When a new leader is appointed to an organisation it is almost invariably because the Board of Directors has determined that change is required to fulfil the company’s potential. Here in the first of a series of three articles, Martin Mackay, recently appointed as CEO of Neverfail Group, explores a framework he is employing to respond to the challenge of change leadership. The second article will discuss in more detail the five key responsibilities a leader has to recognise and the final article will review the seven behaviours a leader must exhibit.

An important question for any story is how it all started? Unfortunately, it rarely can be answered punctually and precisely because history tends to be rather a continuous flow of events and influences, of subjective perspectives and smaller and parallel stories. For the IT in Cluj the situation is largely the same.

One of the first things you note when you read an article or a book about IT project management is that IT projects differ greatly from all other projects. Even when the main topic is related to project management in general, there are direct references on the ineffectiveness of some methods when we are dealing with software projects. Unfortunately those differences are not always explained and the focus is rather on describing solutions, which are more or less efficient.

The power of processing various information using small devices allows us to conduct our work efficiently even outside the office. In the context of continuous development of technology, the storage and display of information capacity is improved and the communication possibilities between devices are unlimited. In such an environment, a real challenge in usability is represented by the desire to satisfy every wish of the persons that are using such devices.

In an increasingly agile business environment, with an increasing number of companies competing for the same market share, the possibility of developing applications with many “out of the box” functionalities, Liferay framework is at least interesting. This article analyses the architectural problems that must be addressed at the beginning of the project in order to obtain a flexible product and to not to need major adjustments later on.

About 40% of Google’s mobile search is local. Given this figure, there is a great potential to increase the number of local customers by local SEO. With Google+ for Business companies can increase their online visibility in the geographical area in which they operate. Google+ for Business is a free tool offered by Google, which targets small and medium businesses.

Cloud - another buzz word that we hear almost every day. For the moment the providers that offer this service are: Amazon, Microsoft (Windows Azure), Google, Rackspace. When we think about cloud what comes to our mind? One, two or more instances that we keep on the cloud and when we need more resources we can grow very easy the number of instances.

Development of SAP business solutions represents a continuous challenge which extends on two levels, the technical and the knowledge of the business environment. The need for performance and high adaptability in creating a SAP business software also requires innovation whose already applicable revolutionary results we would like to reveal in the following paragraphs.

Code review is systematic examination (often known as peer review) of computer source code. It is intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers’ skills.

Over time the mode in which data persisted created a number of problems. Problems that can be approached from multiple points of view, but in the case of application developers, are related with the database interaction, the organization of data at the level of module persistence being of less importance for a software developer (for example: relational schematics, hierarchical schematics, network, semantics, etc. )

The workshop from the last edition of launching Today software Magazine, determined me to approach one more topic on leadership and management, because of all the questions raised during the panels about being a leader, overcoming the situational leadership theory, which are the limits of managing a team and once again, the difference between being a manager and a leader. Because of that, this article I am going to make a short presentation of the roles and responsibilities of a leader and a manager. As mentioned already in the previous article, the leader is the person who has a vision and has followers, and the manager is the person oriented on the strategic part.

Launching a website cannot be simpler in theory: write ten lines of HTML , save it in a file named index.html and poof, you have a website. For the site to be able to fulfill the purpose for which it was built, it must have two qualities:
- to be usable by the users who need to access it
- potential users need to be able to learn about its existence

This article it will show the basic steps required to achieve these qualities.

When I founded the company (Ab Mobile Apps) one of the challenges was to ensure that all our computers were running with licensed software and we had access to adequate IDEs. This meant: Microsoft Windows, Office and programming in .net, Visual Studio. Advised by a friend who had passed through this stage, I came across Microsoft’s BizSpark, a program that addresses startups and IT professionals.

Now we can clearly feel the startups wave in Romania too. In Cluj, in 2012, niche events and startups which were funded appeared. In recent weeks I have participated in several discussions about startups, investments and accelerators. But all these discussions were in smaller circles and I haven’t seen an event or a meeting to gather all active and interested people on this topic. So putting all this information together, we discussed the issue at Open Connect Cluj #6 in January (summary can be found here) in order to bring out all the ideas and projects that together could form a solid startups ecosystem.

Since my activities do not coincide with those of an HR Manager, who is responsible for the industrial HR part of a company and neither with those of a recruitment specialist, the idea of writing this article is based on the situations met while interacting with the colleagues from the department I am responsible of on a daily basis. 90% of this people are ABAP developers or consultants.

Gogu looked at his watch for the hundredth time, he was already exasperated; two hours had passed without any tangible result. He was under the impression that whenever they were near a decision point, someone from the other departments intervened and turned the whole discussion upside down.