Tag Archives: productivity

Microsoft Office 2010 Launch Event by PUG – Aug 7

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What: Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group‘s Microsoft Office 2010 Launch Event
When: Saturday, 7 August, 9am-1pm
Where: Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, ICC, SB Road
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Register here

PUG is Pune's user group for Microsoft Technologies. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles related to PUG.
PUG is Pune's user group for Microsoft Technologies. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles related to PUG.

PUG Developer Summit

Microsoft Office 2010 Launch Event

Pune’s Microsoft Technologies User Group will have a half-day event this Saturday to give developers details of the latest features in Office. Pushkar Bhat will speak about what’s new in Microsoft Office 2010, and Aviraj Ajgekar will talk about Microsoft Online Services.

About the Speaker – Aviraj Ajgekar

Aviraj is a Computer Engineer from Mumbai and currently working with Microsoft India. In his present role he’s accountable for managing IT Infrastructure of Microsoft India – West Region. An active member of IT Professional communities across India specially Mumbai User Group and Pune User Group supported by Microsoft. A real blogger, he is very compulsive on adding his thoughts to online blogs, forums, community and media. You can check his technology blog at http://blogs.technet.com/aviraj. He is very fanatical about speaking on IT Professional topics such as technology screencasts for Microsoft TechNet EDGE @ http://edge.technet.com/people/aviraj. He a regular speaker at various Microsoft Events such TechEd, MS TechDays, Virtual TechDays, Microsoft India Webcasts and many more technology events. In his spare time he likes to spend time with his family, hang around with friends, listening to rock music and he’s also passionate about long drives. You can follow him on twitter @aviraj111

About the Speaker – Pushkar Bhat

Pushkar is a Solution Specialist at Microsoft; he works with customers in the Manufacturing and ITeS vertical on solutions for Business Intelligence, Collaboration, Portal Strategies, Document Management and Business Process management. His specific area of interest is in B2B and B2C Collaboration Portals which integrate analytics and innovation management frameworks for large enterprise. Another area which I have worked off and on is Enterprise Project management. He is also keeping alive my interest in the area of Demand Planning, Supply chain optimization, Sales Reporting and Sales Force Effectiveness.

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Pune-based Innovize Tech Launches Productivity Measurement Software

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Last week, Pune-based product startup Innovize Tech announced that it has received funding of $350k from the Indian Angel Network. (Note: Indian Angel Network had also invested in another Pune-based startup Druva.)

Innovize Tech Logo
InnovizeTech is a Pune-based startup that builds employee productivity measurement software. Click on the logo to go to Innovize Tech's website.

Innovize Tech has built a software product, called Sapience, that helps companies measure the exact amount of time spent by employees in various work related activities.

LiveMint has a nice article explaining the Sapience product:

For example, an investment banker working on a deal will use several applications, such as MS Excel to do financial analysis and modelling of companies, and MS PowerPoint and various in-house databases to obtain information and do analysis.

Sapience will be customized to register these applications as work applications, and will calculate how much time the banker spent on them at the end of the day.

This would help his managers know how many hours the investment banker actually spent working, out of the time he was in office. They can also find out if the banker was spending too much time on some aspects of the work.

The article further points out that:

The software can be installed at company data centres. Smaller firms without a data centre can operate it from a so-called cloud server managed by InnovizeTech.

Its target consumers are software firms, banks, insurance firms and other firms whose employees use computers to deliver their output.

The key USP of Sapience is that it is a highly automated method of accounting for time spent by employees on different software packages (and hence different activities). While information can be manually fed, Sapience has an API that encouranges programmatic sourcing of this information. Further, nit uses learning and rules based intelligence, to increasingly automate this activity. Further, it can handle various difficult cases, like different employees sharing the same PC, or the same employee using different machines, or an employee logging in remotely to a server. They have applied for a global patent on their technology.

It then aggregates the per-employee information at team, project, and other company levels and locations. The product’s analytics and trend engine then provides insightful information that helps senior management to enhance overall business efficiency, and individual and teams to improve their own productivity.

Sapience is priced on per-user basis. The per-user permanent license fee is equivalent to a few hours of average per-employee cost to company. They point out, on their website that they demonstrate savings of several hours of productivity within the first 30 days of deployment. Therefore, Return on Investment (ROI) period is typically one month.

Innovize tech was started last year by Swati Deodhar, Shirish Deodhar, Hemant Joshi and Madhukar Bhatia. The Pune startup community will remember that Shirish, Hemant and Madhukar were also the people behind nFactorial software, the Startup Mentoring company. nFactorial has not been accepting any new mentorship engagements for a while now, and the founders are now primarily focusing on Innovize Tech. For more details on the executive team of Innovize Tech is on their About Us page.

Why Python is better than Java for Object-Oriented Design

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Dhananjay Nene recently switched over to Python and has discovered that he is much happier writing programs in Python. We covered his first article in the series, and the end of that post gives an idea of why we think you should listen to him, and also subscribe to his blog. In the next article in the Python vs. Java series, he takes a few design principles of object-oriented programming and shows how to implement those using sample code in Java and Python. 

An excerpt to whet your appetite:

Well, static typed languages use polymorphism as a powerful mechanism of extensibility. In other words, in many cases the extensions are likely to be newer derived types. Thus design the rest of your code to work on the base type and introduce the newer derived types later as required without having to necessarily change existing code. However static languages primarily depend upon inheritance as the vehicle for delivering polymorphism. Dynamic languages on the other hand depend upon duck typing. Duck typing supports polymorphism without using inheritance. In this context you need the same set of relevant methods to be implemented in each of the extension classes. The role of the abstract base class or interface as the one which specifies the contract / api has been made redundant. You can still choose to define a base class / interface if you want to, but you no longer have to. 

The full article is a must read if you are a student of programming languages in general, and object-oriented programming in particular. If you are neither of those things, and if you plan to be in the software field for a while, then you seriously need to ask yourself, “Why not!?“.

Why Python is better than Java?

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Dhananjay Nene recently switched over to Python and has discovered that he is much happier writing programs in Python. He has a detailed post over at this blog on the reasons:

I think the most dominant impression from the last few months is that python does make programming feel a lot more easier and often more enjoyable. The feeling is not very different between riding a bicycle without gears then riding one with gears. In the latter case one just feels one can cover a lot more distance much more easily though any physicist will tell you the actual effort is not particularly different. It just feels like one has a much bigger toolbox (ie a wider assortment of tools) to work with and therefore the task seems simpler. Why do I think that way ? I believe the following features of python do help (in no particular order) :

* Concise Coding style : The code typically is much more concise, with much lesser verbosity
* Dynamic typing : You really do not need to worry about declaring data types and making sure the inheritance hierarchies especially for all the interfaces and implementations well laid out. The various objects do not even need to be in the same inheritance hierarchy – so long as they can respond to the method, you can call it. This is a double edge sword, but that doesn’t take away the fact that programming under dynamic types environment does seem a lot easier.
* Easier runtime reflection : Java seems to have all the reflection capabilities but I think these are just way too painful to use as compared to python. In python the entire set of constructs (classes, sequences etc.) are available for easy reflection. In case you need to use metaprogramming constructs, python really rocks.
* More built in language capabilities : Items such a list comprehensions, ability to deal with functions as first class objects etc. give you a broader vocabulary to work with.
* Clean indentation requirement : It took me about 2-3 days to get over it but, it seems that python code is much easier to read since if you do not indent it correctly it will be rejected.

I am a Perl person myself, and think similar thoughts about Perl, and I don’t really care for the forced indentations of Python. But Perl is really for disciplined programmers who don’t get carried away and start doing all the weird things that the language allows. For the indisciplined folks, I guess the forced indentation of Python is probably a good way to keep them in check.

Anyway,  read the whole article. You should also read the post he wrote at the time he chose Python for this next project. In fact, subscribe to his blog. He writes detailed and insightful articles that, as a techie, you would do well to read. If you are interested in programming languages, I would recommend reading “Contrasting java and dynamic languages”, and “Performance Comparison – C++ / Java / Python / Ruby/ Jython / JRuby / Groovy”. And if you are a blogger, check out his tips for software/programming blogging.

Dhananjay is a Pune-based software Engineer with 17 years in the field. Passionate about software engineering, programming, design and architecture. For more info, check out his PuneTech wiki profile.