TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE

Share Point Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

Microsoft Office Project Server 2007

With Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 and its clients, your organization can more effectively manage and coordinate work ranging from one-time projects to complex programs across the entire project life cycle. Office Project Server 2007 is designed to be accessible by its clients, Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Web Access.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration software is groupware that is designed to help you increase organizational productivity and responsiveness. Collaboration tools include corporate email and calendar, business-critical instant messaging and a rapid application development and deployment environment.

IBM offers a portfolio of Lotus software building blocks that add the value of real-time and team collaboration, document and Web content management, and online learning to a Lotus Notes and Domino environment

.NET Development

The Microsoft® .NET Framework makes the Internet a true distributed computing platform, providing a framework that enables computers, devices, and services to collaborate. This area provides code examples to help you build .NET Framework solutions and Web services that can be developed in any programming language.

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a technology for creating dynamic Web applications. It is part of the .NET Framework; you can author ASP.NET applications in most .NET compatible languages, including Visual Basic, C#, and J#. ASP.NET pages (Web Forms) are compiled, providing better performance than with scripting languages. Web Forms allow you to build powerful forms-based Web pages. When building these pages, you can use ASP.NET server controls to create common UI elements, and program them for common tasks. These controls allow you to rapidly build a Web Form out of reusable built-in or custom components, simplifying the code of a page.

ASP.NET provides a programming model, and infrastructure, to make creating scalable, secure and stable applications faster, and easier than with previous Web technologies.

C#

C# (pronounced C sharp) is a programming language designed for building a wide range of enterprise applications that run on the .NET Framework. An evolution of Microsoft C and Microsoft C++, C# is simple, modern, type safe, and object oriented. C# code is compiled as managed code, which means it benefits from the services of the common language runtime. These services include language interoperability, garbage collection, enhanced security, and improved versioning support.

SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) for building business applications. SQL Server helps your organization turn information into results with scalable business solutions, powerful data warehousing, and integration with Microsoft Office.

Java EE

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE (formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition or J2EE up to version 1.5), is a programming platform—part of the Java Platform—for developing and running distributed multi-tier architecture Java applications, based largely on modular software components running on an application server. The Java EE platform is defined by a specification. Similar to other Java Community Process specifications, Java EE is also considered informally to be a standard because providers must agree to certain conformance requirements in order to declare their products as Java EE compliant; albeit with no ISO or ECMA standard.

Java EE includes several API specifications, such as JDBC, RMI, e-mail, JMS, web services, XML, etc, and defines how to coordinate them. Java EE also features some specifications unique to Java EE for components. These include Enterprise JavaBeans, servlets, portlets (following the Java Portlet specification), JavaServer Pages and several web service technologies. This allows the developer to create an enterprise application that is portable between platforms and scalable, while integrating with legacy technologies. Other added bonuses are, for example, that the application server can handle the transactions, security, scalability, concurrency and management of the components that are deployed to it, meaning that the developers can concentrate more on the business logic of the components rather than infrastructure and integration tasks.

Java ME

Java Platform, Micro Edition or "Java ME" (also referred to as Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition or J2ME), is a collection of Java APIs for the development of software for resource-constrained devices such as PDAs, cell phones and other consumer appliances. Java ME is formally a specification, although the term is frequently used to also refer to the runtime implementations of the specification. Java ME was developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 68. The evolution of the platform has abandoned the umbrella Java Specification Request in favor of separate JSRs for the different flavors of Java ME.

Java ME was designed by Sun Microsystems and is a replacement for a similar technology, PersonalJava. Note that Sun only provides a reference implementation and that most work targeting a non-Intel-based small device will require a vendor-supplied JVM to be available on the device.

Java ME has become a popular option for creating games for cell phones, as they can be emulated on a PC during the development stage and easily uploaded to the phone. This contrasts with the difficulty of developing, testing, and loading games for other special gaming platforms such as those made by Nintendo, Sony, and others, as expensive system-specific hardware and kits are required.

Sun Microsystems has tended not to provide free binary implementations of its Java ME runtime environment for mobile devices, rather relying on third parties to provide their own, in stark contrast to the numerous binary implementations it provides for the full Java platform standard on server and workstation machines. One of the notable omissions is for Microsoft Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) based devices, despite an open letter campaign to Sun to release a rumored complete project "Captain America" which is such an implementation.

As of December 22, 2006, Sun Microsystems has released the J2ME source code, or significant portions of it. This is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and is released under the project name phoneME.

Jbuilder

JBuilder is a Java IDE from Borland. It has won several consecutive awards as the most powerful IDE for professional Java Programming.

Borland sells a variety of versions of JBuilder, and offers a free limited version for beginners of the Java language.

Crystal Reports is a Business Intelligence application used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. Several other applications, such as Microsoft Visual Studio, bundle an Original Equipment Manufacturer version of Crystal Reports as a general purpose reporting tool.

Rational Rose

Rational Rose is an object-oriented Unified Modeling Language (UML) software design tool intended for visual modeling and component construction of enterprise-level software applications. In much the same way a theatrical director blocks out a play, a software designer uses Rational Rose to visually create (model) the framework for an application by blocking out classes with actors (stick figures), use case elements (ovals), objects (rectangles) and messages/relationships (arrows) in a sequence diagram using drag-and-drop symbols. Rational Rose documents the diagram as it is being constructed and then generates code in the designer's choice of C++, Visual Basic, Java, Oracle8, CORBA or Data Definition Language.

Two popular features of Rational Rose are its ability to provide iterative development and round-trip engineering. Rational Rose allows designers to take advantage of iterative development (sometimes called evolutionary development) because the new application can be created in stages with the output of one iteration becoming the input to the next. (This is in contrast to waterfall development where the whole project is completed from start to finish before a user gets to try it out.) Then, as the developer begins to understand how the components interact and makes modifications in the design, Rational Rose can perform what is called "round-trip engineering" by going back and updating the rest of the model to ensure the code remains consistent.

Rational Rose is extensible, with downloadable add-ins and third-party partner applications. It supports COM/DCOM (ActiveX), JavaBeans, and Corba component standards.

Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports has been part of Visual Studio since 1993, and is now the standard for reporting in Visual Studio 2005. It ships with every copy of Visual Studio 2005 and is integrated directly into the development environment.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 brings the ability to create interactive, presentation-quality content to the Windows environment. With Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005, you can create complex and professional reports in a GUI-based program. Then you can connect your report to almost any database source, as well as to proxy data, such as a result set (for example, an ADO.NET DataSet). With the wizards included in the GUI designer, you can easily set formatting, grouping, charting, and other criteria.

You can host your report in either a Web or Windows application, with one of the Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 viewer controls. Report presentation in both Windows and HTML 3.2 or 4.0 clients is highly interactive and provides you with features such as chart drill down, report navigation, and text search.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 ships with an extensive SDK. You can use the SDK to interact with the report programmatically at runtime, by use of one of four possible object models:

• Crystal Report Viewer, the simplest object model
  
• Report Document, the more extensive object model
  
• Object models available through upgrade
  
• Report Client Document, the most extensive object model
  
• Info Object, a powerful object model for scheduling and configuring reports within the Crystal
  
• Reports Server or Business Objects Enterprise framework.
  

PHP

PHP is a powerful server-side scripting language for creating dynamic and interactive websites. PHP is the widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft's ASP. PHP is perfectly suited for Web development and can be embedded directly into the HTML code.

The PHP syntax is very similar to Perl and C. PHP is often used together with Apache (web server) on various operating systems. It also supports ISAPI and can be used with Microsoft's IIS on Windows.
Database

MySQL

MySQL is a database. A database defines a structure for storing information.

In a database, there are tables. Just like HTML tables, database tables contain rows, columns, and cells.

Databases are useful when storing information categorically. A company may have a database with the following tables: "Employees", "Products", "Customers" and "Orders".

Oracle

An Oracle database consists of a collection of data managed by an Oracle database management system. Popular generic usage also uses the term to refer to the Oracle DBMS management software, but not necessarily to a specific database under its control.

One can refer to the Oracle database management system unambiguously as Oracle DBMS or (since it manages databases which have relational characteristics) as Oracle RDBMS.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a free software object-relational database management system (ORDBMS), released under a BSD-style license. It offers an alternative to other database systems. Similarly to other free software projects such as Apache, GNU/Linux, and MediaWiki, PostgreSQL is not controlled by any single company, but relies on a global community of developers and companies to develop it.

SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005 is designed to help enterprises address these challenges. This next-generation database management and analysis solution delivers increased security, scalability, and availability to enterprise data and analytical applications, while making them easier to build, deploy, and manage.

Extending the strengths of SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 provides an integrated database management and analysis solution that can help your staff do the following:

• Build, deploy, and manage enterprise applications that are more secure, scalable, and reliable.
  
• Maximize IT productivity by reducing the complexity of developing and supporting database applications.
  
• Share data across multiple platforms, applications, and devices to make it easier to connect internal and external systems.
  
• Control costs without sacrificing performance, availability, scalability, or security.

SQL Server 2005 advances your data infrastructure in three key areas: it makes your enterprise data more manageable, your developers more productive, and your business intelligence (BI) more comprehensive. It also breaks new ground in affordable pricing and licensing, upgrade paths to SQL Server 2005, and the Microsoft Windows Server System.