I'm a huge fan of automation, especially when it comes to installing software. With a simple one-click solution, you can setup software on a user's workstation with little or no impact on your work load. In fact, you don't even need to do the installation -- users can...
Software Development & Release Management
ElectricCommander Custom Dashboards: How to Visualize Your Build Data
Whenever I get a chance to see any kind of motor racing I am amazed at how many displays the engineers use to watch and monitor all the data coming from the cars. Modern performance racing cars produce a lot of data about the engine, tires, fuel consumption,...
Improve your build, test and deployment with ElectricCommander
Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
Does your Outsourcing Company Have the Right Experience?
Outsourcing IT, technical and engineering related tasks, rather than employing extra staff, is a cost effective way of staying flexible in an ever changing market and economy. However, one big question that needs to be answered is; does your outsourcing company have...
How to Ramp Up Your New Product Development While Servicing Your Existing Customers
To succeed in any market, a company needs to innovate, pioneer and push out the borders. The recent one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs reminds of one of the tech industries greatest comeback stories. Apple's key to success, other than the charisma of Jobs...
Accessing Enterprise Applications from Windows 8 RT
In a recent post, I spent a few minutes with Windows 8 and Office 2013 using a Dell Latitude ST -- and in my excitement over the launch of a new Microsoft tablet, I purchased a Microsoft Surface running Windows 8 RT hoping to see how it performs in an...
Keep Your Developers Developing!
Software companies often choose to rollout new products by having their developers work directly with beta test customers. But is this really a good idea? Not really, but let's understand why not, and then consider a couple of best practices if you just have to do it...
Outsourcing of Vital IT Tasks to Grow in 2013
In 2013, roughly one third of businesses will increase their IT outsourcing budgets. Chief Information Officers and CEOs, from small businesses to large enterprises, are planning to up their spending on the outsourcing of web/e-commerce platforms, application...
Alternative Ways to Deploy Web Services Other Than the Cloud
During 2012, the shining star for cloud services has once again been Amazon’s web service (AWS) offering. It success and popularity has made it an almost household name for cloud based web services. However AWS, or any other web services cloud offering, isn't the only...
Dropbox: Do Everything!
I will assume that everyone reading this is familiar with Dropbox -- my favorite program ever -- but I would like to highlight some newer features and espouse the virtues of this program in case anyone is still living in 2007. Dropbox acts as a shared folder between...
3 Real World vSphere Situations to Avoid
Almost a year ago, I wrote about 10 Pitfalls that Can Impact VMware Performance. I thought I’d revisit this topic, provide some specific situations I've encountered over the past year, and explain what I've learned from them. You may have already taken the advice of...
How-to Run Android 4.4 (KitKat) using VMWare Player
Did you see our guide for running Android 4.0 in VMWare from two years ago? We've updated the instructions, below, to help you get the newest version of Android running to use as a product development tool. Download and setup VMWare Player 6 (note that you will need...