The Problem

Corporate training and educational programs in general is a major topic of discussion right now. Funding cuts within our schools and the high turnover in the office combined with the need to tighten our belts and polish business processes are all waking folks up to the value of improving and or developing quality training resources. It is proven that education in the workplace will improve efficiency and productivity and help your company or remain competitive in a global economy. Schools and learning institutions have requirements for student results trackin and there is a shift required to evolve a more sustainable educational system.  This may require a blend of traditional settings as well as virtual training. Corporations and schools alike can reduce travel costs and transition times productivity lost shifting between locations. These and other key factors are all opening the door for the online or virtual training solutions.

Opportunities

The cost advantage of a Joomla Content Management System with integrated Learning Management capabilities now makes this capability within reach for small businesses, learning institutions and non-profit organizations.

New Social Community capabilities also can fuel the way we interact and share information. Since Joomla offers this capability through a host of extensions there are limitless opportunities for developing focused learning communities with segmented user groups.

Affordable Options for LMS

There are many options for Learning Management but a couple of major contenders in the open source community are Moodle LMS (Ideal for schools) as well as Joomla when using the numerous third party Learning Management System (LMS) extensions (More ideal for companies and Non-profit organizations). There's actually a "bridge" between the two systems that lets you utilize both Moodle and Joomla for the same user base. This technology capacity is a force multiplier that can open the doors for a lot of possibilities iff it is applied properly.

CNP Integrations has become an early adopters for this bridge on our http://www.givetoed.org project where we incorporated a number of tools for K-12 school teachers, parents and local community leaders to work with others and engage in conversations concerning the potential of education and related matters. While still a pilot project the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Professional LMS is now within reach

There are many enterprise level systems used for conventional learning establishments and larger organizations but these tend to be expensive solutions to implement since the training and deployment costs are extensive. Until recently this has made Learning Management Systems far out of reach for the small and mid size business, local school districts  or non-profit organization.

What we have found is that by leveraging either a Joomla CMS (http://www.joomla.org) along with integrated LMS extensions or Moodle (http://www.moodle.org) or even a bridged combinations we are able to help deliver a reasonable scale of functionality and student tracking capability that puts the strength of Learning Management Systems available to small and mid-size businesses, learning institutions and non-profit organizations. Not only is this technology platform substantially more cost effective but each of the curriculum and education resources that we produce can be designed to be SCORM compliant and as a result can be integrated with virtually any other SCORM compliant Learning Management System should your requirements ever outgrow the platform. However, because the technologies continue to improve and scale with new features you may never need to look elsewhere.

Practical Applications of LMS

If you are a small business, training can help you deliver your products more consistently and position your company to be able to scale up or down to meet the needs in the marketplace and protect you from risk in employee turnover. If you are a School or educational institution it is important to segment your user types and track student progress. If you are launching complex business tools on the web you need to empower your users to get the most out of your technology investments. What this means is that utilizing the capabilities of Learning Management can offer benefits to businesses and organizations of many types and range in size. It also means that this may be a wise investment that can have short term and long term payoffs.

Experience to Succeed

Since most of our team has backgrounds in education and training there is a lot of passion in our company for incorporating professional development and training as part of the value in our service offerings. We will be dedicating this month as "Training Month" at CNP and moving forward you will see a lot more from us in training and curriculum development for educational products and services. We hope the articles and information that we present will generate conversation and help us find creative ways to help you engage your customers and better train your workforce using many of the cost effective solutions that we support.

Stay tuned for ongoing articles and reviews of LMS systems and approaches that can benefit your organization. We are eager to help you better understand the opportunity you can have with an effective online leaning or professional development program using our tools and expertise to implement them.

If you would like to have a demonstration or more information of any of the Joomla based learning management solutions or training we can offer, feel free to contact us so we can help you assess if what we offer will fit your needs.

Additional information can be found at: http://www.joomladesignservices.com

http://www.cnpintegrations.com

http://www.learningcrm.com

http://www.givetoed.org

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2010 has been a boom year for web hackers. I hear that overall hacking was up more than 600% during the last year reported by Joomla ! web protection specialist Tom Canavan. Tom wrote a book labeled “Joomla! Web security” released through Packt publishing. A handful our customers experienced hacker problems this year which is certainly an issue that keeps all of us on our toes. A large majority of the hacks tend to be more embarrassing than anything however, many do affect intellectual assets, client assurance as well as corporate identity. Although hacking occurs in almost all public website systems and Content Management systems the Joomla! online community is among the fastest to reply as it is using one of the biggest worldwide systems of Joomla cms developers as well as skilled programmers. In our struggle of keeping the bad guys away we've drawn together a few ideas along with links that you ought to think about.

Tip one: While developing and designing any Joomla! website be sure you keep on top of an effective protection system as well as add these expenses in your on-going budget. A dynamic website calls for frequent focus which indicates a continuous investment of your time as well as resources to help keep this up. Hackers pound away at the central Content management system platform along with third party plug-ins in search of vulnerabilities. If you always make sure that your primary Joomla! Content management system along with extensions are operating using the most recent security patches you will save yourself lots of complications simply by protecting against a large portion of vulnerabilities. The more time a component exists but not patched the greater probability a hacker has to crack into your infrastructure. Remember, that for just about any reasonable website, you place lots of time as well as treasure into making this your home on the internet and unless you invest in guarding it the whole place may be blown up in a puff of smoke.

Tip two: Use professional components whenever feasible and be prepared to help with some of those initiatives that aren't. The reason is, powering the code are serious men and women and financial aspects works into the achievements as well as durability of those components. It really is a significant responsibility in order to maintain the stability and advancement of those development initiatives. The healthier you are able to enable them to develop into the healthier your own code possibilities are going to be to be able to develop your individual internet system over a period of time.

Tip three: “Keep a clean house” as they say. Be sure you clear away any unused components and modules. This will not simply help in reducing the ways for any hacker to get access it will likely enhance the overall performance within your web site. Be sure file permissions are going to allow you the mobility you'll want to build out material however, button down the rest in order to additionally prevent risks.

Tip Five: Check out the alternative of utilizing a security tracking program. Often these solutions will be accessible via your current Web service provider. We've worked with the “Securelive” solution developed especially for Joomla! and thus far it is doing a fantastic job. There were a few performance problems while we were first having it set up but now it is very effective. Learn about it from www.securelive.net.

Tip six: Backup everything on a normal schedule and do not forget. This provides you with a far greater feeling of protection on several levels as well as defends you against more than hackers, and also protects against “human failures” at the same time. You might want to take a look at www.joomlaplug.com and http://www.akeebabackup.com/ for a couple Joomla! component alternatives we have used.

Tip seven: Have a look at exactly what security vulnerabilities might have an effect on your site most. The more you know the better prepared you will be. Here are a few blogs and posts we located that could further assist your own study ways for stopping hackers from spoiling your entire day as well as sending you and all of your group in “fire drills and rescue missions”:

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Joomla is an exciting platform for growing your business online

One of the most exciting reasons for recommending Joomla as a platform to our clients is the vibrant global development community that continues to innovate and grow the platform’s capabilities. Others include; an open source architecture that allows us to provide economical solutions for our clients and ease of use for collaboration across a team of users with varied technical skills. This allows for a broader base of collaboration and empowerment across a team of stakeholders.

The current collection of extensions and add-ons for Joomla CMS is now over 4691 and new stuff is coming out daily. This provides tremendous flexibility and scalability over time. Our company specializes in Joomla development, we enhance and build new components or extend existing Components and Modules to add features or configure them in the most effective ways. If done right there are really limitless possibilities for achieving cost effective results and achieving targeted business goals.

Here case study for a recent solution we provided: Rokstories layout like Yahoo

RokStories is a module built by the folks at Rocket Themes. Rocket Themes is a Joomla template design company that has evolved their template architectures with innovative features. They have built integrated modules, plug-in’s and other superb functionality around stable and graphically pleasing Joomla 1.5 native and Joomla 1.0 compatible templates. Their team has one of the best template clubs available in the marketplace and we offer free use of http://www.rockettheme.com Joomla templates to our customers as part of our service engagements.

One of our clients wanted us to modify their RokStories module with a layout to look like the yahoo module content slide show as seen here: http://www.yahoo.com/. This is what our enhancement to the RokStories module looked like when we were finished: http://www.canonprofits.org. Some of the features are turned off in this installation but as you will see the same look and feel was achieved at a fraction of the cost compared to building such a module from scratch. This is a good example of what open source is all about, working with existing code to help a client achieve goals in the most efficient way possible. Building functionality like this from scratch would have taken a considerable effort, cost more and had a much longer development cycle. With a few hours of additional programming we were able to provide what the client wanted at a fraction of the cost.

Top 5 reasons to go with Joomla

1. Using any open source platform will give you scalability but Joomla stands out since it is the most popular and best supported open source CMS platforms in the world.
2. You can build out features freely and never be “held over a barrel” by a development company.
3. You can always update over time and respond to your future needs.
4. Joomla offers limitless flexibility for just about any business model with thousands of extensions and an easy to use administrative interface.
5. Working with a talented group of Joomla! developers and consultants that understand Joomla both from a programmatic capability and from a business process and configuration capability will serve you well and allow you to get the most technology for your investment.

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JomSocial and Joomla CMS help to initiate conversations

JomSocial is a perfect tool for meeting the demands of the marketplace and our overall shift in cultural interaction notably called “socialeconomics”. I have been reading a great new book by this title and in it there are many fascinating examples of how our society, now plagued with multi-tasking and the pace of a race car on the finishing lap, is using social media to “knock of several birds with a single stone” sort of speak. I recently started a new social community as a tool to centralize information about some of my views and those that I have collected about Public Education. The idea was to build conversations around topics that can help folks better understand not only what is at stake but perhaps where they can contribute their ideas and creativity in a way that can have impact on the end game. This www.givetoed.org community allows folks to interact with most of the popular social networking and community collaboration tools in a way that remains personal yet captures the spirit of teamwork.

Platform for communication, collaboration and education

The GiveToEd.org platform leveraged all of the key features found in the JomSocial Community suite for Joomla CMS and has the intention of centralizing conversational information that can increase awareness about targeted topical categories. The ability for anyone to contribute blog articles, calendar events and comments around these topics seems like a perfect application of these tools.

Since the JomSocial components are useful for expanding the user profile fields in Joomla CMS it is a huge compliment for a variety of web applications that want extended user profiles and registration form processing. I was an avid user and big fan of another such tool for several years now called Community Builder components. These were the first for the Joomla platform and are still a great choice for Social Networking sites and extending user profiles. However the overall architecture of the JomSocial suite of community tools is a little more user intuitive for a facebook style niche social community.

We will see more and more niche social communities moving forward.

I think we will see more of these types of niche communities over time since organizations like Linked in are the business networking “Chambers of Commerce” of the future. Businesses are competing globally now and our personal social circles are also much more diversified and geographically dispersed. As an example I joined facebook a while back but did not find many folks on there just a few “early adopters”, social media geeks like me. Since leavening the Mpls MN music scene in 2000 after a rewarding 15 year career in the music/entertainment business, I have been longing to connect with many of my old friends and colleagues. A few weeks back I found a few folks that knew a few folks that new a few folks and within a week I was instantly connected with nearly 300 wonderful people that I really missed and appreciate. They and I have been able to passively and personally interact in conversations in the weeks since. It is really neat to see what many of the folks, some I have not seen for 10 years, have been up to. Though I am half way across the country in a different world as a “family man a computer geek” I am able to connect to a part of me that I could have by no other means.

Relationship management tools will be the norm of tomorrow.

The Givetoed.org community we built is hoping to bring our local communities together around a central purpose of improving our public education. Social community and relationship management tools like this play an important role and create a bridge for people to communicate at a level they could not before. For example you can look at this two ways; One, you can get those spontaneous thoughts out with quick short messages that syndicate in real time for instant response to a broad audience quickly or you are able take your time with well articulated content you wish to share that could have a lasting effect on others opinions. These social web tools can help fill the gap of communication and collaboration between where we were not too long ago and where we are now and into the future.

Public Education is just one community that needs social media conversations

If the next generation of schools are going to be effective and affordable we will have to adapt to a world to a world we have yet to understand.  Just think, when a 1^st grader this year graduates from college it will be 2026 give or take a year. Look back on what happened in the past 16 years and tell me if you could have predicted where you would be today back then.

I am thankful that the technologies like JomSocial for Joomla CMS much like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have evolved to connect people and help us manage these many relationships

My hope is that many sites like our www.Givetoed.org social community web portal will bring people together to Collaborate, Communicate and Educate on important areas within our society. We learn more efficiently through interpersonal communication than by any other means. I hope you drop by and have a look around and even better yet leave your comments.

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One of the most powerful and popular capabilities of a Joomla website is the ability to deliver robust ecommerce solutions. While there are a growing number of options for ecommerce in Joomla, the pioneer and still the most popular shopping cart option is the Virtuemart shopping cart extension. It has been exciting to watch how a great basket of ideas has grown to become one of the most popular engines for ecommerce on the web.

Small businesses like it because it is FREE to download, it is easy to implement and maintain and it is scalable to meet the needs of their business as it grows. Shoppers like it because it looks great, is intuitive to use and is secure for handling their transactions. Developers like it because there are many extensions, accounting systems integrations and it is open source code so they can deliver real world business results and be the hero. Yippie everybody wins!

Let’s start with a quick overview of the core features and then I will get to some real exciting stuff that I like about this solution.

Virtuemart release 1.1.4

General Features

• capable of using Secure Sockets Layer (https) Encryption (128-bit)
• flexible Tax Models
  • Model 1: ShipTo Address-based Tax Calculation
  • Model 2: Store Address-based Tax Calculation
  • Model 3: EU Mode (Store Owner based Tax Calculation when Customer comes from an EU Country)
• Shoppers can manage their User Accounts (registration required)
• Shipping Address Management (Customers can enter their own Shipping Addresses)
• Order History: Shopper can view all their previous Orders (and Order Details)
• Order Confirmation Mail (customizable!) is sent to Shopper and Store Owner
• Multiple Currencies (you can allow Customers to change the Currency and buy using an alternative Currency)
• Multiple Languages (using the Joomla! Component Joom!Fish or Nooku).

Product Catalog Features

• Powerful Web-Administration Interface (Javascript-powered)
• Manages an unlimited Number of Products and Categories
• Can be used as a Shop or just as an Online-Catalog (you can even turn off Price Display)
• quick Search for Products, Categories and Manufacturers; filter by features or discounted Products
• Product Ratings & Testimonials (moderated or auto-published)
• feature specific Products by setting them "on special"
• Product Availability: show how fast a Customer can expect delivery
• Handles downloadable Products (virtual Goods)
• "Product is back in Stock"-Notification for subscribed Customers

Administration Features

• multiple Images and Files (like Spec Sheets and Flyers) per Product
• Product Attributes (like Size or Color) can be added to Product
• Product Types for Classification (like "Car", "Motorbike" or "Music Album")
• Shopper Groups for Customers (allows different Price Levels and Payment Options),
• multiple Prices per Product (Quantity-based and/or Shopper Group-based Prices)
• flexible Price Display (number & currency formatting; including or excluding tax)
• On-the-Fly Price Conversion between different Currencies using Live Rates from the ECB or other banks
• Shop Statistics / Control Panel with a Summary of new Customers, new Orders....
• Stock Level Control for Products and Item
• Order Management with Order History, Customer Notification and Order Edit Functionality
• basic Reporting Feature: sold Items, monthly/yearly Revenue
• Order Status Management
• manage different Currencies, Countries & States

Payment Modules

• capable of live Credit Card Processing
• pre-defined Payment Gateways like authorize.net®, PayPal, 2Checkout, eWay, Worldpay, PayMate and NoChex
• extend your Shop with other Payment Modules using the Payment Module API!

Shipping Modules

• flexible Shipping Carriers and Rates Configuration
• Live-Shipping Rates using Shipping Modules (e.g. InterShipper, UPS, USPS, FedEx or Canada Post; Modules can use the Shipping Rate API).
• extend your Shop with other Shipping Modules using the Shipping Module API!

For even more information drop by the projects web site: http://virtuemart.com/ and if you are a developer you may want to track the changes and upgrade evolution found in the change log.

• Change Log: https://dev.virtuemart.net/cb/wiki/4245

Virtuemart Extensions:

In addition to the many core features there are many folks that have taken initiatives to build add-on’s and themes to enhance this Joomla extension with an even more rounded collection of capabilities for both look and feel of the shopping experience and functionality to serve niche markets

Check out the extensions available as well: http://extensions.virtuemart.net/

There are so many but one that caught my eye recently was supporting the idea of On Page Check out: http://www.onepage-checkout.com/features.html.

Templates:

Virtuemart has been around for a while, has a pretty nice user interface and is overall very flexible for delivering a comfortable and astatically pleasing customer experience. However, I happen to like the surge of interest in developing template options for Virtuemart. Here are a couple of my favorite resources

These folks have some very nice designs and I am eager to try them out myself but they are relatively new to the scene so I have not yet had the chance. However, they appear to do very nice work. http://www.vmjunction.com/

This group was one of the first to deliver a 3^rd party option for Virtuemart design goodies. While this was not the most graceful process to implement these into my cart they have done a nice job if you like the style of their designs. http://www.yagendoo.com/ If you are new to Joomla or do not understand css and html well you may find working with this a bit challenging.

One of our favorite template designers released a nice Joomla template called Mynxx that offers a nice theme for the Virtuemart experience. Take a look at their live demo. Go to http://demo.rockettheme.com/ and select the dropdown item Mynxx.

I think one of the reasons many of the template design vendors have not jumped on board with template designs for Virtuemart has been that unless you deliver Virtuemart as part of the installation it can be difficult for the average non-technical user to install. I think this will only get better over time and since it has grown in popularity there is now a stronger business case for vendors to invest in this.

Payment Gateways:

One of the biggies for setting up ecommerce is having a connection between your shopping cart and a payment gateway. Something I especially like is that connecting to PayPal with Virtuemart is a real no brainer. Just enter an email address for your PayPal accounting and you are mostly “DONE”. While Authorize.net is another popular gateway there are several others supported and since the Virtuemart framework is open source, well, you can build your own if needed. We work with the OSDCS.com folks to connect the dots on any gateway issues. They are the simply the best and have many prebuilt gateway extensions at http://www.oscds.com or you can also drop by http://www.cmsextensions.org for more useful components and gateways.

Small Business Management Solutions – Real world value

The real power and value for your small business with the Joomla CMS and Virtuemart combination is the ability to integrate Joomla and Virtemart with other accounting and Customer Relationship Management systems.

Synchronize with QuickBooks and CRM

The key integration that I am particularly interested in is the Info@hand Customer Relationship Business Management platform, where there is a bridge between the users in a Joomla/Virtuemart experience and the contacts and accounts in info@hand CRM. With this solution you actually manage your products inside of the CRM (info@hand) and then synchronize this with your Virtuemart extension in Joomla. Then to make this even more interesting, when a customer makes a purchase an ecommerce invoice is passed to info@hand and associated with the account so you can then manage all of your accounts from a centralized dashboard in info@hand... And then to make this even more exciting you can synchronize info@hand with QuickBooks Accounting software so that you have a full transaction life cycle management solution. This will allow small businesses to actually have a low cost of ownership solution that could allow you and your niche products to compete effectively in the marketplace.

• Synchronize with QuickBooks
• Info@hand eShop CRM Sync with Joomla and Virtuemart
• Customer Relationship Management
• Marketing Campaign management
• Workflow Automations
• Integration with Auth.net and other payment gateways

Click here for full list of many robust features.

For more information on this solution visit these sites: http://www.learningcrm.com and http://www.crbm.net

Another solution I found interesting was not as full featured as an info@hand CRBM solution but offered the synchronization with Quickbooks was bay a company called Webgility. There solution which I have yet to try, looks like it would do a good job for connecting the dots with QuickBooks but is just limited to this function and it is a desktop application so you lose the portability of the web.

http://www.webgility.com/quickbooks-integration-video-demo.php?utm_source=vm&utm_medium=directory&utm_campaign=virtuemart

Why we feel Joomla and Virtuemart are the best solution for small business ecommerce:

We have implemented sites for customer ranging from selling a single product to working with companies with huge databases of products. In this experience we have found the Joomla and Virtuemart solution to be very easy for our customers to configure and manage. It offers most of the functionality out of the box and if you use PayPal for your payment gateway it is about a easy as eating pumpkin pie to set up. Since this is a popular open source project supported by a global community the support and advise will not limit you to one vendor and you have the freedom to expand the code base to meet your particular business need.

We hope this overview is helpful and if you ever need configuration support custom coding or training on the Joomla or Virtuemart solution we would be happy to talk with you.

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