PractiTest Blog

We stumbled upon a report from Microsoft saying that Small & Medium Businesses using hosted services and solutions perform better financially than those using in-house software.  You can check their press release here.

To summarize their findings, the study performed by a third party research firm showed that companies using SaaS and Cloud Based products, such as PractiTest , showed higher revenues than those using traditional in-house solutions.  The research also pointed at the fact that both awareness as well as the migration of SMBs towards SaaS solutions is growing year after year.

Michael Korbacher, a director in Microsoft, said that “Using pay-as-you-go cloud technologies, small and midsize businesses can now afford and easily have access to enterprise-class, secure services across any platform.”

The study also quotes Dale Vile, research director of Freedom Dynamics saying that “This whole picture corroborates the notion that technology and hosted services can provide tangible business advantage, even for smaller companies, and it’s not surprising to see that investment in IT and hosting goes hand in hand with good financial performance.”

So what we always knew that makes perfect sense now gets a formal approval: SaaS solutions such as PractiTest are good for SMBs since they allow them to get the best possible products at accessible costs, and not only taking into account the price of the licenses but also the overall cost of installing and maintaining these solution in-house.

Last month IDC published a Private Vendor Profile on PractiTest:
PractiTest Private Vendor Watchlist Profile: Taking Testing into the Cloud

The report includes: Company Overview, Company Snapshot, PractiTest Watch Factor Score Versus Watch Factor Average Score, Potential Market, Market Disruption, Competitive Landscape, Technology/Solution and more.  You can view the full Table of Contents here.

We cannot recommend it or not (since it costs $3,000 US), but it’s nice to know that after our previous product review, which was very positive, now we are being reviewed and followed by no less than IDC.

Our latest updated comes to answer some of the “small-feature” requests we’ve been getting from the field these last number of weeks.  We decided to make it a small one, so that it would allow us to continue developing the cool new functionality that will be available shortly (teaser – it rhymes with passports…)

This update comes with the following additions:

• New filter criteria to display entities based on whether one of more of their fields are “empty” or “not-empty”.  A simple change to make a world of difference.

• When a test has been cloned from a previews test, the system will also allow you to see the attachments of the original test(s) and not only those of the current one.



• PractiTest now remembers the status of the Folder Tree in the Test & Execution module, and it will not expand it whenever you enter the view.
• And many small fixes and improvements related to working with large number of views and folders, cloning operations, filtering with dates, etc.

See you all real soon with a new update!

During the few weeks we concentrated a lot in our back-end server infrastructure, resulting in today’s upgrade with few functional additions, but bug fixes and back-end related stuff.

These are the two small features that we did add to this release:

• A specific permission type related to the Custom Views, which means, if you’re not the owner / author of the view, and don’t have this permission (by default Administrators only), then you cannot change other’s views. You can change your own views though.
  

  PractiTest Users' permissions addition

• ‘Account Settings’, available only to Account owners, near the ’settings’ link. The Account Settings shows to the Account owners how many projects there are under their account, the users’ license information, and the keys for using our API.
  

  New Account Page for Account owners

Hi,

On July 2009, we got reviewed by IsraelTest blog, at http://www.tapuz.co.il/blog/ViewEntry.asp?EntryId=1516850. Since the review is in Hebrew we decided to translate it to English and share it with all of you:
http://www.practitest.com/files/IsraelTest_Product_review.pdf