, but only 44% say their organizations are adequately preparing for the disruptions to come.

With terms like deliverability, scalability and user experience becoming the core areas of focus for online businesses and especially digital partners, business leaders want IT to work hand in hand with business, to give data driven predictions, take results on the same and move towards the path of continuous growth.

There are a lot of things to weigh on the scale, and to decide which could be sacrificed for the other.

Involvement Vs Output

How much involvement needs to be there also matters about how complex your system is going to be. The more the complexity the more the involvement might happen as there are a lot of factors that would need to be taken care of.  

cdn.pixabay.com

On the other hand, output and performance is one such factor that cannot be compromised with so publishers need to gear up to come to such kind of a solution that neither compromises output nor adds involvement

Infrastructure speed Vs infra reliability

In some of the articles that we have covered lately especially the ones about cloud computing we have come across in a lot of places about the importance of infrastructure, there happens instances when this becomes a huge downer and results into degraded experience for consumers.

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Reliability is therefore very important to consider.

Uniformity Vs Flexibility

If technology is flexible and scalable it becomes easier for companies to move from one area to another, for expansion of business while if things are more uniform they are stable and have less ups and downs and less maintenance but comes at the cost of flexibility.

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Carry Vs Keep

What to keep and what to take becomes a big problem  while digital transition is into play.

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Often business leaders focus on this areas as it can lead to drainage of resources that have been built up over the years.

Analysis

Calculating the return on investment is very important, you might be moving with a new vendor or a different technology but is that change giving you a better output than before?

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People

The IT industry in terms with the Publishing industry has been changing from times unknown, every year things are changing, getting better speedier but the tenure of people in the industry is not changing that fast.

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Hence investment has to be done in training the resources, employees will help in the move only if they are aware.

To fully utilize the full potential that lies underneath, these are a few things that needs  to be taken care of. Business leaders want IT to be focused on business results, innovation, and continuous improvement and growth. Opportunities of digitized technologies and their effect in a strategic and focused way can open gates beyond knowledge. There are a lot of ways your business can be benefited. Find out with us.