Gc pulse winter edition

Dear friends and colleagues,It is with sadness, gratitude and joy that we remember GrapeCity’s Honorary Chair-man, Paul Harold Broman. Sadness- since we will miss Paul. Gratitude- for his life here in this world. Joy- knowing he now lives in heaven.

On November 24th, Paul left this world. Paul was an incredible blessing to his loving wife Setsuko, to their 22 children, and to family and friends around the world includ-ing all of us at GrapeCity.

Together we will strive to carry on his lega-cy in everything we do at GrapeCity.

The best I can do to honour Paul is to share the message to which he dedicated his life. Paul lived a rich life and as we remember him, it is good to reflect on what motivat-ed Paul. What motivated Paul was Jesus Christ, whose birth the world celebrates this month.

From an early age, Paul understood that we are all sinners, we have all fallen short of the glory of God. Because we are sinners, there is an infinite distance between us and God who is without sin and is perfectly holy, righteous and just. So great is the distance that God himself had to reach across it. So great is our sin that so great a sacrifice had to be made to pay the debt and reconcile us to God. So great is God’s love for each of us that he himself, his own Son, became a person.

Several hundred years before his arrival, God’s prophets wrote that the Messiah, the one who would deliver us from our sin, would be born in Bethlehem from the fam-ily line of David and of a virgin. Jesus was that Messiah, fully God and fully man. Like no other person, Jesus lived a sinless life and was the perfect sacrifice for each of us when he died on the cross, settling once and for all our sin debt. That is why on the Cross he said, “It is finished.”

You may ask, what is required of us then? The answer is simple. We only need to be-lieve.

One of Jesus’ own disciples, even though he had walked with Jesus and seen the mir-acles, doubted Jesus in the days after His death on the cross. This disciple, Thomas, believed Him when He appeared alive, as he did to more than 500 of his brethren be-fore he returned to heaven. If you doubt, I ask you to pray to God and ask him to meet you in your doubt, ask Him in the name of Jesus to open your heart to His truth. Talk to any of us who, like Paul, have believed.

Death came into the world because of sin. But for those of us who believe, we have an amazing promise, the promise of eternal life. You see, Jesus conquered death. What this means is that Paul and all those who believe will not suffer the second death. The eternal punishment awaits all who have

sinned but in their stubbornness and pride, they choose not to accept Jesus’ sacrifice for their sins. As Jesus said, the enemy (Satan) came to steal and kill and destroy. Jesus came to give life and gave abundant-ly.

God’s word tells us that the same Jesus who visited the world 2,000 years ago is coming again. We do not know the day and hour of his return, but we must be ready. Jesus is coming to destroy Satan who is still on the loose in this world and busy deceiving humankind.

This message is extremely urgent and this motivated Paul. He dedicated his life to sharing the message of life, of hope, of salvation. It is Good News.

As Paul himself would do, I urge you not to delay. Don’t believe in Satan’s lies. Put your trust in God today! Trust Jesus, the one who saves us from our sin. This Christmas sea-son, celebrate, that yes, Jesus came for you.

Naoyuki

a good Tree Bears good frUIT

Message froM

Mr. Naoyuki babaGroup president - GrapeCity inC.

WINTer edITIoN 09 | graPeCITY INdIa NeWsLeTTer

GrapeSEED updateThe widespread success and growth of Grape-SEED is attributable to the simplicity of the con-cept. This extremely well-researched and scien-tific, simple yet deep and profound method to teach children English has produced extraordi-nary results for communicating in English: Read-ing, speaking, writing, spelling and vocabulary acquisition. We are finding from schools in India that GrapeSEED is leading to – apart from Eng-lish language skills - an overall personality de-velopment of the child. As his communications abilities grow in English, his confidence increas-es, his shyness reduces and he becomes more noticeable in school. Some of these children are winning laurels in different competitions which testify their verbal skills like English story-telling and poetry recitation. It has also been observed that GrapeSEED videos have also helped them with regard to grooming and etiquette.

Progress has been made in adding more schools to our customer list, and streamlining of pro-cesses. The third edition of the Global Training Seminar was held in our office on December 7 and 8, 2012. The next training session in our of-fice is scheduled tentatively for March 2013. The sales Training Workshop in Shanghai in August/September 2012 was followed up with a second meeting in Sendai to standardize market collat-eral across countries. Currently this collateral differs from one country to another. The process of Trademark and Patent filings for GrapeSEED in India has just started. It is a time-consuming process but a start has been made.

TM

eySen

By Ashoke Ghosh



December is always an interesting month. The calendar year end is around the corner. It is a time typically used to look back and assess how far we came and how far do we plan to go further in the coming year. It has been a very busy year for all of us with new projects and customers coupled with projects which we successfully delivered. Over the past three months, here in Seattle, there has been a lot of action to close off the year on a high note.

ServiceS AccountS/ProjectSNuance, one of the largest GGS customers, has one of our teams working on inception for a new project around their flagship product “eScription”. Together with this, we are also nearing the completion of the beta test-ing phase for ‘BeyondTXT’ with applications rolled out to production and 38 customers already migrated. Gem-star also is close to its integration-testing phase.

Lifeway’s mobile eReader apps’ timely delivery for both iOS and Android platforms earned the delivery team praise for the development work as well as their ded-ication. In the words of the Lifeway Management team “Your efforts were essential for success”.

Microsoft has started using the Intelligent Systems Ref-erence Architecture, which our team delivered in No-vember, in workshops across the world to educate and provide guidance for their OEM partners on “Why” and “How” to tailor their products to best leverage the power of Windows Embedded, Microsoft Azure, and Hadoop as part of their “Internet of Things” initiative.

ActiverePortS Server cuStomerSThe last few months saw many conferences where Ac-tiveReports Server was a sponsor. From the National Association of Healthcare Data Organizations’ (NAHDO) annual conference in New Orleans to the Seattle venue

of the annual SQL Pass Summit, we were there to meet new prospects and share what ActiveReports Server can help in with their ad hoc reporting needs. These confer-ences were a great success for bringing the ActiveRe-ports Server product in front of the people who work with data in their daily lives and resulted in a lot of in-terest from people we talked to. Along with marketing, we added another 5 customers including our first in-ternational customer from The Netherlands. As always, our product team spread across our office in Russia and India has been instrumental in bringing new features

and functionality to the product and further enhance our ability to address the needs of the BI market place. You can read more on the ActiveReports Server website at: http://www.activereportsserver.com.

GGS WebSite refreShWe are going to completely redesign GGS Website. Plan-ning will start from mid-September. Anyone interested in contributing towards this initiative can reach out to Sanjeev Jagtap or Devinder Singh at [email protected].

GrAPecity PoWertoolSThe VisualWebGUI (VWG) product by an Israel based company Gizmox Ltd., is being localized by the team in Japan under the guidance of Taka San. He is in Japan to help the team as they near the release date and align to the releases of the original product from Gizmox. This product provides a unique framework to allow clas-sic form-based .NET development for cross-platform, cross-browser and plugin-free HTML5 web application. The product empowers developers and organizations to consolidate their development efforts in one place rather than using platform specific development environments and compilers.

the uS bAck-officeI can’t end this update without pointing out the consist-ent efforts from both- Tim and Archana , who ensure the smoothness of daily business. Above and beyond the daily administrative tasks, we saw the team organize our very first GrapeCity US Holiday Party. With a great venue and a magical show from a local entertainer (Jeff Evans), we all (families included) had a fantastic time. Oh… I shouldn’t forget the awesome food as well.

We also had our fair share of fun with birthday events and lunch outings as usual. The people who turned a new year over the last quarter included Scott Willeke and yours truly (Bhupesh).

The holiday season has begun and winter is settling in. I sign off the last update for the year with a quote: “Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.” (-Hal Borland) And my little addition to it “Stay with us as we start a new chapter in our book of success in the coming year.”

by bhuPeSh mAlhotrA

US Office Update


Training is one of the most important parts of an organization’s overall Strategy.

Before starting a particular venture or considering a po-tential acquisition, the first question that arises is, that whether or not the organisation possesses the required skills.

Benefits of training are intangible and investing in train-ing benefits both, the organization and the employees, for a long period. Training enhances a worker’s level of skills. It provides sense of satisfaction, which is an in-trinsic motivator. Training also provides the organization with multi -skilled employees. It increases an employer’s commitment towards their job and the organization.

In service industries, the main source of an organiza-tion’s income is its staff expertise and skills, hiring pro-fessionals with high skills is comparatively expensive than training current employees to acquire the required skills.

Training is also a key requirement for new recruits; prop-er training helps them to understand the job, its require-ments and responsibilities. It also increases understand-ing of the organizational culture.

Training programs increase communication between dif-ferent levels of an organization. In GGS we have started the training programs in all the three verticals i.e. Engi-neering, QA and Project Management, on topics related to new features, technology and practices followed in the current software industry with a motto of “employee em-powerment” which is the latest trend in management.

IN THE ENGINEERING VERTICAL the trainings for An-droid are happening under the code name ‘GInnova-tion’ and Azure under the code name ‘Cloud Computing’. Cloud Computing is an execution of computing jobs in multi-tenant elastic environment, where jobs may dy-namically scale up or down requesting/releasing resourc-es on a fly.

The owner of the process is billed only for the capaci-ty used. Currently there are different technology stacks

available on which Cloud computing can be achieved and one of them is Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure Service Platform is a big part of Micro-soft’s cloud computing initiatives. It is designed specif-ically for the cloud. Microsoft Azure includes Windows Azure, which is a cloud specific OS designed to provide scalable compute and storage services. It is supported by Azure App Fabric, which is a collection of different tools for supporting applications in the cloud. SQL Azure enables storage, as well as management of data, simi-lar to the conventional relational database services of an SQL server.

Trainings covering each of these aspects have been scheduled and conducted in GGS during the month of December 2012. In this program there are 5 sessions which cover the fundamentals of Azure , Azure Fabric i.e. Service bus –Design and implementation , Azure Storage – SQL Azure and Azure tables , Azure services like HDIn-sight (Hadoop) for working on Big Data. These trainings are conducted in the form of class room programs where the trainer (member of the existing azure project team) explains the fundamentals through presentations and working code samples. Post session, a complete demon-stration of the aspect covered in the session is given to the attendees, using which one can create his/her own test project for learning the actual implementation.

UNDER THE SECOND PROGRAMME I.E. ‘GInnovation’, trainings on Android development have been conducted. This programme imparts knowledge through video se-ries where videos of 10 -15 min duration cover the fun-damentals and implementation of android development. The benefit of giving trainings through video series are:

leArninG WAve To promoTe The disseminaTion of ideas, experiences, and knowledge To encourage conTinual educaTion

Portability as Video is a portable medium, requiring only a playback device and a viewing screen.

Consistency of content is another major benefit of video training. Especially when no trainer is present, all viewers receive the same content.

These videos are shot in-house by members of GGS An-droid team in which folks have shared the knowledge about the aspects of framework, sdk and implementation techniques.

Also, these videos cover the experiences of these folks helping the listener to understand the magic one can generate through apps made on android.

IN THE QA VERTICAL trainings on a new Automation

flavour i.e. Services automation were conducted in De-cember. Web Services (WCF/ASMX) due to their world-wide implementation and popularity but limited test tool

support, often raise the question around testing them effectively. Testers are craving to find effective ways to Test Web Services. In this agile development era, we are moving to a model where UI is ever changing and con-summation of web services is taking the centre stage and hence this layer gets the attention it truly deserves by shifting the onus from UI testing to Web Services based validation. Thus, training on how to achieve this using SOAP UI was given to the team by engineers having past experience of its usage and helped team in understand-ing the setup and ‘how to’ of the tool.

IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT VERTICAL trainings on en-hancing soft skills and ‘how to write short user stories?’ were conducted.

For effective performance in the workplace, companies need their employees to have not only domain knowl-edge, technical and analytical skills, but also the skills to deal with the external world of clients, customers and vendors; and to work in a collaborative manner with their colleagues. A session was conducted by member of PMO group for all the members of GGS on behavioural competencies (also known as interpersonal skills) which include proficiencies such as communication skills, per-sonal effectiveness and creative problem solving.

Second session under the project management verti-cal on ‘how to write short user stories?’ was conducted for PM and APM members. In this session, the following were covered:

This approach requires a lot of collaboration with client and team but helps in drafting correct and achievable scope.

The trainings programme conducted helped a lot of peo-ple in polishing their skills and take a step forward, be it in technical or non-technical direction. Such programs always prove their worth in the long run, so kudos to the group for organising this so effectively.

By Prateek Katyal

leArninG WAve WINTer edITIoN 09 | graPeCITY INdIa NeWsLeTTer

aspect and tips on how to create user stories,

explaining the functionalities in a few sentences,

techniques one should follow to break the feature into small sub features,

drafting the stories explaining its working.


crm updatesYear 2012, was an eventful year for the GGS-CRM projects team with a lot of ‘firsts’ hap-pening during the year.

It started with the launch of Telesales Soft-ware for Salesforce CRM, our first App devel-oped on Force.com and certified by Salesforce Inc. for Appexchange. Since the launch we have had customers from US, Finland,Netherlands and UK purchasing licenses of the App and hundreds showing interest in Tri-als, Demos, Test drives.

Along with our first Salesforce Product launch, we also got our first (and second) Salesforce CRM customization projects from two of our existing customers in Netherlands - Peak-IT and MVP. These projects involved a lot of complex customizations, coding and data mi-gration activities. It has provided a very rich experience to the team and will immensely benefit us in all the future projects on this cloud-based technology.

On Pivotal CRM front, we signed our first ever CRM deal in India with a new client -Monsan-to. This is a year-long deal for Sustained En-gineering project with great certainty of the deal extending further in future. Monsanto has some other areas where we would be pitching in for more business and we can right away see a realistic chance of getting another new project from them in the next 6 months. We also had regular business coming from our existing US clients- and we expect it to be the same in the coming year as well.

Sanjay Gupta’s SonName: Aarav Gupta | DOB: 20th Nov, 2012

Q1. Agents Yellow, Red and Green each have a green badge, a yellow badge and a red badge, but none of them has a badge color that matches their name. They met when called to a conference at headquarters.

The Agent with Green badge said “I have license to kill!, to which Agent Red replied sarcastically: ‘what time?’ What color is each Agent’s badge?

Q2. Including the 16 unit squares shown, how many squares are there? How many matches do you have to remove to leave not one square of any size?

Q3. Express 100 with five 1s. Express 100 three ways with five 5s. You can use brackets, patentheses, and these signs: +, -, * (into), / (divided)

The first one to answer all the puzzles will win a surprise gift.Please send your answer to [email protected]

To sum it all, inspite of challenging business conditions, we managed to bring in some new business on the table, kept existing custom-ers happy and hope that 2013 turns out to be a good year for GrapeCity and everyone else in the IT industry.

Wish you all a very Happy New Year 2013!

By Rahul Singh

QuiZ



Technology

Gc pulse winter edition