All posts by Navin Kabra

PMI Monthly Meet: “Work life balance” & “Best practices for MS Project” – 13 June

PMI Pune LogoWhat: Monthly meeting of PMI Pune, featuring two talks: one on the importance of security in global delivery projects, and another an introduction to Banking and Financial Domain
When: Saturday, 13 June, 10am to 12:30pm
Where: Pune Shramik Patrakar Sangh, Cummins Auditorium, 193 Navi Peth, Ganjwe Chowk, Near Alka Talkies, Garware bridge
Registration and Fees: This talk is free for all to attend. No registration required

Session 1: Work Life Balance – How to enjoy life and keep your job by Shivakumar C S – PMP®

Work-life balance is a broad concept including proper prioritizing between career and ambition on one hand, compared with pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development on the other. As the separation between work and home life has diminished, this concept has become more relevant today than ever before. The interactive session aims at understanding between what is “work life balance” and what “work life balance is not” and tips to lead a healthy “Work Life Balance”

Session 1: About the Speaker Shivakumar C S

Shivakumar is a training professional with 19 years of hardcore training experience in setting up corporate universities. He has a Masters in Public Administration, a PGDPM&IR and an MBA with specialization in Personnel Management and Additional Specialization in Marketing Management. He is a Certified Project Management Professional and a Certified Cross Culture Trainer.

Shivakumar is currently the Global Head – Training at Syntel. Prior to Syntel Shivakumar worked as the head of Training at Persistent Systems Limited, (Pune).Prior to that he had a long stint of 14 years at WIPRO Technologies (Bangalore) and has worked across the spectrum of the Training function, He is an active member of the PMI-Pune Chapter and an inspirational speaker at various forums and colleges. He is an outbound team building expert and a renowned PMI-PMP Trainer.

Session 2: Best Practice Guidelines on Using Microsoft® Project by Ashish Dhoke – PMP®

Best Practice Guidelines on Using Microsoft® Project

  • The Scheduling Process [Key Steps]
  • Tracking & Monitoring
  • Best Practices for Dynamic Project Scheduling
  • Do’s and Don’ts [Checklist]

Session 2: About the Speaker Ashish Dhoke

Ashish Dhoke has over thirteen years of IT experience. Ashish has successfully delivered solutions to UK customers including Norwich Union, Experian, RAC plc, LEX, Surfcontrol and Barbour ABI amongst others.Ashish is a certified PMP® and a registered PRINCE2™ Practitioner. He is a Microsoft certified MS Project 2007 Technology Specialist and has extensively used Microsoft Project and Enterprise Project Server for project management and project scheduling. Ashish has participated in process improvement projects as a SEPG member in ISO 9001:2000 and CMMI implementation program. He was involved as a Six Sigma Green Belt in process improvement projects for RAC plc call center.

Ashish has delivered project management training programs on PMP Preparation, Microsoft Project, Software Project Management, Planning and Scheduling, Communication and Leadership and Risk Management. He has conducted various workshops on Cultural Familiarization in UK and India. Ashish has developed courseware on Microsoft Project 2007 for Microsoft.

For more about PMI, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PMI Pune. For other tech events in Pune this weekend, see the PuneTech calendar.

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Ignite Pune: Speak for 5 minutes on anything you’re passionate about – 19 Jun

ignitepuneThoughtWorks hosts the first edition of Ignite Pune! Imagine you’re on stage. You have 5 minutes, 20 slides advancing every 15 seconds. What is the passionate topic that you would talk about?

On June 19, 2009, 6:00 PM at ThoughtWorks Pune, YOU can have that stage. Any topic that you think is interesting is welcome (no sales pitches or a product demos please!). If you are interested in speaking, email your presentation to ignitepune@thoughtworks.com

The event is free, so if you’re interested in meeting people, learning something new and sharing their passions, RSVP via email.Let’s Ignite Pune! If this will be your first Ignite night, check out others around the world at
http://ignite.oreilly.com/

Venue: ThoughtWorks
GF-01 and MZ-01, Tower C
Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada, Pune – 411006
Email: ignitepune@thoughtworks.com

For more details see the Ignite Pune page. If you want to attend, register here.

Breakfast with TiE: My Story by Narendra Barhate of SEED Infotech – 11 June

TiE Pune LogoWhat: A talk by Narendra Barhate of SEED Infotech, and an informal get-together with entrepreneurs from The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), Pune
When: Thursday, 11th June, 8:30am to 9:30am
Where: PYC Hindu Gymkhana, Near Deccan Gymkhana, Bhandarkar Road, Pune
Registration and Fees: Anybody can attend. The event is free for TiE members, and Rs. 50 for non-members. To register, send mail to namita[dot]shibad[at]gmail[dot]com.

Details:

This session of “Breakfast with TiE” has Narendra Barhate, Managing Director and CEO of SEED Infotech Ltd, Pune and SEED Healthcare Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

After graduating in Electronics and Telecom and an M.Tech. in Computer Science, IIT Mumbai, Narendra worked for DRDO Labs from 1984 to 1994. He started SEED Infotech Ltd, a company that provides technology training and consulting services in 1994. Since then, SEED has set up 30 centers in India and now even started a small venture in China.

Narendra added SEED Healthcare Solutions in 2006 and has successfully installed Hospital Information and Management software in over 100 hospitals in India and the Middle East. SEED is also the winner of the Maharashtra State IT HRD award.

On Thursday, June 11, Narendra will share his experiences, insights and the path forward for his company.

This will be followed by an informal chat with all present. A truly invaluable morning.

For information about previous TiE events, see PuneTech’s TiE page. For more information about tech events in Pune this week, check out the PuneTech calendar.

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Event packed weekend in Pune: Proto volunteers, tweetup, Android, much more – 6th June

PuneTech logoThis weekend promises to be very hectic for techies in Pune with at least 6 events planned. If you did not know about at least 4 of them, you have not been paying attention – PuneTech has already written about the tweet-up (6:30pm), the Marathi localization meeting (6pm), the presentation on Google Android, and the IBM Tivoli User Group Meeting. If you count today (Thursday) as part of the weekend, then there’s the PuneChips event for the semiconductor/EDA design/apps professionals in Pune, bringing the total up to 7. And also, Lakshminarasimhan Sundararajan is looking to meet Pune entrepreneurs for an informal coffee in Koregaon park, so if you’re interested, let him know.

In addition there is a free CRM workshop by iWare Logic, from 10am to 5pm, at their Baner Road office. “Know CRM” is an intensive short duration workshop where we don’t just talk about CRM concepts but how they can be implemented usefully in your day to day operations. CRM consultants will share their knowledge and experience with you and help you understand the components of an effective CRM solution through guided demonstrations of Oracle CRM On Demand.

There’s a meeting for all those interested in volunteering for Proto.in. Proto is India’s premier startup conference, and it is coming to Pune in July. There is a lot of work to be done, and for this to become successful, a lot of volunteers are needed. This is your chance to get involved in the startup community in India – interact with the who’s who of the startup community, see the best startups in India at close quarters. And make Pune proud by making this the best proto. No registration required. Just show up.

And there also the monthly Pune Linux Users Group meeting from 4pm to 6pm. This meeting happens on the first Saturday of every month at 4pm in SICSR, and is definitely the place you want to be if you are interested in Linux in particular, or free/open source software in general.

Did we miss anything? If you are aware of any tech events in Pune (this weekend, or anytime in the future) please add them to the Pune tech events calendar at upcoming. This is an open calendar – anybody can add events to it. Please do so for the benefit of the tech community at Pune. Any event added there automatically gets added to the calendar at PuneTech.com.

By the way, don’t forget about the inaugural event of PuneChips today (Thursday, 4 June, 6:30pm: details). PuneChips is a forum for semiconductor industry (chip design, EDA, applications, VLSI, embedded systems) professionals in Pune. Please come today to meet and network with others in Pune working in this area, and to help us figure out what the activities of this forum. And in case you need more incentive to attend, Abhijit Abhyankar, head of Rambus India will talk about the emerging opportunities in the semiconductor industry. Please forward this info to your friends who might be interested.

As always, keep checking the PuneTech calendar on a regular basis. And follow PuneTech on twitter.

Adding FUEL to the Marathi Localization Fire: PLUG Meeting – June 6

FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization) is an open source project for streamlining the process of translating open source software into regional languages like Hindi and Marathi. We’ve had two major FUEL Marathi meetings recently – one in the GNUnify conference, and later in the Indlinux conference. Based on this, the Pune Linux Users Group decided to continue this work by with the aim being apart from the current active members in Marathi L10N,  find and get more persons from different walks, to participate in Marathi L10N activities. While that being the broader goal, the starting point activity will be standardizing on Marathi translations in FUEL, after which more localization work could be done, depending on resources and level of interest.

With this in mind, all those interested in contributing to this initiative (i.e. all those who can contribute to the Marathi translation project (also known as Localisation or L10N)) are invited to attend the FUEL Marathi meeting on Saturday 6th June, 6pm, at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR), 7th floor, Atur Center, Model Colony, Pune, India (Map). The meeting is free and open for all. No registration required. The meeting will be held immediately after the Pune Linux Users Group monthly meeting, which is from 4 to 6pm. (The PLUG monthly meeting is held on the first Saturday of every month in the same place and at the same time. It’s a good place to meet the most enthusiastic Linux and open source fans in Pune.)

The meeting will discuss the following points:

1. Current status of Marathi localisation: How, why, where, what etc.
2. FUEL activities. How to take it further.
3. Marathi word collection for adding in dictionaries. Validation/verification of these words. (Shantanu Oak has a big repository that needs to be reviewed/verified/corrected and included in dictionaries)
4. Spell check and other related applications/tools
5. Generating new words for various technical English words.
5. Usage of unicode by various categories of users- especially the DTP, book publications community.
6. Pushing Unicode from the Government to the users.
7. etc. etc. etc.  add here…. etc etc etc.

This is not just an “open source” or “Linux” activity. This is for those interested in seeing good Marathi translations of software and is generic to all the computing systems. Please inform other like minded people and groups so that we have enough people at the meeting to give a boost to Marathi l10n activities.

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India’s largest tweet-up: Will Pune break its own record? (#ptu2)

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

The Pune Tweetup is back.

Back in February, when we had the first one, organizers Bhavya, Purva and others had organized it on CCD on FC Road, assuming that “a few” people will turn up. A staggering 62 showed up , and managed to squeeze into CCD (that number is confirmed – I was personally present when the bodies were counted). Rohan talked about how he got business through twitter, Anupam Saraph talked about how to help Pune using twitter, Dhananjay talked about using different twitter accounts for different purposes, and I gave my twitter best practices spiel. It was covered by Pune Mirror, DNA, and Indian Express. As far as we know, that was the largest tweetup in India, and will be known by that name (“Largest Tweet-up in India”) until someone gives us details of something bigger that happened elsewhere.

Or, unless Pune Tweetup 2 (#ptu2) is bigger.

This one is on Saturday, 6th June, 6:30pm at the Mint Cafe. And I am not giving directions, because a SadakMap url is a more efficient way of doing that. To give the organizers a chance to panic (at the number of registrations), you should register at http://ptu2.eventbrite.com.

And for those feeling a bit lost, I guess I should explain what a tweet-up is. A tweet-up is a meet-up of twitterers. A Pune Tweetup is a chance for Pune’s twitterati to meet in person all those people they’ve met and interacted with only over twitter. It’s a place where you make friends and influence people. It’s a place where you run into people with interests similar to you. It’s the best place for professional networking. There’s also place for some unprofessional networking. It’s a place where you’ll sell your Ferrari and become a monk. It’s a place where you meet some of the smartest people in Pune (by definition, since, if you are not on twitter, you are not that smart, right?) And those who have been living in a cave for the last two years and have just emerged are probably wondering what is twitter and why is everybody going ga-ga over it, should educate themselves about twitter and take the plunge.

So what are you waiting for – register now. As they say, offer valid until stocks last.

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IBM Pune Tivoli Users Group Meeting – 6th June

IBM Global Services
Image via Wikipedia

What: A meeting of the Pune Tivoli Users Group – with presentations on various Tivoli products
When: 9:30am to 12:30pm, Saturday 6th June
Where: Meeting Room M4 (Video Conference Room), 7th Floor, Tower (B), Tech Park One (TPO), (Panchshill), Off Airport Road, Near Don Bosco School, Yerwada
Registration and Fees: This meeting is free for all to attend. Register here.

Details:

The agenda for this meeting is as follows:

Agenda:
0930-1000 hrs: Welcome and Introductions (Aleem Subhedar, Barclays)
1000-1030 hrs: IBM Tivoli Monitoring – Universal Agent (Himanshu Karmarkar, IBM)
1030-1100 hrs: Introduction to Tivoli Security Operations Manager-TSOM (Boudhayan Chakrabarty, IBM)
1100-1130 hrs: Hands-on TSM Installation and Configuration (Bharat Vyas,IBM)
1130-1200 hrs: DEMO – Tivoli Identity Manager (TIM)- Provisioning Policies (Deepak Kaul, IBM)
1200-1230 hrs: TUG Members Networking and Working Lunch (Pizza)

As usual, see the PuneTech calendar for other tech events in Pune this week.

Emerging opportunities in the semiconductor industry – with Abhijit Abhyankar, country head Rambus India – 4th June

PuneTech logoWhat: Talk by Abhijit Abhyankar, country head of Rambus India, on the current trends in the semiconductor industry and emerging opportunities in the areas of IC design, EDA tools and applications.
When: Thursday, 4th June, 6:30pm to 8:00pm
Where: Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road. To reach Venture Center, go past NCL towards Pashan, pass the cricket ground adjacent to NCL and then you’ll find NCL Innovation Park / Venture Center on the right hand side. Map
Registration and fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

About the speaker – Abhijit Abhyankar

Abhijit Abhyankar is a Sr. Engineering Director, and the country head for Rambus Chip Technologies, India. Abhijit has over 17 years of industry experience and was directly involved in the design of groundbreaking Rambus memory technology. He has held various engineering, management and executive positions at Rambus. He has authored several publications and is the inventor of multiple patented technologies at Rambus. Abhijit has an MBA degree from San Jose University, an MSEE from Stanford University and a BSEE from University of Utah.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. This event is the inaugural event for PuneChips. PuneChips was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start and grow their businesses.

PuneChips has been started by Abhijit Athavale, president and CEO of Markonix, and a high-tech marketing consultant. He has 16+ years of high-technology industry experience. Prior to Markonix, Abhijit spent over 11 years at Xilinx, Inc. in various engineering, applications and marketing roles. In his role as a marketing consultant, he has held executive management positions at Taray, Inc and Sanved DA. He has a masters degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from University of Pune. He is an accomplished speaker and author of several publications including a book.

For more information, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneChips, and/or join the PuneChips mailing list.

Please forward this mail to anybody in Pune who is interested in semiconductors, chip design, VLSI design, chip testing, and embedded applications.

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Hello Android: An overview and group discussion of Google’s mobile platform – June 6th

Pune Google Technologies User Group GTUG logoWhat: Google Technology Users Group (Pune GTUG) presents an overview and group discussion on Google Android with Sushrut Bidwai
When: Saturday, 6th June. 4pm to 6pm
Where: Synerzip. Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex, Survey No. 23, Plot No. 189, Near Mirch Masala Restaurant , Opp Vandevi Temple, Karve Nagar (Map).
Registration and Fees: The event is free for all. Register here.

Details
Agenda for this meet:

  • Brief History of Android
  • Android Phones
  • Android Experiments
  • What is Android?
  • What’s in new SDK
  • Android Architecture in detail
  • Application Fundamentals
  • User Interface
  • Resources and Assets
  • Data Storage
  • Content Providers
  • Security and Permissions
  • Developing Android Applications In Eclipse, with ADT
  • First Android Application
  • Further Reading

About the Speaker: Sushrut Bidwai

For more information about PuneGTUG, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneGTUG. For other tech events happening in Pune, see the PuneTech calendar.

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TZen: Community Powered Innovation with the PlanetAikon platform

planet-aikon-logoPlanetAikon is a forum that allows “community powered innovation”. It is a Pune-based startup which allows its members to “connect, collaborate and co-create”. It strives to be a unique innovation ecosystem bringing together a community of ideators, contributors and sponsors – in other words, it connects the guys with the bright ideas, the guys with the money, and the guys with skills and time to implement the idea.

This is the story of TZen, one of PlanetAikon’s success stories. It is written by Prateek Dubey and originally appeared on the PlanetAikon Blog, and is republished here with permission.

TZen – The Tool whose Time has Come

Hi- I am Prateek Dubey and I have a Story to share with You – The Story of Tzen

The Inspiration and the Rationale

It all started when Zensar Technologies Testing Center of Excellence decided about 2 yrs ago to develop a test tool which will be used for Manual Testing for Projects in Zensar and to encourage use of Test Tools among associates. Add to that the prohibitive cost of branded Testing tools and the Training & Upgrade costs associated with it were the significant business drivers which strengthened our resolve to build such a tool.

Zensar Technologies Limited
Image via Wikipedia

We developed our first Test Tool prototype which was a Test Management Layer over an Opensource Defect Management Tool called “Bugzilla”, which was based on technologies like CGI, perl and mysql.

We soon realized that our prototype was not going to fulfil the future requirements of Test Management, as CGI was slow and handling large data in an efficient way was a challenge. This was the time when we started a new prototype which was based on new AJAX Technology. An article about a newly introduced web services concept called REST sparked further ideas. After a month of design and re-design we finally had a draft design ready. We chose php for implementing our web services to support the development of a quick, easy to understand and highly responsive tool. We wanted this application to be a full-fledged WebTop Application, keeping in mind that we were designing it for the future. We came up with a prototype which was named “TZen” by our project manager Vishal Wani. Vishal encouraged us to do a Demo of our Prototype to some internal projects. The Demo was an instant hit as nobody had ever seen a Web Application which loaded only once and then ran on the browser as a Desktop Application.

With Vishal’s and Testing Practice Head Prem Apte’s continued support, we started development of our product with help from Testing Community in Zensar. As we developed TZen further we were facing serious technology challenges as “Ajax” was a new technology and we were at par with rest of the world in exploration of the same. Thus, every time we ran into an issue we had to resolve it mostly by ourselves. We were also using Technologies like Yahoo UI library and Dojo, it took us around 6 months to come up with a first fully functional TZen prototype. We deployed it at various projects and got a lot of feedback on our implementation, TZen was still very basic in functionality and we still had a lot of work to be done. During this time we had a lot of organizational changes in team and finally we were left as a 2 member team from a 4 member team.

Reinventing TZen with Community Powered Innovation

TZen went slow for about 6 months until recently when it got revived by a Zensar Opensource Innovation initiative with the help of Planetaikon Platform. We started with significant doubts about what we could achieve through an Open Community involvement. But with support of NASSCOM (under their Innovation Initiatives) and the leadership at Zensar we soon found ourselves inundated by requests from individuals from other companies to join this initiative.

  1. We had the usual initial teething issues as folks were adapting to working on a on-line collaborative co-creation platform (as against meeting face-to-face or the “business-as-usual” of e-mail exchanges).
  2. We got a lot of feedback from participants which led us to shortlist 27 (twenty seven) new features to the existing version of our tool.
  3. Those who contributed did so because of their passion to create something and did so in after-office hours and on weekends. In approximately 5 months time we were able to come up with our Release 1.1 with those 27 additional features which we have again contributed back to the community.
  4. Our Vision is to develop TZen into the most successful Opensource Test Management Platform. Our Team size has now grown to 66 (Sixty Six)!
  5. TZen is designed ground up to be Opensource and Agile development compliant product. It can be developed quickly and tested easily. This was recently re-integrated when a small set of students with only a few days of TZen exposure, created a “Commenting System” for TZen , which is going to be featured in the next TZen release again a validation of the value that communities can provide

TZen – A Snapshot

TZen provides most features that a Test Management Tools must have. These include:

  • Requirement Management
  • Test Plan Management
  • Test Case Management
  • Test Execution Management
  • Defect Management (integrated with Mantis)
  • Reports and Exports at various levels

The Road Ahead

As we progress, we look forward to the community to help us take this product to new heights. Some of the features we plan to include are

  • Extensive graph and Chart support
  • Flexible Imports
  • Custom Fields
  • Server pull services and more….

TZen has got a lot of business, technical and innovation opportunity ready to be explored and taken forward, improvements at every level are in progress.

We are now throwing open another call to professionals who are keen to participate in taking TZen to its next high. We are looking for Php 5 developers, Testing Domain Experts, Usability Domain Professionals and Testers.

Come add to our adrenalin and let us show the world how the audacity of Ideas can be supported by the passion of communities.

Join us @TZen on Planetaikon. We are counting on YOU.

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