General

As part of the ongoing process of migrating computers in Kerala Legislative Assembly to Free Software, we got the opportunity to offer GNU/Linux training to the first set of 120 employees of Kerala Niyamasabha. Zyxware Technologies conducted trainings for 8 batches of staff of Assembly. Each batch had a session of 2 hours each. This was spread over 8 days between November 26, 2013 to December 6, 2013.

We are happy to announce that Zyxware is now a Featured Service Provider on Drupal.org, a select club of Drupal providers with only another 4 members from India. This is a recognition of our contributions to Drupal over these years. We thank all our employees who have helped make this possible through their sustained contributions and members of the Drupal community who have guided,mentored and helped us as we grew in the Drupal space.

The first thing that you have to do when you want to improve something is to understand what is it that you are trying to improve. To do that you have to have some way of putting that thing which you are trying to improve into a quantity you can measure and get some kind of numbers on. This is applicable not just for your web traffic or social media marketing efforts but with anything (or rather most things) you do in your business.

In the last year or so we have been in the process of transitioning from a small business to a medium size business. With over 50 people in the rolls it was time we moved away from a bunch of people working with and around a single individual to a more structured organizaiton. As part of this transition we have been looking to change gears on our marketing initiatives. For the first time since we started our business we now have a business development team and we have active business development activities going on.

If you are in the habit of running queries directly on your production database to generate custom reports then you will run into the requirement of having to connect to your Drupal database on the Acquia cloud hosting. One of our clients wanted to do this and this is how we got this working for them. When you host your Drupal site on the Acquia cloud your site resides on a set of different VPSes that runs Varnish, Apache, MySQL and memcache. Additionally you have your staging server, your development server as well as your production servers - all of them being VPSes.

In the wake of the recent Companies Bill, there has been much writing on the provision for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). It has been taken up in right earnest by companies, industry bodies, think tanks and non government organisations. While the case for mandating CSR is well made, it is important to situate the CSR provisions of the Bill in a context and suggest possible directions for companies for whom CSR is a novel idea. This piece attempts to do just that. INTRODUCTION

Zyxware conducted a session on "Introduction to Moodle" at LBS Institute of Technology for Women, Trivandrum on 2013-11-01. The session was taken for the faculty at the college to help them build an understanding of Moodle as they gear to start using Moodle as a teaching platform at the college. The training session covered

Every business is continuously looking to hire people who are right for them. So are we. One key question is how do we know who is right for us from amongst the many who apply to us. Again as with any other business, we have tried to define what are the key attributes we need in our people and then devise a selection mechanism to assess people on those attributes. As a business which is heavily dependent on people, we have a significant investment on the selection side. We have a 5 stage selection process beginning with an on-line aptitude test and ending with an interview by the C.E.O. In the final interview we look for attributes like ability for systematic pursuit in a chosen area, self efficacy, analytical abilities, depth of understanding, ability to present in a structured manner, attitudes to work and work place issues and so on.

We are happy to announce that we will be conducting a Drupal bugathon at our office at Sasthamangalam, Trivandrum on the 12th of October, 2013. If you are a Drupal developer and you would like to get some guidance on how to contribute to Drupal you are welcome to join us. Bring your own laptops for the session. Our Sasthamangalam office address is SMRA 78, SRKM Hospital Road, Sasthamangalam P. O., Trivandrum, Kerala - 695010 You can call us at 9446069446 for directions. The following would be the schedule.

On one of our recent projects we had an issue where the Drupal site search was not working. There was a search.html file present in the home folder to handle a Google custom search page outside of Drupal. Since the filename was not the same as the drupal search path we did not expect it to be the cause for the Drupal search to not work.