Benefits of Portal Content Management

Organizations need to provide timely, relevant information to customers, partners, and employees anywhere in the world, to meet today's business requirements. Some of the hurdles that the organizations face in achieving this are IT bottlenecks, information getting lost, irrelevant and outdated information. If these problems are not looked at properly, then this will lead to escalating costs and erode customer satisfaction which will be a great loss for the organization. One good solution for all these problems is to create and deliver highly relevant content on a portal.

Companies can deploy a unified content and portal infrastructure to meet its business goals. This infrastructure should have tools that can unify content and infrastructure between portals to provide a consistent user experience and tools that can empower non-technical users within the organization to create, manage, and publish their own information to enterprise portals. In addition, the tools enable distribution of trusted, up-to-date, and accurate information to support multiple portal initiatives including partner extranets, and employee intranets and add content intelligence to increase the relevance and targeting of information for end users.

Problems that arise due to IT bottlenecks in the content contribution process and problems due to administrative overhead in the portal publishing process can be solved by empowering non-technical business users to contribute content to the portal. When you need to provide a unique infrastructure for the portals of partners, employers, and customers, you can unify the content and content infrastructure between portals to provide a consistent user experience. When end users need to access multiple applications and repositories for all of their content, content across enterprise applications can be integrated and delivered to accessed portals. Portal content management solutions not only empower non-technical users to within your organization to create and publish their own portal content but also ensures that the information published is relevant and personalized to serve multiple portal audiences

Some of the key benefits of portal content management include the ability to manage more content assets at lower cost, publish portal content faster and improves the reach of relevant content to the appropriate audiences. In addition, portal content management also empowers non-technical users to easily publish content on their own, increase online collaboration with partners or customers, and achieves better, faster integration of content via integrations with enterprise applications.

Portal content management software provide a simple, web-based user interface for creating and publishing content to portals, to empower non-technical, line-of-business users to create, manage, and publish their own content. The Portal content management software also provides a powerful navigation system for editing and updating content within the portal. Portal content management solutions ensure that only relevant content is delivered to each audience based on an enterprise taxonomy that drives content tagging and categorization for creation and powerful attribute search within the portal. This ensures that the content and metadata published are mapped to personalization rules created and deployed in the enterprise portal.

Powerful attribute finders of Portal content management software enable end users to easily locate content within the enterprise taxonomy that is exposed as intuitive, browseable categories in the enterprise portal. The enterprise content management platform of Portal content management software provide robust enterprise content management services such as workflow, versioning, lifecycle management, and security. Enterprise integration services provided by Portal content management solutions enable easy integration of transactional data from enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, etc.

Electronic Contract Manufacturing Today

Fifty years ago, all components of an electronic product were manufactured by the same company that produced the final product. This meant that the manufacturer had to purchase the raw materials, employ experts, carry inventory for each and every individual component that goes into the product. In addition, this made it extremely difficult for small companies with small runs to enter the market and compete.

The market was ready for 'electronic contract manufacturers' that specialized in the design and manufacture of specific components that would then be sold to the OEM to be placed in the final product. Narrowing the focusing of a company to just one product or component, allowed them to offer economies of scale in the acquisition of raw materials, talent and expertise in the design process, and equipment for production. This cuts costs for the original manufacturer and frees up their capital.

With this new structure, manufacturing companies were able to produce a better product, more efficiently, and easily scale up or down to customer demand. In the design development process, usually the most complex and difficult part of the process, a contract manufacturer is more likely to accumulate a team of experienced engineers that will focus their expertise on the specific component. In the production process, they are more likely to keep up with the latest, high tech equipment and state-of-the-art technology.

Suppose there is a problem with one of the components. If the manufacturer is producing all the components in-house, it may take a while before it is found - and maybe even after it has gone to the end-user. In addition, the problem has to be solved using in-house resources and capital. When working with a contract manufacturer, in many cases component flaws have already been caught long before they reach the OEM - often due to experiences with other manufacturers. Often a third-party view of the problem is what's needed, and the resolution is solely on the shoulders of that third-party.

Since an ECM only purchases materials for the components they produce, they are able to purchase in bulk offering the OEM substantial cost savings. And since they are purchasing from their individual supplier in greater frequency, the manufacturer takes advantage of the strong relationships developed.

Finally, the contract company will thoroughly test the components they provide for quality. They will stay at the forefront of technology proposing improvements and upgrading their product so that it works better, lasts longer, and is more efficiently. This is a daunting task for the original manufacturer that has hundreds of components to keep up with.

An electronic contract manufacturer is an expert in the components they develop and provide. This expertise offers extreme value.

Considerations when choosing an Electronic Contract Manufacturing partner

For many companies, especially small to mid-sized companies, having a contract manufacturing partner is not only a good idea, it's critical to the success of the business. Besides pricing structure and quality requirements, there are several other items that should be considered in evaluating potential partners:

How much and why do they want your business - Choose a partner with compatible objectives.

Some companies may only be interested in the amount of money at stake. While it is important that the numbers match up for the benefit of both parties, find out what their main driving force is. Larger contract companies may be interested in smaller manufacturing companies if they offer the opportunity to gain experience in an industry that is new to them. Or a product that has big growth forecasts.

Learning the answers to these questions is important before proceeding to the length process of submitting an RFP, and more critically, entering a partnership.

If the business principles do not match up, the OEM may not get the attention they need to make their product successful.

What will the ECM be looking for in a partner - Provide accurate forecasts

No one knows where an original manufacturer plans to go unless they see a well-developed forecast. If they want to make the most of the partnership, they need to inform the contract manufacturer about where they have been and where they plan to go in the future. This provides needed credibility.

The contract manufacturer will need to know what level of risk they are signing up for, while determining what level of resources will be needed to meet the requirements. Will they be able to purchase materials when needed, will they be able to handle the inventory?

What are the expectations regarding inventory

Determining up front what the policies and liability for inventory are between the two companies will minimize the possibility of conflict, and surprises. Understanding inventory issues and supply chain management, and actively making efforts to reduce exposure, is crucial when forecasts do not match up to sales, or a crisis occurs.

How will the ECM handle product changes

With electronics changing at lightning speed, changes are bound to occur fairly regularly. Find out the preferences for handling product changes, and the process they have taken in implementing them in the past with other customers is very important.

Defining the level of involvement expected by each party in the change proposal, analysis, and execution is important for the success of the partnership and the product itself.

Partnering with a company that has a large amount of experience in the multiple phases of a product lifecycle will provide valuable input in the various phases. Therefore, this experience as well as the documentation process should be discussed.

There are many aspects of electronic manufacturing that need to be considered when deciding on a manufacturing partner. These are some of the less obvious, but very important issues to make sure are not forgotten.

General Microcircuits is a North Carolina based Electronic Contract Manufacturer providing simple solutions for circuit board manufacturing since 1980. We design new products and improve existing ones, supporting the entire process from concept through production, serving a wide range of markets, including industrial, commercial, telecommunications, medical, and defense.

How to Get The Best From Your Monitor Calibrator

You've bought your monitor calibrator, installed and updated the software, connected the measurement instrument and you're all ready to make your first display profile. Accurate on-screen color is just a click away.

Or is it?

Before calibrating and profiling a monitor for accurate color display, there are a number of 'pre-flight' checks you should carry out to ensure that the results you get are as good as possible.

Uniformity assessment: It's not worth attempting to profile a display if it significantly fades at the corners or has a localised color cast, as any judgements you make will be affected by this. A quick way to visually test uniformity is to set a neutral mid-gray desktop pattern and close all windows. Older-style CRT displays usually have controls that allow you to adjust for mis-aligned screen display and various other screen geometry faults, but there isn't anything you can do about a faulty LCD panel; be aware that LCD manufacturers do specify tolerances for uniformity and defective pixels.

Clean the screen and position the measuring device: LCD panels don't attract dust the way electrostatically-charged CRTs did, but it still settles there, and fingerprints won't help your calibration efforts either. Make sure that if you have a colorimeter with suckers for attaching to glass CRTs that you don't press it against an LCD panel as it could pull the front membrane off when you remove it. All recent colorimeters for use with LCD displays ship with counterweight arrangements that allow the instrument to rest against the front panel. It usually helps if you tip the screen slightly backwards, to ensure that the colorimeter stays flush to the screen and doesn't move during measurement.

Resolution and bit-depth settings: LCD panels are best run at their 'native' (maximum) resolutions. Most LCD displays support lower resolution modes for compatibility with older video cards, but it may interfere with color rendition as well as image sharpness if you run the display at lower settings. If you're not certain whether you're running at maximum, it's a good idea to check this and that you're running the display at maximum color (bit) depth - see your operating system help for how to do this, but you should have 'millions' of colours, 24- or 32-bit selected.

Display warm-up: It's crucial that you let your display warm up before attempting to calibrate and profile it. Although CRTs were always known to require a warm-up period to stabilise, it is also true for LCD panels, though once warmed up they then remain more stable than CRTs. Allow at least half an hour.

Energy and screen savers: Disable anything that is likely to change or shut off your screen before beginning profiling. Most screen-saver timings are based on user input activity and won't necessarily notice that a calibration application is running. Given the warm-up requirement even for LCD panel displays, it makes sense both for calibration purposes and for general working to disable anything that turns the screen off too quickly.

Ambient lighting: Changing the luminance (brightness) on a calibrated display to allow for changes in lighting conditions will invalidate your calibration. Aim to achieve consistent lighting instead. Some display calibration and profiling tools (and some displays) offer ambient light adjustment options that are intended to compensate for changes in the lighting environment. These should never be used.

Arrange things so that the display is the brightest object in your field of view but don't work in a completely dark room; lighting levels similar to those that are comfortable for watching TV are appropriate. This will help increase the apparent contrast and reveal more shadow details in your images. A monitor hood (included with many high-end models) may be helpful here. When measuring your screen for calibration and profiling, do switch the lights off, draw blinds or curtains, etc, to minimise the chance of stray light getting into the measuring instrument and giving false readings.

Once everything's set, go ahead and run your calibration and profiling software and enjoy the benefits of accurate color.

This article is based on Practical Colour Management for Photographers and Digital Image Makers, an e-book that's full of detailed practical tips on how to 'do' color management on real computer displays to support high quality image editing. It includes tips on choosing and using colour-critical equipment and the optimum system software settings and working environment for reliable results.