Support As A Technology
 
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Our Information – personal / professional

03
Apr
2018

We used to enter all the required information asked by any of the website, without understanding the consequences of it. Since these are marked with RED asterisk “*”, we have no choice but to provide it. Have we ever thought, why does these information asked?

 

We are habitual of receiving lots of mails on daily basis. Our mail provider, Outlook, Gmail, Ymail etc has given us the Spam / Junk mail facility, where we can move such unwanted mails. Our mailing system is already very intelligent, which moves many of such mails in the spam / junk folder by its own. It does have the feature, which permanently delete such mails over a period of time.

 

Since we are so used to about these mails, notification, alerts, calls, sms, whatsapp message that we sometimes decide to live with it. Some of us gives up and let it be like that. Some of us decide to fight back against these unwanted messages. As a result we have DND “Do Not Disturb” facility, still some of these unwanted messages are reaching to us.

What these messages are? Well these can be advertisement, promotions, news, information; the matter of fact, these could be anything. But if we haven’t subscribed for these, why these are coming to us? Unfortunately knowingly or unknowingly we used to subscribe for these messages, while accepting the terms and condition during the registration of some of the sites / portals etc. Now if we have done so, then there should not be so much of hue and cry.

 

The problem starts, when so many of such messages starts appearing from many providers.

 

How does others getting our data? Is the site / portal whom we have provided our information responsible for it? Is the owner of the company responsible of it? Is the government responsible of it? If the owner of company resigns, will that resolve the problem? If the CEO gets terminated will that solves the problem? The answer is NO. The process has to be matured to secure these information.

 

There are possibly two very simple and common method of such data leak, one – code’s security testing wasn’t done properly and two – someone internal or external has the database access. I am not blaming here the developers or hackers, instead I believe someone’s responsibilities are compromised.

 

Remember the future’s oil is data and that is the reason you will notice everyone is asking for data. The more data the company have, the better prediction will be done by them. To understand it more, we take the simplest example which we see during our Search. As we start typing to the search box, it starts giving us suggestions. Similarly our personal and professional information provide lots of information to others. Lets take another example; we used to receive lots of calls for loan, how? They know out credit score and they have the defaulter’s data with them. Lets take another example; we used to receive lots of mail and calls about many job portals including those whom we haven’t even registered, how? They are pulling the information from our professional database.

 

So far there is not any solid idea, which I am aware of to stop data leak and misuse of our data but one, which may reduce these, is to make ourselves responsible of our data because whatever is once out over internet, assume it is public. Hence we should deactivate our account from all those places, which are not needed anymore. Stop registering ourselves here and there. Think twice before installing any free software. Think again for registering ourselves for receiving any free alerts or promotions.

 

Again the Data is today’s Gold, the more it is with the companies the better they will be. So the companies will keep on asking for it. It is for us, how we deal with it.

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The most difficult question ever asked – Tell us about yourself

02
Apr
2018

Tell us about yourself

“Tell us about yourself” is the most difficult question asked during an interview. We have so much to tell yet it feels confusing and difficult, what to tell.

Many experienced trainers suggesting to explain about your strengths, describe your achievements, whereas few of them suggests to talk about related achievements for the advertised vacancy. Sometimes if required you can exaggerate it as well.

Everyone talks from their own or from others experience, hence all the about are correct. However for me, it is kind of more dependent over the state of mind of the interviewer. What he wants to know about you and if you’ll give him the precise information in this first introduction itself, 50% of your interview will be cleared, rest 50% will be specific to the profile only, which should not be a big deal for you.

In my opinion, the interviewer are there only to select you and not to reject you. If we see on the other way, by letting us selected, we are actually helping them and making their job easier and this is the key, which we should understand. Once we’ll understand it, all we need to do is to help the interviewer. This will give us more confidence and help us to overcome of shaking hand, stammering or losing confidence kind of common interview-mania situations.

To sum-up, the simplest way to answer this question during the interview can be, telling yourselves in points or topics. As the conversation starts, you can also ask the interviewer, what specific area he wants you to elaborate. This will make the interview easier and quicker. It will also help both parties to be comfortable and will allow a two way interactive communication, which may change your future carrier!

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Message Transfer Agent – Miscommunication

02
Apr
2018

Mail server sends your mail to someone else

Most of us may know about the MTA “message transfer agent” or “mail transfer agent” or in a simple word mail relay, which basically circulate our messages to the recipients. Its job is sending the message to the right addressee.

There is a defined way to complete this task, MUA – SMTP – MTA – MDA – POP / IMAP – MUA. I’ll not go in further technical details here, still I want to understand, what are the chances of failure in this process, where the mail doesn’t reach to the actual recipient, instead landing to other’s mail box. At which step, we add another level of check to fix this issue?

Interesting? Believe me it is happening. I am not talking about the mails are not delivering to other mail recipient, I am talking about mails delivering to wrong recipient. Imagine your salary slip, your bank accounts details, travel details, password reset requests are received by other person who is having similar mail id as you do, with an extra dot “.”.

While searching over internet, I have received few mailing issues, however don’t know how will this issue be fixed?

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/Gdb4Ga6hwyY

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=137222

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-osend/some-of-my-e-mails-are-not-reaching-the-intended/c9bc0937-79c9-4504-b899-f040962cf479

I think the simplest way to fix it, will be to inform the person about this issue and keep on forwarding these messages to that person who belongs to these messages, but the question is why? Am I responsible to receive others message? Is he responsible for Google mail server, which is delivering his message to me? Or is it Google mail server, which forwards his messages to me?

Someone has to test it, collect the failure rate and fix it and I don’t think I have Google’s mail server’s access yet 🙂

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Facebook Startup Training Hub

29
Mar
2018

Training by Facebook

Recently the Facebook has started the “Startup Training Hub”. It is available at https://startups.fb.com

The Facebook id can be used to login and choose the lessons from the provided itemized list, which you want to learn. Since it is just started so not much data available there, however as a startup it is sufficient. They are promising to share more data shortly.

Unlike the other training portals, which are providing training sessions in the animation of video format, the Facebook is giving these trainings in readable format as of now. It is good for those who wants to read and learn. The catch here is, that if you don’t even read the full lesson and simply scroll down till end, you’ll get the training completion note with “start next training” option.

The Facebook is also giving an opportunity to those who want to create their own training plan, so by clicking the “create lesson plan” one can select the kind of training he/she want to go for. It will ask few basic questions before we can continue and based on the answers, it will provide a list of training lessons for you.

Again since it is Facebook and I think that is the reason why it’s idea is different than other training portals. It is quick, easy to load and as you read the complete lesson, the training will be marked completed.

I strongly recommend it to be explored by you at least once.

Happy learning Guys!!

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Add over LinkedIn

29
Mar
2018

LinkedIn Marketing

Almost everyone now a days is trying to earn by advertisement so do the LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn is providing an option to bid for the ads. The one who wins the bid, gets an opportunity to show their ads. The good part here that LinkedIn is giving us an option to start whatever the budget we want to go for. It is not mandatory that we have to go for a higher amount only. This flexibility encourages the bidder to start as and when he/she want to. Also at any point of time, one can stop the services.

Here is the marketing URL https://business.linkedin.com/ where one can start as per requirement.

In terms of the investment, we can control it by setting a daily budget, a total budget, and maximum bids along with, whenever we want to start it and stop it.

There are 3 ways, which LinkedIn is offering us to control our expenditure over ads.

1- Total budget

If we want our ads to visible ASAP for a specific budget, then we can go for this option

2- Daily budget

If we want to set up a campaign that is always on, then this option is for us.

3- Setting bids

Set the maximum amount we are willing to pay for clicks, impressions, or delivered InMails. By this option we’ll never pay more than the price we bid for.

 

Once we’ll decide what option we should go for, we need to decide the pricing options. Again LinkedIn is proving 3 options there;

  • CPC – Cost per click – when people clicks our ads
  • CPM – Cost per 1000 impressions – when people sees our ads
  • CPS – Cost per send – when they receive the ads in mail

I believe at this point only two action left for us;

  • Decide about the ads
  • Give our credit cards details to LinkedIn
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Work from home

28
Mar
2018

Work from home

It was common for people to work more than 12 hours a day and 365 days in a year before the labor law came into its existence. This change has helped to achieve a balanced life for the employees. Business further developed and allowed their employees to take leaves, enjoy company paid holidays along with decreasing the number of working hours and working days. The next step for the employees’ betterment and business continuity plus cost saving was Work From Home policy.

 

Work from home policy allows the employee to connect remotely to the company and perform their day to day activities. Many big companies, especially the IT industries and media industries are allowing their employees to WFH. In most of the cases it does beneficial to the company, where as in some cases, employees are abusing it.  The WFH policy is a mutual agreement between both, employee and the employer, where the managers are playing a very critical role to make WFH as success or failure.

Let’s take an example of a manager who mostly interested in micro management. There are chances that he’ll keep on checking by e-mails, phones or chat, whether the employee is available or not. He might want to satisfy his ego by assuring that as soon as the employee moves out from his seat, will inform him or take permission from him, even for a cup of tea. Whereas couple of managers are letting team free and owning everything on his own shoulders. In both the cases, company will be at the loss side, as the employee will not as productive as it was expected during WFH.

 

If we talk about the benefit of the WFH, I think the beauty of it is, 24×7 availability, especially for the managed support projects. Employee does have the pressure of the severity 1 issues though. On the other hand if we talk about the drawback of WFH, then the major one is communication and discussion gaps especially for the development projects.

 

I believe that if any company is allowing the WFH to their employees, employee should give more respect to that company because it is allowing their employee to be free from the 9 to 6 regress physical availability in the office premises. On the other hand company is blindly trusting their employees by providing WFH facility. Those who are taking WFH for granted, may loss self-confidence and prefer to always be in their comfort zone, which means they might be out dated soon.

 

Thanks!!

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Your Service is No Longer Required

27
Mar
2018

How does it sounds, when one fine day, your office management calls you in front of HR and say “Your Service is No Longer Required”? Well it sounds terrible!! It feels like all hell broke loose. Earlier you were taking everything easy but now it will be all over the map.

Usually we do talk about our future, we do see many brands are promising to redefining our future, lots of policies are securing our future, however there is no one who can save us from the pink slip. We keep on living in the illusion of securing our future but at some point we lose our present.

No doubt, there are many, who really think and plan their future, however in general we live in our comfort zone. For me retirement and layoff are just two faces of same coin. In IT language, it is like Graceful restart or hard boot. In both scenario the mental situation is pretty much the same with same question, do what now? At the end many broke and looking for a hand.

In my personal opinion, no matter what situation is, two things we should religiously continue

  1. Regular exercise
  2. Keep ourselves engage in anything.

No matter we like above two points or not but I am positive that these two points keep our services required more than earlier!!

At some point the employees are aware of the situation of the company or the management, many are able to secure the position in the same organization, where as many in other organization. The question is, what happens to those, who has to face this sentence?

Eventually, if we notice, since from the beginning at every stage, we are getting trained for this situation. Don’t believe it?

Well it’s kind of true and we are practicing this every day. We are even saying this sentence many times in a day. Let’s analyze what all we have done today;

Woke up and said to the alarm, your service is not required today, left the bed, said same thing to it, done from the breakfast etc, again said the same sentence, took the public transport and reached to the destination, done with the work and left for home. The whole day, numerous of times we had repeated this sentence, so what’s so special when the same sentence will be told to us.

It’s just the matter of how have we planned our routine life. If we had planned it well, then this sentence will boost our confidence and if not then it will make ourselves drowned in the ocean of depression.

Choice is totally ours, so plan wisely!

 

Cheers!!

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Recruiter and the Candidate

27
Mar
2018

 

It is common to hear about the clashes between the recruiter and the candidate’s views, where candidates are blaming to the recruiter for taking them for granted and on the other hand recruiters are not happy with the candidate’s behavior and attitude.

It is a two way game, where both parties are equally responsible for their actions. In most of the cases, we are getting complains against the recruiters about wasting candidate’s time due to various reasons, where waiting time is the biggest culprit. This usually triggers the panic button of the candidate. They feel themselves as an object, which is waiting for its turn for the quality check. Hence they used to search for better options not giving importance to the company which had selected them.

Eventually the recruiter is making all the possible effort to assure that they are hiring the right candidate for the required position. Not just hiring but also assuring that the candidate will meet the company’s norms and full fill the requirement. In order to get it right, they usually align all the rounds, booking the location. During all these arrangement, they sometime overlook the wastage of candidate’s time.

Some recruiters are resolving this issue by taking appointment from both parties and keeping gap between the interview round. Up to some extent this helps, however still it needs to be mature.

The candidate should also take responsibility to be transparency about their options and if they get better option post offer letter. That’s the only way to change this game into better relationship.

Good Luck!!

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The Boss

27
Mar
2018

The Boss

It’s a common perception that many bosses are horrible. Once you allow someone to talk about their boss, they come up with different names and define their bosses by specific words. Most of the time it becomes a reality that bosses are bad due to various reasons, let’s not go in that details, but do you agree with this perception?

For me, the bosses are basically our teacher and well-wisher. Now this sounds horrible isn’t it? Well actually this is true. Don’t think that I am defending the bosses because I am not. I am trying to present the other phase of the coin.

In general practice all the bosses’ want results as per their expectation. They do have their bosses and they are also expecting the same from them. Since they are the bridge between client, you and their bosses, they want to make things right, on time and as per the expected output. They used to be under more pressure then you. At this point their nature of making pressure over you to get the right deliverable is natural and accepted. They don’t want their client to be disappointed because of the hard effort added by you, they do try to avoid re-work and at the same point they do defend you in front of the management.

Most of the bosses are actually like that only and hence they do keep on educating you, making you robust so that when you reach to their level, you can easily handle this much of pressure.

For the sake of argument, let’s consider that your boss is not good as per your perception. Think about what qualities are you looking for, in him/her? What’s expectation from your boss? In a nut shell what do you want your boss to be look like?

If you are done with your expectation list, now think, will the assigned task be complete as per the expected quality and timelines, once the boss will behave exactly the way you want him to behave?

Before you go to the conclusion, you need to understand that you are only seeing the bigger picture and may be just the limited part of the project, instead of a complete project, you might be interacting with limited team members instead of multiple teams and higher management or clients.

There is a chance that you are correct, however most of the time, you may not. Do you think that the Boss is privileged like you? Actually NO, the Bosses are not even allowed to be wrong. They have to be right and they have to make things right. That is why Boss are always the Boss.

Not agreed, think about your school teacher, think about your parents, think about your elders, think about leaders, who are they? In some or the other, they are somewhere behaving exactly the same way as your bosses are. They are ordering you, controlling you, making you learn, forcing to follow rule, making you to be on right track, they are actually behaving like a boss and so will you, once you wear these caps.

 

Be a Great Boss!!

Cheers!!

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IT Road map for the Institute of Objective Studies

22
Mar
2018

Recently I had to prepare a short IT road map for the Institute of Objective Studies “IOS”.

IOS preform various of activities toward the betterment of the future. They have multiple precious scriptures and valuable books in treasures. Many of us might not aware that for the past 32 years of it’s existence, IOS has gathered the most precious research data. These data are not limited to a particular issue or community instead it is a Pandora box, which has whole world within.

Now from the IT solution point of view and towards betterment of the upcoming researchers, we “saatpro” has proposed the IOS digitization in the form of IT road map to IOS. It will be a transformation from analog to digital, from hard copies to soft copies, from limited access to selected access, in other word a migration towards a revolution!!

Here is the 10 minutes high level road map to bring this treasure infront of the world. IT Roadmap transition for IOS ,  IT Roadmap of IOS

Thanks!!

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