THE WAREBLOG

Here’s a small round-up of Cloud Computing, SAAS that I wrote out while comparing its advent with the traditional industry setting.
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Cloud Computing, more so than a buzzword, is here to change the way business models operate in terms of not just IT services but consequences far-reaching such as ownership and risk associated with capital itself.
SAAS – or software as a service, one of the three primary facets of emerging cloud computing platforms, specifically allows users to use features of softwares to their advantage without requiring them to have the infrastructure to host the software nor the associated cost of ownership. We take a progressive view of SAAS and its impact on the traditional business landscape in the next three sections.

i. The contrasts of business models

Traditionally, a business model has had four distinct phases attached to assets or processes involved in value creation. These are outlined in the overlapping vein diagram shown below–

Figure 1: Traditional business model phases

Quite evidently, a typical ERP implementation at a big corporate house would then involve ownership of robust hardware infrastructure, associated cost of ownership of the ERP software, the operator and scheduled maintenance and patch fixes until the next big thing emerges on the horizon – which is a matter of less than five years in the field of computer science.

With the arrival of SAAS, this total cost of ownership takes a big slash with the firms only paying as they use – rather only paying for the operating part and do away with all other phases of the traditional value creation model. The resulting diagram is now pretty simple –

Figure 2: SAAS impacted business model phases

To put things in the right perspective, the phases of value creation remain much the same – with a SAAS provider owning, maintaining and disposing the associated infrastructure & soaking in the total cost of ownership; but hundreds of other organizations can now benefit by only paying as they use – changing the entire product-based chain to a service-oriented approach. The risks and costs now lie exclusively with the SAAS provider while organizations are happy to use the services offered at an extremely tiny fraction of costs.

ii. The crossover chromosomes

The more poignant question then is how do we go about assimilating an upcoming trend like SAAS into the time-tested processes? Will it make things significantly better or merely fade into obsolescence with the ‘next-big-thing’?

It would be worthwhile here to note that SAAS is merely an extension of the cloud computing model that has been around for over two decades now. Most websites, since inception, have been hosted on servers available on rentals/subscriptions and also registered via domain registrars/resellers offering such a service. Thus, having a third-party host has been an industry trend for most concerns operating on the internet for quite some time now – the term assigned being IAAS or infrastructure as a service or PAAS (platform as a service) in some other cases.

With SAAS, we take the next logical step of bridging the gap between traditional ways of carrying out business processes and the way things have been done over the internet for years now. Although not without associated risks and privacy concerns, SAAS offers a great deal in its service-oriented way.
A generic approach to adopting SAAS for say, a firm looking to move from a traditional office applications suite, would primarily involve the following flow –

Figure 3: Steps to assimilate SAAS into traditional processes

For any organization, a pilot project or initial analysis of which fronts to approach SAAS for would be essential. Once the results from the same have been assessed, and weighed for organizational & operational fit, the specific wing or process line can migrate to a SAAS adoption strategy.

iii. The need for meiosis over mitosis

Before we conclude, it would be in the best interest to identify the best practices from the traditional setting as well as the most favourable offerings from SAAS. The competitive landscape has always been about evolving and not simply replicating from past experiences – let us take note of the same with respect to SAAS while incorporating it into the traditional organizational setting. We focus on retention factors (those that need to be carried forward from traditional settings) and adoption factors (those needing incorporation going forward).

Retention Factors –
• Risk Analysis – Traditionally, risk analysis, with respect to ascertaining which party owns how much of what and in what respects is accountable for recovery and business continuity, has been of great importance. Going forward, we find, the same would be equally important – even with increasing reliance on SAAS.

• Business Continuity Planning – BCP has been another important aspect of traditional business settings. With the infrastructural ownership lying outside organizational domain, a denial of service by SAAS provider could render processes arriving at a grinding halt. In order to ensure continuity, fallback plans assume critical importance going forward.

• Total Cost Benefit Analysis– Although SAAS appears to be a cost-effective service offering, there can be cases where an organization may possess enough skill and infrastructure to support an in-house deployment more economically than taking up SAAS. A critical evaluation of total cost benefits derived is therefore still relevant, especially in the light of a nascent SAAS industry.

Adoption Factors –
• Discarding extensive ownership – By definition, an adoption of SAAS would provide organizations the advantage of doing away with most of the costs related to owning and operating of facilities that augment software usage.

• Focussing on result-oriented approach – With a paradigm shift from product-oriented to service-oriented offering, the criticality of defining the results desired from an application/software assume high importance. Since the costs are now tied to such metrics as CPU cycles and usage time clocking, one cannot allow peripheral tasks to take lead and end up defeating the whole purpose of SAAS. It is therefore essential to identify the precise results we seek to derive from the application rather than focussing on supplementary tasks.

• Driving a service-oriented culture – With an increasing emphasis on concentrating on core competencies and value creation, most supplementing processes will continue to face outsourcing or in broader terms, a service-oriented approach – whereby, the focus would be on driving processes for executing an organization’s core tasks while getting as much of peripheral tasks executed by a service-oriented culture as possible.

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After cooling my heels for a pretty long time – mostly devoid of any interaction with IDEs and semicolons and more, I was made to sit through a four day task of customizing and deploying an Elgg based portal for my current institute.
So I got myself a new copy each of XAMPPLite & Elgg to kick-start the proceedings
Anyways, here goes the patches that I found in my notebook after the completion-

1. “The database backend you have installed doesn’t meet the basic requirements to run Elgg”

This issue generally arises as early as at the time of installation itself.
Here’s my quickfix : 

• Remove the line in your root install.php file that checks for MySQL5, i.e.: validate_platform();

• Now upload this to your Elgg folder at the host and open the installation page in your browser, fill out the forms with the requested information and most probably – all should be fine!

2. “Object is a misconfigured plugin”

If you enable a plugin and then see the error message “<plugin name> is a misconfigured plugin”, this implies there is probably no start.php file in the plugin’s directory. If you are installing a plugin called “test”, there will be a test directory under mod. In that test directory there needs to be a start.php – file: /mod/test/start.php.

You have three options for fixing this:

• Repair the problem (If permissions issues are found, fix permissions. If no start.php is found, put an empty start.php there.)

• Create an empty file called disabled in the /mod directory. This will allow you to disable the plugin through the Tools Administration page.

• If all else fails, remove the problematic directory from /mod.

3. Extending the external pages plugin to include more static pages
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Say, we need to add a FAQ page to the list of standard external pages.
You may follow the following sequence of activities for this-

Download external pages pluginand open the downloaded plugin.
  

a. Search for the file en.php and seek the following line-

‘expages:privacy’ => “Privacy”, 

Add the following code after this line- 

‘expages:faq’ => “Faq”,

 

b. Search for the file footer_menu.php and seek the following line- 

<a href=”<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>pg/expages/read/Privacy/”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:privacy’); ?></a> | 

Add the following code after this line- 

<a href=”<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>pg/expages/read/Faq/”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:faq’); ?></a> |

 

c. Search for the file menu.php and seek the following line- 

  <li <?php if($type == ‘privacy’) echo “class = ‘selected’”; ?>><a href=”<?php echo $url; ?>privacy”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:privacy’); ?></a></li> 

Add the following code after this line- 

<li <?php if($type == ‘faq’) echo “class = ‘selected’”; ?>><a href=”<?php echo $url; ?>faq”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:faq’); ?></a></li>

 

d. Search for the file edit.php and seek the following line- 

else if($type == ‘privacy’) {

  $external_page_title = elgg_echo(‘expages:privacy’);  

  } 

Add the following code after this line- 

 else if($type == ‘faq’) {

  $external_page_title = elgg_echo(‘expages:faq’);  

  }

 Save all files and upload the modified plugin. 

4. Remove “Friends” option (From Profile)

We might need to do away with the friend feature on a network wherein we want all folks to be able to contact other members easily and without such tasks as adding and deleting of friends. For this, we can proceed as follows-

a. Removing Add/Remove Friend option - 

Edit the relevant code action lines in profilelinks.php at - 

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\mod\profile\views\default\profile

 

b. Removing Friends/View Friends of option - 

Edit the relevant line of rendering code in links.php and linksownpage.php at - 

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\mod\profile\views\default\profile\menu

5. Miscellaneous customization points –

a. Extending the Top Menu bar

Edit elgg_topbar.php at -

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\page_elements

b. Editing the footer-

Edit footer.php at-

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\page_elements

c. Editing Custom Login Page (Index Page)

Download the mod called custom index (not the one available by default) and edit the index page in the root of the mod’s folder to suit your requirements

d. Editing the Spotlight area content-

This involves editing the default.php at -

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\spotlight

e. Customizing tabs in the river dashboard activity-

This involves editing nav.php at –

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\mod\riverdashboard\views\default\riverdashboard

f. Customizing Bookmarks -

Edit the start.php filed under the root of plugin folder of bookmarks

g. Remove/Add Drop Down menu (Top Navigation -> Tools) items

  Edit the parameters for the particular item in topbar_tools.php at-

  C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\navigation

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Since I have been transitioning from my ‘tech’ blog to consolidate all of it here, here’s one from the stuff I did last year at my b-school.. well, some of it!

I’d been lately involved in a few crash-time development scenarios.
Not that they’ve been nifty hu-ha ones but then reasonably good to do is what I would term them.
While one involved customizing a WordPress installation, the other was a table-less template written in XHTML and CSS.

Here are the screenshots and links (you can click on the respective image area to open the associated portals) -

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