Just about every company, big or small, is presented at some point with the dilemma of whether or not to hire a new employee to fill what is most probably a short-term need. Does one go through the employee selection process only to let them go when the work is done, or is there another solution?

At Omnitech, we understand that adding an employee for a short-term software development or business analysis task is often not worth the hassle. That is why we have developed our staff augmentation program. We provide our pre-qualified, knowledgeable personnel to assist you with internal analysis or developmental needs for as long as you need them. These personnel spend their time at your location(s), working directly with and for you.

Staff augmentation works well in situations where a more structured project approach might not. Do you have some ideas that you’d like to explore (perhaps a series of reports that need to be written) but you do not want the overhead of an entire project team? A single Omnitech person who is dedicated to the tasks you assign and reports directly to you might be just the ticket. In addition, if you decide you would like another person to get the job done more quickly, or you identify additional work, it is simple for us to add another person to the contract.

Our clients who have used this approach find that it meets specific, short-term needs quite well. Using staff augmentation can create a closer relationship between Omnitech and our clients and allows our personnel to become directly involved with essential business processes because they are 100% dedicated to client needs for the duration of the augmentation assignment.

Might staff augmentation be just what you need? Give us a call and we can talk about it.

PHP is one of the programming languages we use here at Omnitech. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a scripting language suited for web development. This language is maintained and driven by the Open Source community. Since its inception in the 1990s, PHP usage had reached more than 20 million web domains as of April 2007(see usage stats) and continues to grow. We are always striving to meet our clients’ needs and PHP is one of the many pieces of technology that helps us to do exactly that.

PHP can be run on virtually any web server (Apache, IIS, etc.) and offers a powerful level of interaction with the MYSQL open source database. The main advantage of PHP is that anyone can download it, install it on a server and host websites which use it without incurring any licensing costs for the PHP. Our sister company Dataware hosts PHP websites and web applications on both Apache and IIS servers, depending on clients’ needs.

Most of us have heard of the Linux operating system and even more of us have probably used the Firefox web browser by Mozilla. Omnitech ensures that the websites and web applications it develops are compatible with Firefox, unless a particular client does not need it. Both Linux and Firefox are examples of open source alternatives to Microsoft or Apple products.

In the same way that Firefox may be used instead of Internet Explorer or Safari, PHP provides us with one alternative to using the VB or C# programming languages. Multiple frameworks, similar in many regards to the Microsoft .NET framework, are available to assist in PHP development. Zend is one example of a company that supports the open source community with a PHP framework and applications for use by PHP developers. In general, however, support for PHP frameworks depends on the community working on it, rather than a specific corporation.

In the open source environment, programmers around the world contribute, review code, fix bugs and improve security. We use customized open source solutions when they are advantageous to our clients. Over the years we have worked with PHP to build a number of websites for marketing, ecommerce, and course registrations among others. In addition, we have used it to develop private web applications which are critical to our clients' business. Although C# and VB are our primary programming languages, we are able and willing to work with PHP when it is the best fit.

We are inundated with acronyms today. From government agencies to the latest format for high-definition video discs, everyone seems to be speaking and writing in the new shorthand.

.NET (called simply “dot net”) is one of these new, relatively speaking, acronyms. It is a platform or framework conceived and built by Microsoft. It runs on the more recent versions of Microsoft’s operating systems (such as Microsoft XP or Windows Server 2003).

To understand .NET, it may be helpful to think of a .NET application in terms of layers, starting at the bottom:

• An operating system such as Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.
• The .NET framework, which runs on/with the operating system.
• The actual application (such as MS Outlook).