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A quick answer will be “to make development environments more productive, consistent and standardized”. As an addendum, it accelerates project cycle times, reduce costs.

It is important that companies must update their applications for compatibility with rapid evaluation of  technologies such as mobile devices, software as a service etc. Customers must be happy even after their database grow and the application complexity increases. Current trend is to follow Agile Methodology which forces the stack holders to use iterations for development and reusability of code can save much time.

Some companies commented that they were able to improve productivity of developer up to 40% by reusing assets from Patterns and Practices.

It is also possible to reduce the project cycle times by using pre-built application blocks in Patterns & Practices rather than building the code from scratch.

Some companies commented they were able to shorten project cycle times up to  25% by using pre-built components of Enterprise Library

Here comes the role of Microsoft Patterns and Practices. This gives guidance to to companies to do

• design
• develop
• deploy

using Microsoft platform effectively and rapidly.

If you plan to use Patterns & Practices for your company, you will be spending less time for development it may be even less time than your requirement analysis time.

Microsoft provide:

• A group of Patterns & Practices tools are freely available and
• The Source Code of these tools as also available for free so that the company can alter and use if they need.

The Microsoft Patterns & Practices supports Web, Windows, Mobile Devices etc. These are the forms of support we can avail:

• Enterprise Library Application Blocks – Reusable library for:
  • Data Access
  • Caching
  • Cryptography
  • Exception Handling
  • Logging, Security
  • Policy Injection and
  • Validation
• Software Factory – Helps architects and developers to create instances of specify types of applications
• Guides – Architecture and Design guidelines
• Reference Implementations – Sample applications

References: 1) Guidebook Microsoft Patterns and Practices 2) Internet

Do you know Epson, CISCO WebEx, Ford, Unicef, Air France Corporate, UNESCO, Mercedes Benz, Blender, GE, Sanyo, Audi, Philips, Lufthansa, Metro, La Poste, Volkswagen, Swiss World etc. uses Typo3?

See a list of 51 Typo3 popular websites here

We launched Typo3 India LinkedIn Group for the community activities in India. Initial plans of of the group are:

• Programming and General Typo3 Discussions
• Free Technology advice
• Typo3 and PHP Job Postings
• Notify development news of Typo3 to the community etc.

More details will be followed later.

Visit Typo3India Group Now

Some major achievements we achieved last year:

• Team Size increased.
• Two new offices (4000 square feet each) opened to accommodate the new teams.
• A new large scale application based on SharePoint 2007 started.
• First iPhone Application.
• First RoR (Ruby on Rails) Application.
• Joint Venture with Altros Group for Java Projects.
• Successfully executed 30+ Typo3 projects.
• Became Microsoft Certified Partner.
• As usual number of projects increased than previous year.

As a continuation of last year, this year we have plans to get:

• Microsoft Gold Certified as well as
• Typo3 Certified.

Typo3 has become one of the powerful Content Management Systems now.  But if you search the Internet you will get the impression that India is still a few steps behind in custom development using Typo3.  With offshore development of business processes, India has become a superpower in handling outsourced jobs.  Earlier outsourcing was just because of the lower cost, but now the situation has changed and it is now the better quality results that is the  prime reason that brings outsourced projects to India.

India has a good development base for Typo3 as well as all the OpenSource technologies.

Here are some resources for Typo3 India:

• Typo3India LinkedIn Group
• Typo3 Usergroup India mailing list
• Typo3-India Google Group
• PIT Solutions Typo3 Development center

PIT Solutions (a company with typo3 based projects development) will be initiating a regional Typo3 user group to make it more popular among developers. The activities will be workshops, seminars and other community activities.

PIT Solutions started with the Microsoft Partner Program back in June 2008 and became a registered member from June 17, 2008 with partner ID as 2373888.  Within a short period of time, by Oct 7, 2008, PIT Solutions became a Microsoft Certified Partner.  Now PIT Solutions is moving ahead well to become Gold Certified at the earliest.  The certification is a huge leap forward for PIT Solutions, as it is truly a privilege to be certified by the IT giant.

Being a Microsoft partner is helping our clients have a clear idea of the technologies and tools we can use to develop solutions for them.  Our clients will also benefit by getting listed in the partner directories and solution profilers.

PIT Solutions is proud to be one of the five infotech companies in the Swiss-Indian Joint Ventures List from the Embassy of Switzerland in India and the Swiss Indian Chamber of Commerce (SICC).  PIT Solutions is a joint venture, with PIT Solutions (P) Limited being the Indian company, and PIT Solutions GmbH the Swiss counterpart. The date of commencement of operations was 22.06.2000 from India. PIT Solutions today has a size of over 200 employees engaged in software development and other information technology related activities. The clientele used to be mostly Swiss companies in the initial years, but today it spreads all across Europe, with the bulk of the clients outside Switzerland being from Austria and Germany.

The Swiss Indian Chamber of commerce (SICC) was founded in Zurich, Switzerland in 1985, to foster economic and business relations between Switzerland and India.  The relation between Switzerland and India dates back to 1948 when a friendship treaty was signed. In 2008, there was a string of events to commemorate 60 years of the signing of the treaty.

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Pareeksha is a complete examination management system developed with J2EE.

The word “Pareeksha” means “examination” or “test” in Indian languages.

Pareeksha simplifies an organization’s assessment needs in a simple structured and secure manner. It provides powerful tools to create, manage, administrate and reuse exams with three different types of users. This system is a web based application and can create, edit, and delete different types of questions.

Some of the features are:

• Multiple Question Type support
• Question Set Library
• Multiple Language support
• Exam Groups
• Easy Customizability
• E-mail Notifications
• Print Question Papers
• Remote Examinations
• Internet Readiness
• Platform Independence

More details you can read here 

Pareeksha is an SourceForge.net project too. You can download it for free below.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pareeksha/

http://pareeksha.sourceforge.net/

This piece of text is virtually from an outsider’s perspective. Most of my current development activities are on .NET now a days but I know the programming and customization of TYPO3. This post is based on a small tea-break talk I had with PIT Solutions (a company do development of typo3 projects), Indian TYPO3 team.

For those who do not know what TYPO3 is:

TYPO3 is a popular Open-Source CMS (Content Management System) mainly for small to medium size enterprise web. It is actually a framework with a rich set of standard modules with a high performance architecture.

In the Content Management perspective, TYPO3 is a user-friendly tool which allows users to produce and maintain content with just few clicks. Some of the noted features are:

• Seamless integration of multimedia content
• Internal Messaging
• Workflow Communication
• Shared authoring
• Collaboration

You can get more details from here.

Complete list of TYPO3 features here.

In India, at PIT Solutions, we have an expert team dedicated for TYPO3 development and customization. They already proved their ability in TYPO3 installation, template integration (skins), TYPO3 extension development etc. with many past TYPO3 based projects. They pointed that they develop SEO Friendly TYPO3 projects. You know, today SEO is very important and is very challenging now-a-days. One of the example of our expertise you can see is our own home page pitsolutions.com.

You can see TYPO3 Services of PIT Solutions company at http://www.pitsolutions.ch/php-factory/typo3/.

You can see some of the references to their TYPO3 work in that page.

I know in my past days TYPO3 extension development was a hard part in TYPO3 area. It is nice that they say it is one of their favorite area now. They say they are ready to take TYPO3 challenge in any form.  I appreciate their confidence in their words.

Best of Luck to PIT Solutions India TYPO3 Team.