Happy New Year !

Happy Qatar National Day!

Qatar celebrates every December 18th as National Day in commemoration of the history day in 1878, when Sheikh Jasim, the founder of the State of Qatar, succeeded his father, Sheikh Muhammad Bin Thani, as the ruler and led the country toward unity.

We extend our heartfelt congratulations and greetings...

Happy National Day!!

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

Having a web site is not just a commodity for businesses nowadays, but a must. A company or a professional without a web site is like a salesman without his business card. The website needs to be your profile and face of your company. Once you have done a website, you   obviously need some visitors to the site so that you can get some clients or sell your products. So what options do you have to bring in those visitors? How do you get ranking high on Google? The answer is - an effective SEO provider can offer you the same.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a way of ensuring your website appears high in the search engine results. Most people never look beyond first page of the Google and over 40% only click on the top 3 results. An effective SEO guarantees your business that your site will show up in the first page. That means if it listed in first page, you are more likely to gain that new customer or client. Even if there are bigger names out there, you can beat them in Search engine rankings by an effective SEO.

SEO helps visitors find their website using the targeted keywords and phrases that best describe your business products and services

What matters most in Search Engine?
1. Which websites link to you
2. Number of websites linking to you
3. Google Page Rank (PR) of the website linking to you
4. Anchor text used in the link linking to you
5. Number & type of links linking to the website links to you
6. Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as authority website

For more reading you can have a look at the article

The Ultimate List of Reasons Why You Need Search Engine Optimization

EID MUBARAK...!

Argus wishes you all a very happy and peaful Eid.

May Allah accept your good deeds, forgive your transgressions and

ease the suffering of all peoples around the globe.

HRMS - Employee Preliminary Status

I would like to discuss few points in relate with Human Resource functions,  which is specific to Qatar. A business owner,  should know certain formalities, must be done in order to legalize their employees stay in Qatar. Once a staff arrives in Qatar, a medical test is to be performed by the concerned authorities. The medical test is compulsory for all forms of residency permit and this must be done during the first week of being in Qatar. Medical unfit employees will not be granted approval to stay and will be requested  to leave the country. In addition to the medical check, the employee must pass a criminal records check by the Finger Printing process. If medical is approved and criminal records are clear, then the employee can proceed to obtain his/her work residency.

If an organization delays their employee’s Medical Check/ Finger Printing/ Residence Permit (RP) more than the specified period, they will got penalty for each day. For a business enterprise, it is very important to track each and every employee arrivals in Qatar and their status on Medical/Finger until completes their RP process. So a Business owner should be vigilant always to do the things by the HR person on time without delay.  

The employee initial HR procedure until RP can be shows as follows:

Argus HRMS provides easy options to manage  employee preliminary HR status whether they completed Medical/ Finger/ RP with date and comments. As a default the newly joined employee on pending status,  need to carry out all those procedures like Medical, Finger, etc. The HR user will get the corresponding reminder to do the needful on time as per the parameter settings. On completion of each procedure, he can update in the system to go further procedures.

The Argus HRMS helps an HR person to handle his/her normal duties with the help of very user-friendly forms and reports.  That means, he or she can utilize his major daily hours on other important HR tasks. More over, the return on investment (ROI), may with in few months as per your volume of transactions, it may be in terms of either saving your staff daily hours or saving the emigration penalties.   

Qatar’s I.T spend trends upwards

As per the report published by researcher BMI (Business Monitor International), Qatar’s Information Technology (I.T) spending will trend upwards and scale up by 15% to touch almost QR 2bn this year. Also Qatar is seen as the fastest – growing I.T market in the Gulf region over a five-year forecast period. Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup is expected to “fuel a new wave of investment”, while the government’s ICT-2015 strategy will also create opportunities. The country’s computer software segment is set to record a 17% growth this year in dollar terms, accounting for almost QR 380mn. “Government IT spending, investment, and retail sales are expected to trend upwards in 2012, as Qatar’s booming economy, driven by elevated energy prices and heavy government expenditure, fuels IT growth, BMI report said. “Qatari corporations and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) are looking to benefit from Qatar’s expected infrastructure development and rapid growth, and will invest in IT to boost competitiveness,” BMI observed. 

(Source: Gulf Times )

Ramadan Kareem!

Argus Qatar wishes you Happy Ramadan.


May Allah accept all your prayers in this Holy month of Ramadan. 

Optimize your website for Mobile users

In this current competetive market, each and every business owners should aware the importance of optimizing their web for mobile users. As the smart phone is very popular among the people in Qatar, for accessing a website, everybody depending their mobile only.

People are spending more time than ever on their mobile phones, while by 2014 mobile internet is estimated to overtake Desktop internet use. As per marketing reports, accessing internet via mobile phones will grow drastically with in a year and 40% of them accessing social media content. The rise of mobile browsing is a proof why mobile optimized web design is necessary to enable business with websites who access the internet everyday. I read a statistical report as an estimated 25% of mobile users access the internet at least once daily.

You require a website design, that is optimized for both web and mobile browsers to reach more audiences. If you have a website, the existing website can be optimized for mobile browsers effectively by a solution provider like us. So that you can attract more potential customers and pleases the current ones. If you are not optimized your website for mobile browsers, you may loss lot of possible potential leads in this competetive market.

Now the mobile technology is growing very faster and everybody prefer to buy a smartphone rather than choosing any other options. So mobile site optimization seems to be an important role in businesses to tap into new markets. Over the last few years, Mobile Marketing has become an essential part of the promotional strategy. As a result optimizing your website for mobile devices is very important since more and more users tend to access the internet via their Smartphones, tablets or mobile devices. 


The important thing while creating a mobile website is determining what content you have to include. Given the restricted amount of screen space, it is important to figure out what are the key information your visitors will probably be looking for. Mobile web pages will load slower than traditional web pages, so you have to keep minimum number of pages. In addition, mobile users won’t have the patience to click several pages deep on your site. So keep the site layout as streamlined as much as possible.


You can go through the links below for more reading:



http://www.digitalqatar.net/2012/05/15/ictqatar-gets-a-mobile-technology-makeover/

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/mobile-mania.pdf

IPV6 Launch - The world of internet changes

Recently, the Internet Society launched IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) to allow the internet keep on growing. The internet is basically running out of IPv4 addresses and this is why the IPv6 is necessary. The earlier IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) allows 32-bits for IPv4 address and therefor has 2³² (4 294 967 296) possible addresses.  Whereas IPv6 which was developed by the ‘Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)’ uses 128-bit addresses allowing 2¹²⁸ (approximately 3.4×10³⁸) addresses. 

This expansion can accommodate vastly more devices and users on the internet as well as providing greater flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic.  IPv6 will also bring an enhanced quality of service for gaming, video/audio and IP telephony.

More details http://ipv6.com/articles/nat/NAT-Pros-and-Cons.htm

New Developments in Qatar

In the World Economic Forum’s recent report, “The Global Information and Technology Report 2012 (GITR): Living in a Hyper connected World,” Qatar maintained its strong global ranking, coming in as the 28th most networked nation out of 142 surveyed.

Qatar, looking in to the Football world cup 2022, is heavily investing on infrastructure projects ranging from the construction of the most cutting-edge transit system in the world Qatar Rail, to micro-tunneling projects need for utilities.

So all the business segments are thinking how to improve and to be competitive with others using latest innovative solutions. This is a good time to think about possible I.T solutions that solves your current issues in your day to day business.

We are anxiously looking to the market and researching on what are the issues facing by the most organizations and trying to offer them the best innovative solutions for the future.

Laboratory Software in Qatar

In this blog, I would like to write about Argus Laboratory Management Software. The software is implemented successfully in Teyseer Laboratories with several test reports. Creating test reports is a major concern for all laboratories. This software provide a great solution for this major concern by providing a very user friendly and rich user interface for recording the various test results and there by generating the reports out of it. The software also provides a report designer which gives the user the ability to design various templates and use according to the needs.

The starting point for recording the tests is Job Registration. There are two types of Jobs in the system: Soil and Concrete. Both Job registration forms collect basic information on the test material provided by the clients and support registering more than one report (tests) against each sample. Once a job is registered the Job order is ready to accept result entry under relevant tests. Reporting options also are made available once the results are entered.

The system uses the concept of registering a job for the tests to be conducted. When a user brings a material for testing a new job order is created defining the various tests to be done on the material. The software provides the option for registering multiple tests in a single job order. 

Sample UI-Job Order Registration

 Sample UI- Report

Sample UI- Report Designer

Advantages of the system

·         Keeps track of all the tests conducted.

·         Reduces data entry for Customers, contractors and a lot of prefilled information related with tests.

·         Accurate reports as per industry standards.

·         Custom report designer with template feature.

·         User Access control and Audit features.

·         Database backup restore option.

·         Extendible architecture to support more Tests and reports.

Audit Related Features

·         Detailed logging of all the actions in the system

·         Report locking to prevent reprinting of reports

Tests Available in Lab Software

1.       Aggregate Crushing Value

2.       Asphalt Core             

3.       Atterberg Limits      

4.       Binder Content And Particle Size Distribution

5.       California Bearing Ratio (C.B.R)

6.       Concrete Core Compressive Strength

7.       Concrete Cube Compressive Strength

8.       Compressive Strength of Hollow Block

9.       Compressive Strength of Paving Block

10.   Dry Density / Moisture Content Relationship

11.   Elongation Index     

12.   Flakiness Index        

13.   In-situ Dry Density By Nuclear Gauge

14.   Particle Size Distribution for Soil

15.   Particle Size Distribution for aggregate

16.   Particle Size Distribution

o   Type A         

o   Type B         

o   Type C         

17.   Ten Percent Fines Value

18.   The Los Angeles Abrasion

19.   The Particle Density And Water Absorption

20.   The Particle Densities of Filler

21.   The Soundness

Share Point Vs DMS

SharePoint is a Portal solution which will provide a unified view to a customer. It will need OmniScan to scan the documents in batches as per the requirement of the customer and will put them in a desired table format from where the documents can be picked by SharePoint. At the same time SharePoint can store and retrieve the documents in a Document Management system like OmniDocs. 

Apart from having a DMS in the backend one can have many other applications also running in the backend to provide necessary information to the visitor at SharePoint Portal. A Portal and a Document Management system are two different solutions having different functionalities, even though it might seems to be overlapping in some of the cases. One can even have a ERP solution running in the backend from where the Portal can fetch the information and provide to the user of Portal. This does not mean that one can replace a ERP solution by buying a Portal solution like SharePoint, even though some of the functionalities can be common here.

To help you understand more on this let me explain the concept of Portal and Document Management system separately. Kindly note all the features mentioned in a Portal solution or in a DMS solution as mentioned in this document may not be always available through one software product, for eg. For emails Microsoft uses a different software product and does not provide it under SharePoint.

What is a Portal Solution ?

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. A Portal typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed for sharing and collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones/mobile phones.

SharePoint is a portal solution which can have a Document Management System in the backend. A user can use the SharePoint user interface to access these documents instead of using the OmniDocs user interface if they wish.

What is a Document Management System ?

A document management system (DMS) is a computer program used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. It is usually also capable of keeping track of the different versions created by different users (history tracking). The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems. Document management systems commonly provide storage, versioning, metadata, security, as well as indexing and retrieval capabilities.

Refer the below link for more details about DMS http://www.newgensoft.com/products/document_management_omnidocs  

Argus provides the Document Management Solution in Qatar market, tie-up with Newgen Software Technologies