Blog Archives

We are very happy to announce that we will be a part of this year’s Logistik schafft Lösungen, taking place in Hamburg, Germany, on Wednesday the 14th of June.

Seeing how Radix has an immense experience in providing services for the logistics industry, we believe that we can offer the vast German market of logistics some new IT solutions that can save time, improve security and cut cots.

For more information look for mr. Mark Nerlich

Or contact him at:

mark.nerlich@radixcloud.com

Mobile: +49 (0)163 87 87 945

Many times, startups assume that they can achieve all the deadlines, implement all the features of their application or solution at once, figure out all the technicalities, preserve their cash flow etc. But more often than not, this is not the case. You end up micromanaging a lot of processes that you didn’t intend to. This is why having an extended team can help you.

Extended teams are not a new or revolutionary solution. An extended team is a team of experts that is assembled for your company, to provide you with a cost effective and time saving alternative. Extended teams work for you, sharing their knowledge and expertise from a different location.

With our extensive knowledge in providing the extended team services we have pinpointed these 5 reasons why startups need extended teams:

1. Easier control of resources

Being on top of your resource management is key when handling your startup. Having a great idea is no longer enough. Managing your resources can be very tricky when shaping your great idea into reality. Having an extended team can help you with having a better grasp of what you spend your time and resources on. Your core team can focus on essential work, while other tasks are taken care of by a team of experts in the field. Ideas are infinite, resources are limited.

2. Having an access to a wider knowledge base

Not being tied down to a single location can be a great thing. By using the extended team model you can have a team in another location of the world, with a wider knowledge base of technologies, local markets, and оther skills that your startup can benefit from. Having different types of people working globally, using their knowledge, will lead to creating a startup environment that can take a solution or application on a global market easier than having a centrilized local team.

3. Constant communication

Extended teams work closely on a daily basis. And when you focus on daily meetings via online platforms, you only talk about essential tasks that need to be performed. Friendly office banter and other distractions are removed when using an extended team. Focusing on essential work is very important when working on your application or solution, and an extended team can offer you just that.

4. Cost-effectiveness

Having an extended team is much By having a team abroad, you will be able to save money and time, and still get the expertise that you need to make your application or solution work.

5. Increase global market reach

By having a team that is from different countries means that you can easily have a presence on more than one market. Of course in today’s world, you can have global reach just by having a great solution and great marketing, but to have people in different parts of the world, that know the local market and the local mentality can always help you build market reach faster.

Starting a company involves many firsts. First customer, first invoice, first ad, and of course, your first website. Very often, creating your first website requires many hours of effort to get it just the way you want it, as well as knowledge of web design. Unfortunately, after this first initial phase, most companies stop paying attention to their website, even today. In today’s digital world, this can reflect very badly on your business and as a result, you could lose sales, you won’t be able to have any brand visibility etc. Here are 5 reasons why maintaining your website and your web presence are important:

1. Your site is your window on your business

Everybody enjoys window shopping, and a website provides people with the ability to window shop any type of business. They can get an idea about your services or products and also learn more about your company and your team. It is important that they get to see the most up to date view of your company, otherwise they will get the wrong idea about what you are able to do. Regularly updating your site and keeping it active will ensure that people have an up to date view on your business and that you are still active. Customers today make informed choices, and your maintaining your website can enable them to be informed about your services or products.

2. Stay ahead of your competitors

If you aren’t keeping your website up to date, then it is very likely that your competitors are. If they are not, then you have a huge opportunity to take advantage of. People want to see modern webpages that have current and up to date information. If they see an older site that hasn’t been updated in many years, they will not stay on that page. They will simply visit the next one in the list and if they have an up to date page, they will stay there. It’s not just the information you present, it’s the way you present it that matters.

3. Stay Relevant on Search Engines

Search engines like to present new information. If there are 5 different sites that are promoting the same type of product, but only one has updated their website, this one will be presented before the others. Maintaining a blog on your website or regularly updating your products and product descriptions can go a long way to ensure that your pages stay relevant on search engines. Adding new features will also enable you to stay more relevant.

4. Stay in touch with your community

Your website can provide you a lot of information about who is visiting and how they came to your site. This information can help you find new leads and new places to advertise. Regularly updating your website will ensure that people continue to visit your site, and also share your site with other interested people. The information you can gather from these visits can be a very important tool for your marketing and sales team.

5. Stay Active

An active website lets people know that your company is open for business and available to support the needs of their customers. Updating the look and feel of your website with the new trends, maintaining the information and articles, and posting to your blog and social media outlets also ensures that your company looks professional and knowledgeable in the space that you are working in. Companies that do not maintain an active website look old and not in touch with their customer base. Keep an active website and grow your customer base. This is also very important with the previous point- staying in touch with your community.

Maintaining your website is essential to businesses today, especially now that most people do their product research on their mobile devices. If your site isn’t ready for today’s user requirements, or not cater to their desired user experience – you will most likely lose business.

We are very happy to announce that the website for оur latest joint venture with our partner VisualGest called RadixVisualGest or RVG is finally up and running!

RVG combines the best of both worlds, Radix’s development, mobile and web services, as well as the next generation ERP system of VisualGest.

This partnership is based on our mutual experience of providing services to clients in a truly global model. Both companies have a history of providing premium services to companies of all sizes, services that are uniquely created to optimize their business processes. So with that in mind, we have ventured together to combine a unique ERP system along with the best in support and development, striving to create solutions that will bring companies closer to their customers, suppliers and markets.

For more details, visit RVG.

And stay tuned for more news!

Recently, we discussed the challenges that we saw in 2016 and how we saw Cloud evolve from 2015 to 2016. We thought it would be a good idea to discuss how we will be dealing with the challenges of 2016 and what we hope to see as trends in 2017.

1. Train and Reinforce Expertise
   
   

A lot of companies have invested in very advanced and complex Cloud solutions, but are only using a small fraction of the features. The base solution is typically very easy to start using, but the advanced solutions require some expertise in the solutions. In addition, it is often quite complicated to migrate your data onto the new solution. But having all your companies’ data available is extremely beneficial. Finding the right partner, with the right expertise, will be very important in 2017 to ensure that you get the most out of your investment.

As the Cloud gains even more momentum in 2017, companies will not only look to improve their ROI from using the Cloud solutions, but they will also look to taking complete advantage of the Cloud solutions that they have adopted. This is exactly why Cloud experts will become a much more important part of the IT industry in 2017.

2. Redefine our Monitoring and CMDB

Your operations team needs a new way to be able to manage Service Levels and also keep track of IT resources. Any ITIL based organisation is dealing with a lot of issues related to the business using Cloud solutions. Ensuring that you have the right monitoring solutions, and also the right CMDB solution integrated with the different providers you are working will be key for operations.

3. Build DevOps

DevOps has been considered a tool for companies that Develop applications. But it is also a very advanced tool for the operations team. In fact, most operations teams will get more use out of DevOps tools than Development teams will. As companies get more used to the new Cloud based solutions they have started using, they will start having new demands that will be fulfilled by DevOps tools. If you have never researched DevOps, start now to ensure you can keep up with the business.

4. Update Compliance

If you have not updated your compliance documents, this year is the year to do it. There are so many different types of Cloud solutions available on the market today, that basic compliance requirements based on the Cloud of 2010 will simply keep your company in the past. Updating your documents to ensure that the different divisions in your company can take advantage of the tools built for them will be key for businesses that want to maintain agility.

5. Pricing Analysis

For many companies, the price of their first Cloud solution was not the most critical challenge. They were concerned about security, compliance, just basically if it will work at all. Now that they have moved into the Cloud and see that it works, they are ready to start looking at the cost of the tools they are using. Preparing a pricing analysis tool that will allow the business to easily compare price to features will be an important tool in many projects. As Cloud providers compete to offer the best in solutions, pricing will become a key factor in choosing the right solution.

2017 will be a year where companies build more control around their Cloud solutions, and refine their selection process. As companies become more comfortable with their data on the Cloud, and how they can move data to the Cloud, DevOps will have a much more important role in the enterprise. Advanced DevOps allow data to be move from one service to another, allowing you to ensure you are getting the best price while ensuring compliance of company rules. This will be the cornerstone of IT Operations and many companies will expand the role of DevOps in their companies to meet the challenges of the future.

Cloud Computing continued to grow rapidly in 2016. As we can see here from Synergy Research, the Cloud market is growing at 25% annually. As a company operating in the Cloud market, we definitely saw a lot of new requests for migrations and new Cloud services in 2016. We also saw the services provided by our partners and suppliers increase significantly, making it a lot easier to move companies to Cloud services and provide all the features they need. As we already see from the market, 2017 will continue to grow and new service requests will continue to come in.

During 2015, we saw Cloud become an accepted solution in most enterprises, and in 2016, we saw most of our customers opt for Cloud solutions over classic delivery options. The following are the challenges that we saw our customers deal with the most:

1. Lack of Resources / Expertise

This is a problem that many companies have with Cloud solutions. Very often, we visit a company who has purchased and is using services on the Cloud, but they have not yet migrated their data into the new solution and they are not yet using all the features available to them. To be able to fully take advantage of these solutions, it is important to work with experts to be able to enable all features and integrate all your businesses data in the tool.

In 2016 we spent hundreds of hours migrating data of companies of all sizes to Cloud services that they have purchased, but did not have a full understanding of their use and features. This is why we provided a lot of consulting services as well.

2. Security and Compliance

The main issue with security that we have to do with ensuring that users are following the companies’ standard security practices for company data. Starting to use a Cloud solution can happen very quickly, often before anybody from IT has heard about it. Most users are not able to understand if what they are following company rules or not. It is important to have a process in place to manage these decisions and ensure that data is safe.

For the past couple of years we have developed several solutions to fit the latest security standards in the Cloud industry. One of them is Buncro a file sharing and collaboration platform that we have had great success with in the past year, providing it to clients that need to share their data, but still need premium security while doing so.

3. Managing Multiple Services

2016 saw many companies move to hybrid Cloud solutions. Very often, this meant using 2-3 public Cloud providers in addition to your private Cloud infrastructure. However, your users still come to you to ensure quality of service and performance. Suddenly, your team is expected to be monitoring infrastructure in multiple locations, global public networks, application performance on VM’s you didn’t create, and in addition control IT costs. Service management has a new level of complexity and must be reigned in.

Many of these challenges are quite new for company IT groups. In the past, IT was able to keep very close control over these topics and ensure that nothing happened without them knowing about it. The new service offerings make it a lot more difficult to be able to manage IT in the same way. 2016 has been a year where Business managers are taking advantage of Cloud services, and IT managers are starting to work and manage these new environments driven by business instead of IT.

Yet another intern program we started! This time we are looking for a Java programmer!

Click on the picture below for more details!

My last week blog post was about how you can maintain a large number of WordPress sites with InfiniteWP and how you can install it. This week will be about connecting your WordPress websites to the InfiniteWP dashboard. Wordpress websites that needs maintenance need to have InfiniteWP Client plugin installed. It’s a really straightforward process.

Login in to your WordPress website, go to Plugins -> Add New, in the right side type InfiniteWP Client and press Enter. The search will return the results and Click Install Now Button next to the InfiniteWP Client title. After installation click activate now to active the plugin.

This will provide you with three fields: the website Admin URL, Admin Username and Activation Key. You can copy the entire data with the green Copy Details button or write it in a notepad.

Now back to the InfiniteWP dashboard to add a new website. Go to the bottom left corner and click the Add Website button.

This will give you a popup with the same information as in your Wordpress website earlier so enter the following:

• WP-Admin URL: The URL to you backend admin login
• Admin Username: Your WordPress website Admin username
• Activation Key: the activation key from the InfiniteWP Client plugin

To make things even easier if you clicked Copy Details just go CTRL+V (for Windows) and it will fill all the necessary information.

After filling the form click the Add Site button and that is it.

You InfiniteWP Admin dashboard now communicates with you WordPress website and you can see all your WordPress core, plugins, themes or themes frameworks necessary updates. As you can see we have few updates to make to our website. If you click on the green bar you will get a more detailed view of the versions and what category is that needs to be updated.

You can now add as many websites as you like that need your attention and maintenance. Next week we will update to the website to the latest version.

Dragan Markovski, 

Lead Web Developer/Programmer @RadixCloud

When you are a super awesome hosting company that offers a variety of services for our customers such as building their websites, there comes a time when maintenance of the same is also required. Customers want to stay up to date the with the most recent core updates, plugins or themes.

For most developers which have 2-3 websites to maintain logging individually might work, but having more than 150 websites simply won’t cut it. It wastes time, it’s ineffective and often tedious work going on every single admin dashboard URL, logging in, updating through the menus, notifying the customer and logging out.

This post is about maintaining the WordPress websites that we host and sometimes create, and how we maintain a large number of websites all to the latest version from a single central dashboard.

I will guide you with a step-by-step tutorial on how to install infiniteWP.

You need to download InfiniteWP dashboard which is all in one solution for your WordPress websites. Most important of all it’s free. The only thing, if you want to pay for, are the extra plugins. So go to this link https://infinitewp.com/installing-options/ enter your email and click download now. You will receive a zip file.

The dashboard works either with a local server such as XAMPP or WAMP, or you can go with a server through FTP/SFTP. Either way will work. In this example i use WAMP which is Apache + MySQL + PHP for Windows. If you want to go with the local version of the installation you can download WAMP on this link https://www.wampserver.com/en/#download-wrapper . The installation for WAMP is pretty simple, but if you are having difficulty you can check our post here. The minimal requirements for InfiniteWP are PHP v5.2.4 or higher with CURL support and MySQL v5.0.2 or higher. WAMP does come with all the necessary requirements.

After starting up WAMP which is in the lower right corner with a green icon W, go to your WAMP installation folder and to your WWW folder. The default path is C:\wamp\www. Here just unzip and paste the IWPAdminPanel_xx folder. After unzipping you can rename the folder name if you wish. We are also keeping all the files in the folder IWPAdminPanel_xx because you might want to have multiple projects in the future, so each gets it’s own folder on your localhost.

Next we need to create a database with phpmyadmin which is done through a browser with the url localhost/phpmyadmin. Log in with you username and password (default username is root and password blank), and click on the new. You will get a form on the right side so just enter the name and click Create. My database name is IWP.

Now it’s time for the installation of our InfiniteWP dashboard. In a browser type in localhost/your_folder_name, in my case it’s localhost/iwpa. The first step is the license agreement, click Agree & Install button.

The second step checks the requirements that the InfiniteWP dashboards uses and if everything is all right you will get green OK on the right side. Click on Next DB details button. Also this step is automatically skipped if everything checks out.

This third step requires all the Datatabase settings for InfiniteWP. For a localhost set the following values in the form DBHost – localhost, DB Port – 3306, DB name – iwp (your db name from phpmyadmin), DB Table Name Prefix – iwp_ (it can be set to whatever you want), DB Username – root and DB password – your password. If you don’t have a database password set leave the field blank. For a live server you need to enter your settings according to the hosts documentation of ports and DB settings. Click Next, Create Login.

Your login is with an email address and the desired password setting. The same email is used for password recovery. The password needs to be at least 6 characters and it’s good to have lowercase/uppercase letters, numbers and signs. The strength of the password is also show. Click on the Next, Install for the installation process to begin.

If the installation was successful you will get the following screen. Click the green Open my admin panel.

Enter your previously entered login email and password into your login screen.

For a newly installed InfiniteWP you need to have some security settings, such as HTTPS enabling and IP restrictions, however we will not cover this in this blog post. We will have a separate blog post specifically for how you can protect your dashboard and make those settings. Click Continue.

The final screen asks for a data collection if you are willing to improve upon InfiniteWP. That’s it Click Done and Open the app.

Now you are ready to add your websites inside the InfiniteWP dashboard. We will cover adding websites and backups in the next blog post.

Dragan Markovski, 

Lead Web Developer/Programmer @RadixCloud

For the past couple of years, automation has been аll the rave in IT. Looking for ways to ease processes for the end user comes natural. It’s easier for the user, it easier for the system engineers, easier for the whole IT sector in general.

Тhis past year we have had a lot of clients looking for automation of their IT processes. One in particular, has a large number of end users, and a complex IT system running across a variety of OS’s, a lot of applications, thousands of devices and аn enormous amount of data.

But this is a challenge that we welcomed with open arms, and created a system that suits their needs best. By using a set of applications and a team of our engineers, we provided the client with a “few click” system, that can be used by all end users, regardless of their IT knowledge.

Here are the applications used for creating this system:

Connected BackUp- for full backup of end user data on their PCs.

WebEx (Cisco)- teleconferencing application by Cisco, a leading platform in the field.

Citrix XenApp- virtualization of applications and desktops.

InTune- a mobile device management platform.

SSCM- a complex application for remote control, patch management, software distribution, operating system deployment, network access protection and hardware and software inventory.

By combing all these, we created a system that can be used by all the end users, with the simplicity for all, regardless of their IT knowledge.
Have no doubt, creating this system required time and hard work, but the end result was awesome. But the work those not end here. Maintaining, updating, and improving this system is a full time job, that needs a dedicated team of professionals. The amount of data that goes through these applications on a daily basis is incredible. Creating the system is a challenge, but maintaining it is challenge on a whole different level. But with the team that we have on working on this project, as well as our experience this is not a problem.

For any information regarding automation or other Radix Technologies services feel free to contact me at:

Aleksandar.Maksimovski@radixcloud.com

Aleksandar Maksimovski,
Lead Service Desk Specialist