Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) on Wednesday unveiled Equipt, formerly named Albany,  a subscription-based service that bundles together Office applications, Windows Live OneCare security software, and Office Live Workspace, the Web-based extension of Office for sharing and storing documents. Subscription pricing for software has become commonplace in businesses but is a relatively new concept for consumers.

Equipt bundles a subscription version of Office Home and Student with Microsoft’s OneCare antivirus product for $69 a year–just $20 more than the suggested price of OneCare alone. The software bundle will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores in USA.

The idea behind the subscription service is to convert more new PC buyers into Office buyers. It plays on the fact that although most people don’t buy Office at the same time as a computer, many do purchase a security software subscription.

Bryson Gordon, a group product manager for the Office group, said Equipt is aimed at people who wouldn’t ordinarily buy Office at the same time they purchase a new computer. Instead, they’d repurpose their old Office disks or pirate a friend’s copy. But those same folks are willing to spend extra on security software.

Gordon was adamant that Equipt’s purpose is to increase paying Office users. But consumers’ response to subscription pricing will also help the company figure out how to negotiate the industry’s shift from desktop-only programs to ones that are accessed via the Internet.

Source: AP

The Indian IT market is expected to grow by 18 per cent to $38 billion in the present year, clocking second highest growth rate after China, which is likely to attain a 20 per cent growth and touch $138 billion mark, according to research data released by Forrester.

Forrester senior analyst Jonathan Brown, who authored the report, says, “The IT sector has long looked to India for top-drawer technology talent. But India is poised to become an increasingly important market for technology vendors as its population comes of age (half of India’s population today is under 20), its rural areas become increasingly developed, and its engagement with the US increases. It’s time the tech vendors no longer treat India as merely a skilled talent pool but also as a lucrative market in its own right.”

Forrester felt that Indian firms would make great leaps in application integration, ERP, CRM, unified communications, and security and regulatory compliance.

The report noted that while Asia-Pacific economies are closely connected to each other through trade and cross investment, they differed in their levels of economic development and the state of their IT infrastructure. For instance, while India, Korea and China demonstrated tremendous enthusiasm for the SaaS (software as service) model, Japan and Hong Kong appeared reluctant to abandon traditional development and licensing models in favour of SaaS.

The report ‘The State Of A-PAC Enterprise Technology Adoption: 2008′, gives highlights of data collected from 777 companies in the Asia Pacific region via Forrester’s Enterprise Technology Adoption Survey (Asia Pacific, Q4 2007).

These 777 companies, which had a 1000-plus employee size, from countries such as Australia, New Zealand, India, Korea, Singapore, Japan and China participated in the survey.

Source: HinduBusinessLine

Overview:

Project management software aims to help organize teamwork. Web-based project management services are inexpensive and easy to set up. They are well-suited for coordinating a mobile or geographically dispersed team. Each team member just needs access to the Internet to participate in project planning.

Wrike offers a more full-featured Web-based project management service. It bridges the gap between email, project management tools and collaboration tools. The service moved out of beta test and into public release in June. The latest update features a TimeLine view, which displays Gantt charts.

Features:

• Email Integration: Wrike allows you to create tasks and track their progress via e-mail. Simply add wrike@wrike.com to the e-mail recipients, and the system creates a task in your personal workspace on the Web. Add the due date into the subject of these e-mails, and wrike.com will build a Gantt chart for you.
• Wrike is very flexible software. It allows you to build multi-level folder/subfolder hierarchies. A folder in Wrike unites tasks that revolve around a common topic or activity. A folder may represent a project, product, department, branch, office, feature, person, event, etc. Each folder can consist of a hierarchy of subfolders and tasks, so your plan is organized logically. You can overlap your hierarchies and include an item or a folder in many folders. So you can slice a project by departments, steps or vendors and still keep it as one interconnected plan for people who have full visibility into the project.
• No installation is required because Wrike is a Software as a Serice(Saas) based agile tool for Project Management. You can use it 30 days free trial version. Then it starts from $3.99 per user per month. Wrike’s 15-user account ($49 per month) is the most popular paid plan. It supports an unlimited number of tasks, provides up to 3GB of storage, and adds SSL encryption for data security. Larger plans for up to 100 users are also available
• Timeline: A timeline (simplified Gantt Chart) gives managers the big picture of parallel projects, helps track the work load of team members and allows managers to create an elegantly designed outline of plans and projects. All these management tasks are a huge challenge when using other online project management and collaboration tools.
• Reports: In Wrike, you can quickly build reports and see who is doing what. You do this by combining your own categories like “Product launch” with standard ones like “Overdue” or “Assigned to John.” You can also visualize your reports with a timeline.
• Interface: User interface is clean and intuitive. Most of key features are described in welcome video screen just after first sign in.
• Universal membership only need one login no matter how many client accounts.

Disadvantages:

• You must work with information online: There is no PC client to let you synchronize and work with data offline. Offline use is currently limited to reviewing printouts that you created while logged in to the service.
• No way to easily define the order of tasks and groups.
• Odd naming conventions and little documentation are confusing
• Wrike doesn’t have color&logo customization as far as I am aware.

Conclusion:

Overall, I think Wrike is a really great web 2.0 based tool in online project management space. Take advantage of useful collaboration feature of Wrike and discover the new level of management and planning of your business and personal life. It’s got a really great foundation but may have some flaws. It is definitely worth checking out.

Source: PC World

As per Dataquest-IDC E-Sat survey, the top five reasons for high degree of stress for Indian BPO companies are as follows.

Insufficient Holidays

While BPOs work 24×7, executives work 12-14 hour shifts on an average: mostly at US or UK shifts. Going by the Indian Standard Time, people work nights. Staying up nights for days, weeks and months together adds not just to physical stress levels but to the psychological stress levels as well. In addition, BPO executives are required to work on all other public holidays and during festivals, which only adds to the burnout levels.

That’s why the lack of sufficient holidays has emerged as the most critical contributor to high stress levels at Indian BPOs.

Long Working Hours

Call center executives work 12 hours, on an average, every day. Twelve hours every night with hardly any break or a mere five-minute one, if any, can be extremely stressful. Nearly 22% of the respondents revealed that long work hours played an important part in creating high stress levels at the job.

Repetitive Nature of Work

Most BPOs in reality are call centers. The daily experience, therefore, tends to be repetitive, intensive and stressful, and this frequently results in employee burnout. Over 28% of the respondents revealed that the repetitive nature of work is an important cause of stress.

Pressure to Perform on Metrics

Organizational rhetoric in inbound calls centers in concerned with customer satisfaction (quality service). Yet these goals are associated with an ongoing pressure to keep call times down and call volumes up. Efforts to attain the desired balance between the quantity and quality of calls remains a huge challenge.

Health Issues

Health is one issue that plays a major role for high stress level recently. Factors like long night shifts, stress, pressure to perform on metrics, high call volumes and irate customers invariably take a toll on the health of the BPO executive. Common ailments that emerge are insomnia, depression, visual and hearing problems, and digestive problems.

Source: Dataquest, India

IBM announced a new Language Translation Services Center (LTSC) in the Pune facility to address increasing demand from clients in Europe for non-English language skills.

The new center is part of IBM’s strategy to set up similar centers in Europe and Asia that will offer document translation in multiple languages, an IBM spokeswoman said on Monday. Besides having staff translate documents, such as e-mail messages, Web pages, and contracts, the center in Pune will also use technology developed by IBM’s research lab in India, and tools available in the market, to automate some of this translation work, she added.

The company has hired staff to do this work. They are also going to use technologies developed in-house to automate some of this work. IBM aims to have around 2000 people working at this new center.

Source: PC World

Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing helps customers manage all aspects of the utility customer life cycle including service connection, management of meter reads (index and interval), complex billing, payment processing and debt collection. In addition, the product also supports associated functions like field service, meter management, sales and marketing and provides a very flexible rating engine and efficient contact center management application.

• Improve Conservation Program Management - Utilities today are focused on driving environmental initiatives by offering green products and services. Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2.2 enables utilities to manage conservation programs within the customer information system (CIS) itself, ensuring a single data repository and a single view of the customer.
• Enhance Customer Service - Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2.2 offers utilities new tools that empower employees to improve customer service. The new application version provides enhanced cashiering functionalities that help streamline processes and improve the efficiency of walk-in payment centers, which can lead to shorter customer lines. The application also enables utilities to track customer preferences, ensuring the utility contacts customers through the channel the customer requests, which may include e-mail, phone, fax or postal mail.
• Boost Productivity - The application includes Task Optimization tools that allow utilities to reduce the number of steps and associated “clicks” in their most common processes - improving efficiency and ensuring consistency in task execution.
• This application leverages Oracle’s application infrastructure - including Oracle Database 11g , Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Linux, a feature of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program - to provide a unified application and technology operating environment.

“Excellent customer service will play an increasing role in our ability to maintain and grow our competitive advantage in anticipation of Tasmania’s increasing contestable retail electricity market,” said Paul Bloomfield, General Manager for Retail, Aurora Energy. “We selected the Oracle Utilities solution for its flexibility and scalability in helping us manage and access our customer and billing information. Ultimately, this will help us continue to deliver the best possible service to our customers.”

Source: Oracle

Microsoft plans to shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Web sites and stop scanning library and copyright books. Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site.

“Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries,” Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal and advertising for Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .

Microsoft has scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles during the life of the projects, he said. That material will still be available in Live search results, but not through separate indexes. Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Microsoft’s decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support. Several major libraries said that they had chosen to work with the Internet Archive rather than with Google, because of restrictions Google placed on the use of the new digital files.

Some search experts said Microsoft’s decision to end its book-scanning effort suggested that the company, whose search engine has lagged far behind those of Google and Yahoo, was giving up on efforts to be comprehensive.

Source: Infoworld

In Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1, Mozilla hasn’t changed much about the browser’s basic look, but many usability are changed. The Release Candidate means the intermediate step between the Beta and final version.

Both history windows and the bookmarks window are displayed together in an Structured Query Language (SQL) database. Several new options are now available, including dragging an URL from the history column directly into a bookmarks folder. Also, a new Smart Bookmarks offers a complete categorization of the user’s folders, guided by the most frequently visited, recently bookmarked, and recently tagged web sites.

On the security front, the phishing site filter from Firefox 2, which uses a blacklist to block known phishing pages, now has the ability to block known malware-pushing sites as well. And faulty-fingered surfers everywhere will appreciate the revised password saver. Instead of having to decide between saving and canceling a password before you know whether it’s the right one, you can now decide after logging in.

Mozilla has improved Firefox’s memory management and speed. With four test sites (CNN, Netvibes, PC World, and Yahoo Mail) loaded, version 3 used less memory than Safari 3.1 did: 81MB to start and 85MB after an hour, versus 94MB and 95MB for Safari 3. It also perfomed well in the SunSpider Javascript test, with a score of 3.61 seconds; Safari 3.1 failed to break the 4-second barrier on this test.

Source: PC World

Last December, Microsoft rolled out Service Pack 1 , a total of 320 MB. The update includes fixes for 455 issues throughout the entire Office suite. Microsoft is not going to push users for Automatic Update for at least three months. “We’ll give users a 30-day notice before throttling up [SP1 via] Automatic Update,” promised Shaffner, worldwide product manager for Office. The notice will be posted on Microsoft’s Web site and publicized elsewhere.

Shaffner and Rizzo detailed only a few new features in SP1, including support for the not-yet-released Windows Server 2008 and beefed up compatibility between 2007’s native file format, Office Open XML and the formats used by earlier editions of the suite. Also, Office 2007 SP1 features a slew of security patches and bug fixes (including the mathematical error in Excel), but doesn’t add any new features. Aside from bug fixes, SP1 reportedly offers a number of performance enhancements, particularly for those running Windows Vista, where performance often lagged.

You can get a more complete description of SP1, including a list of issues that were fixed, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 936982: Description of the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1.

You might ask, why Service Pack 1? Well, SP1 focuses on the issues that matter to users of Office 2007 which have been collated based on direct customer feedback and error reporting tools.

Source: PC World

Research In Motion and German-based SAP announced on Friday that a new, mobile version of SAP business software will be available on BlackBerry smartphones in the coming months. SAP’s business management software is called SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and is already used on other mobile devices, including the BlackBerry, through a browser. But this new software allows business employees to be even more mobile with information directly on the device.

It will allow business information, such as sales reports, purchase orders, contact information, and customer records all to be readily available on the BlackBerry, just like e-mail. It’s also GPS-enabled and can print maps and store several dozen hours of video.

SAP CRM application will be the first to run native on the BlackBerry smartphone and integrate with RIM’s email, address and calendar apps. Companies that already have SAP’s CRM apps for the BlackBerry will “require only basic user training and minimal incremental IT infrastructure investments.”

RIM will enhance its framework for building workflow-enabled apps. Once this framework is in place more SAP applications will be available on the BlackBerry.

Deployments will be centrally managed and companies that already have BlackBerry Enterprise Server and SAP apps can use their existing infrastructure.

Source: ZDNet