Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

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Propeople official Acquia Platinum Partner

We are extremely proud to announce: Propeople is now an official Platinum Partner of Acquia, the company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal. Find partner page here

The partnership between Acquia and Propeople is important as it brings endless opportunities and advantages both for Propeople and our customers. This partnership strengthens our leadership position in cutting-edge trends and technologies, and forges Propeople as the leading Drupal company in Scandinavia, being the only Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner in the region (along with other 5 in the world).

Now, we can deliver an increased value to our customers by ensuring a higher level of confidence in our solutions. Our customers are reassured that selecting Propeople, an Acquia partner, they are working with a team committed to the higher ethics, quality, and innovation standards. Indeed, Propeople team is one of the best. We have gathered more than 55 web high class specialists from all over the world. Our team includes well-reputed pioneers and regular speakers at many important international conferences.

The main reason behind this partnership lays in offering the best benefits for our customers. We can now share all Acquia’s knowledge and experience.

First, our customers can learn from previous experience through numerous case studies describing the success of many of Acquia’s customers. In addition, our customers’ successful experience may become an Acquia’s case study.

Second, our customers have access to the technical and business whitepapers that fully describe and position Drupal based web sites. The whitepaper library will provide a better understanding about the final product delivered to our customers.

Third, there are analyst reports that will allow our customers to learn from industry experts the current trends in content management and social publishing.

Fourth, our customers will have access to Acquia’s competitive briefings on other players within the web development and open source community and social publishing space. This way our customers will know why to trust Drupal as their web solution.

Indeed, now we can offer multiple advanced benefits for our customers. Nevertheless, we already gained the trust from such important clients as Maersk, Egmont, Berlingske, Real Dania, SBSTV, SBS Radio, Arla, Radiodays and many more.

Contact Propeople to fully profit from the endless exclusive benefits we provide to our customers. Leave a comment to this post or get in touch with Propeople CEO Michael Drejer by writing an e-mail to info@propeople.dk or by calling +45 23 28 80 46.

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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Twitter for business

Twitter is the real buzz and the big thing on the web. Just take a look on the facts:  Twitter is ranked as the third largest social networking site more than 700% in 2008 and reached a peak of almost 8 million American visitors in February 2009. Twitter is everywhere and everyone is on Twitter. following Facebook and MySpace, Twitter’s traffic increased.

All these facts testify the success of a three years old web project that is so simple to describe as it really is: a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read other users' text-based updates of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. In other words, Twitter allows people to interact through messages of 140 characters or less.

Twitter is both simple and sophisticated. It is so simple that even a child can use it, yet sophisticated as a business and marketing tool.

Companies can use Twitter to communicate in real time with their customers. Announce your company’s last news, new products and services, ongoing sales, new openings, job opportunities, as well as to respond to your clients’ inquiries and to build a virtual community of followers and supporters.

Use Twitter to find out what people say about your brand, about your completion, and about everything related to your business. Twitter is a space to gain real time feedback and a perfect research tool when it comes to find out customers’ needs and wants. Ask questions on Twitter and you’ll be amazed how many valuable answers you’ll get.

Being on Twitter will help your business gain a human and personal approach toward your customers. Twitter is a space of personal interaction and socialization. Reach your customers in a simple and personal way, yet don’t forget to have a clear vision and strategy about it. It’s also true anyone can criticize you on Twitter, but you have the opportunity to study the critique and find solutions.

Still hesitating about Twitter? Look for others successful experience on Twitter. Whole Foods Market extensively uses Twitter to inform and interact with its virtual community of 289,217 followers and growing. Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh is using Twitter to regularly tell his 286,339 followers about where he is, what he's doing, and what he's eating and of course, doesn’t forget to promote his business. Use Twitter in your own way by finding your approach in the 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business article proposed by Chris Brogan. Also, don’t forget to explore the web to find useful and innovative uses of Twitter.

Being only three years old and extremely popular, Twitter is far from reaching its peak. Furthermore, there will be lots of new and better opportunities to use Twitter for business. Don’t miss the opportunities Twitter may deliver to you. Start twittering.

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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The right approach to new web challenges

It’s no secret we now live in the Web 2.0 era. The web switched from being a monologue, to a direct and participative dialogue. In fact, today the web is merely a platform for social interaction. People communicate, interact, socialize, and share more than ever before. Web 2.0 changed the way people behave online. People are no longer speechless users; they have an opinionated, outspoken, loud, honest and straight talking voice.

Back in 2007 Dan Scheinman at Cisco Media Solutions Group, envisioned that corporations will tend to behave as media companies and the time proved he was right. Corporations reacted to the Web 2.0 explosion and became content producers, in order to directly communicate with customers: respond, answer and converse. A press release published online or a press conference in front of a bunch of journalists is no longer enough to persuade the public, now customers require information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration. Are you ready to challenge these requirements?

A corporation must play by the rules of its customers, otherwise it can be costly. It should stick to the concepts of the Web 2.0 and extensively use the evolved solutions such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, etc. It’s no longer difficult to have a virtual news room integrated in a web site. Having the right tools, a company can share information (text, podcast, and video), syndicate relevant content in real time. Employees can create and publish high quality content, and easily ask customers to provide feedback about their needs and wants.

At Propeople we found Drupal is a very powerful solution when it comes to integrate Web 2.0 concepts into a corporate web site, being one of the best Content Management platform on the market. Drupal allows one or multiple users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Drupal is perfect for corporate web sites, community web portals, discussion sites, intranet applications, news publishing, personal or multiuser blogs, e-commerce applications, directories and social networking sites. Even more, Drupal allows you to mix all of these elements all together and it’s extremely flexible when it comes to adopt it in a way to fit any specific strategy.

Extra features are available when combined with dozens of free add-on modules: forums, newsletters, podcasting, picture galleries, file uploads and downloads, peer-to-peer networking and many other. Needless to say many corporations such as Google, Nokia, Symantec, Sanyo, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, FedEx and so many others already switched to Drupal.

Propeople has a huge variety of large Drupal projects in our portfolio and several new large web projects is about to be launched soon. Each of them is built on Drupal and incorporates most of the Web 2.0 concepts.

Drupal is a perfect platform for Web 2.0 interaction and communication. First, mastering your website through Drupal is easier than ever before. Drupal has an intuitive administration panel and a vast and freely available documentation that describes each step of the workflow. Second, Drupal’s integrated features allow customers to fully interact and communicate through the web site. Customers are able to express their thoughts and impressions by commenting, reviewing and rating different products and services. Third, Drupal is an open source technology. This means it’s free and can be customized according to the requirements on any specific web project. There are virtually no limitations for Drupal.

The web and the consumers are continuously evolving. A corporation cannot afford not to interact and communicate online with its customers. Nevertheless, each corporation must have a platform for interaction and communication with consumers. Yet, the question is what software to choose for managing the website and whether the chosen software can accommodate the current and future web trends.

If you have any questions regarding community solutions or Drupal, feel free to contact me or our CEO Michael K. S. Drejer.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Ultimate solution for IE6

Released in August 2001, IE6 is definitely one of the most widely used web browser peaking over 80% share during 2002 and 2003. The good news is that users tend to less use IE6 when surfing the web. According to w3counter.com Global Web Stats, IE6 is losing popularity over the last two years. Back in May 2007 Internet Explorer 6.0 ranked the first among browsers with a huge margin of 50.22%, and in May 2008 for about 36.85%. The last available data, February 2009, indicate that IE6 is used by 25.95% users, being the second most used browser after IE 7 (31.61%).

gtalbot.org reports on 119 bugs in IE6 for Windows. In addition, IE6 bugs became so notorious they even got generic names such as the double float margin bug, peekaboo bug, guillotine bug, phantom box bug and so many others. These CSS bugs are all found only in Internet Explorer.

In May 2006, PC World magazine rated Internet Explorer 6 the eighth worst tech product of all time. Unlike other browsers, IE6 does not support many important CSS2 features such as child selector, adjacent sibling, attribute selector, max/min width and max/min height rules. This means web developers must use workarounds so the web page will look properly in IE6. Some web developers estimate they spend extra 20% of their work time just to fix IE6 bugs.

As a web development company, Propeople develops, optimizes and provides support for IE6 in compliance to all web standards. However, we are in the same situation as the rest of the web development community, struggling to find an ultimate solution about IE6. From one side it is extremely painful to provide support for a technically outdated product, yet it is impossible to ignore a quarter of users thus clients demand their web products to be equally available in IE6 too. Many web developers stopped developing products for IE6 and call the rest to do the same, some other charge double for the time spent fixing IE6 bugs.

Another solution would be to make users to change their browsers. Adobe FlashPlayer experience may serve as a good example: when a flash site detects an older version of the Flash Player installed on your machine, the system will prompt you to download and install the latest version; otherwise you cannot access the site. It’s a win-win situation: the user gets the best product and developers can focus on important issues, other than fixing senseless bugs.

Microsoft, the company that released IE6, is already providing two newer versions of the Internet Explorer browsers and is making the effort to persuade users to upgrade to a newer and better version. It is even curious to see Microsoft getting along with several large Norwegian websites that launched an advocacy campaign urging IE6 users to upgrade their outdated web browsers.

Despite all the effort, the struggle around IE6 is not over and is likely to be a serious concern for the next years. Yet, the question is whether the web community must take severe actions such as to stop supporting IE6 or to let it go until IE6 will become history. What do you think?

Propeople expert

Denis Chakarov is Front-End (HTML/CSS) manager at Propeople since 2006.
Denis has 5 years of professional experience in web industry mostly design and front-end fields, including html, css and javascript techniques, cross-browser compatibility, server side programming such as php and mysql, as well as Drupal and Drupal theming. Feel free to contact Denis info (at) propeople . dk write "Denis" in the subject.

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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DrupalCon DC 2009

Propeople is at DrupalCon DC represented by CEO Michael Drejer, Technical Manager Jens Beltofte Sørensen, Production Manager Welin Wasilev Welchev, HTML and CSS Manager Denis Chakarov and PHP Developer Svilen Sabev. DrupalCon is an important event for Propeople as we are the leading Drupal company in Denmark. We see a growing demand for Drupal from our clients. There are several huge projects Propeople is building right now in Drupal and soon to be launched: Amnesty, FDM, Hello Ide for Real Dania, a large fitness website and many more.

DrupalCon is the heartbeat of the Drupal development process. Each session is a new beat to pump the blood of creativity and solutions into the Drupal community. DrupalCon DC, taking place now in Washington DC, is no exception.

Before jumping into the event, let me tell you how Drupal has changed progressively in just 4 years. In 2005, the first DrupalCon took place in Antwerp, Belgium with only 45 people. Now, in 2009, DrupalCon DC is attended by 1400 people. The Drupal community is bigger than ever before (http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/node/51) and is totally ready to fine touch each aspect of Drupal development. As Michael Drejer, Propeople CEO says: “It’s not a buzz anymore, it’s an earthquake!”

DrupalCon DC 2009 is memorable in many ways. First, at DrupalCon DC were made important decissions. First, it was established that there will be no alternative template systems in Drupal except PHPTemplate. In this regard, Young Hahn explained the Limitations of the Drupal Theme Layer (http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/limitations-drupal-theme-layer) with the release of Drupal 6.

Second, John Albin elaborated a plan How to Kill Blue Marine (http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/how-kill-blue-marine-new-core-themes...) and together with his team presented the current state of the plan to have a new core theme in Drupal 7. In addition, they are trying to engage the larger CSS and design community as part of the plan.

The DevelopmentSeed Team presented a great tutorial on how to Reuse Drupal Features (http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/paradigm-reusable-drupal-features). It's incredible how much time a developer can save by using such "features" as Spaces and Context modules.

Going beyond the words, go to Ronald Mulero twitter account (http://twitter.com/ronaldmulero) to find links to videos from the most of the sessions at the DrupalCon DC 2009.

All in all, DrupalCon is a fantastic event where people are working together to expand the open source ideas into the real life.

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

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Welcome to Propeople’s new blog.

There are two great news at Propeople today. First, we re-launched our blog because we are committed to continuously communicate with our friends, supporters, partners and the community. This blog will not only be a way to present and share our projects, products and experience but also a means to gain your feedback, to find out about your thoughts about what we are doing.

Propeople blog is your ultimate gateway to the backstage of web-development. Here you will find lots of exclusive information and original and quality resources about web-design, CMS, Drupal, Microsoft EPiServer, virtual communities, e-commerce, blogging and Web 2.0. Here you will be able to read insightful reports from important web events and unique interviews with the best web experts and developers, as well as to ask your question and receive all the answers you need.

Second, Propeople has a new team member that will be taking care of the blog. I, Mihai Moscovici, am the new Propeople blogger. I started blogging more than two years ago and have developed several blogging start-up projects.

Recently I have earned my M.A. in Communication at the University of Texas at Arlington, and already had the chance to integrate into the corporate world while working as a Media assistant at IOM. However, when offered the opportunity, I was more than glad to accept to become a fulltime blogger.
I and the Propeople developer and executive team we will do our best to make this blog an extraordinary experience for every single visitor.

Now, subscribe to our RSS feed in order to be updated each time we have something new for you. Also, comment and tell us your opinion, let us know about your suggestions and expectations for the new Propeople blog.

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