Are you balanced?
With managers needing more from employees already working at full-tilt, achieving work-life balance is more important—and difficult—than ever
--Source BusinessWeek
What is "The Cloud"?
For a lot of small-business owners, "Cloud Computing" is the latest IT buzzword to leave them scratching their heads.
any service or program sent over an Internet connection can be considered a cloud service. An outside vendor runs the servers and software, so the buyer doesn't have to worry about the technical issues in-house—and can focus on its core business.
About 3.2% of U.S. small businesses, or about 230,000 businesses, use cloud services.
Another 3.6%, or 260,000, plan to add cloud services in the next 12 months.
Small-business spending on cloud services will increase by 36.2% in 2010 over a year ago, to $2.4 billion from $1.7 billion.
Source: IDC
Link to source article
any service or program sent over an Internet connection can be considered a cloud service. An outside vendor runs the servers and software, so the buyer doesn't have to worry about the technical issues in-house—and can focus on its core business.
About 3.2% of U.S. small businesses, or about 230,000 businesses, use cloud services.
Another 3.6%, or 260,000, plan to add cloud services in the next 12 months.
Small-business spending on cloud services will increase by 36.2% in 2010 over a year ago, to $2.4 billion from $1.7 billion.
Source: IDC
Link to source article
The WORKDAY Function
As an IT support professional, there are many situations that might require you to accurately track time.
While Excel’s DATE function makes it easy to find the difference between two dates, problems can arise if you only want to calculate workdays. Fortunately, Excel offers a function to do the job. Excel’s WORKDAY function returns the number of workdays after a start date, and even considers holidays.
Click here to download a fully functioning copy of the Excel spreadsheet
Follow this link for instructions
Are you Agile?
Agile is on the rise.
"Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams."
Breakdown of Methodologies Used: Scrum 10%
Agile Modeling 6%,
feature-driven development (FDD) 3.8%
test-driven development (TDD) 3.4%
eXtreme Programming (XP) 2.9%
Lean development 2.1%
Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile 1.8%
Agile Data Method 1.6%
Adaptive Software Development (ASD) 1.3%
Six Sigma 0.9%, Crystal 0.3%
behavior-driven development (BDD) 0.2%
Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) 0.2%
The remaining surveyed development groups either are still implementing through traditional waterfall methodologies or don't follow any formalized methodology at all.
--Study by Forrester Research