All posts by Neil Harwani

Interested in movies, music, history, computer science, software, engineering, management and technology

Product ecosystem – What are it’s essential components?

What are the essential components of the product ecosystem?

Some of them are shared with services like:

  • Billing
  • Engineering / Development
  • Sales & Pre-sales
  • Marketing
  • Documentation
  • Roadmap
  • Legal
  • Account management
  • Support services like HR, Operations & Finance and so on

But others are unique to the product ecosystem like:

  • Product features management
  • Product roadmap
  • Product strategy
  • Engineering which is focussed on the product
  • Infrastructure
  • Partners & Suppliers
  • Legal & privacy from product perspective
  • Pricing
  • Domain / functional areas
  • Version management
  • Product help & documentation ecosystem
  • Partnership management
  • Multi-geography taxation & legal requirements
  • Customer Success & Services focussed on iterative feedback and improvements in product ecosystem
  • Market analysis & segment creation
  • Product support
  • Specialized collaboration & product tools
  • Product consulting

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

We should not be normalizing this

Being direct, frank, authentic and natural self is ok but below is not. We should not be normalizing this:

  • Achieve targets literally at any cost
  • Repeated bad behaviour in hierarchy
  • Messing up people’s personal lives
  • Using words like professionalism & seasoned to avoid doing what needs to be done
  • Playing mind games with people fresh out of college
  • Delegate and then take credit for other’s work
  • Judge people without knowing context
  • Promote silos, avoid team work and mess up collaboration and creativity
  • Pay someone less than market rate if we can afford the real salary
  • Treat people like trash and take advantage of them
  • Not fix the fixable
  • Not doing the right thing
  • Bring personal biases into the organization
  • Have different set of rules for the same input and output for different groups of people
  • We are not at war, we are in information technology / services industry
  • Most people lose their cool or misbehave once in a while or have a bad day once in a while but if that is a habit ingrained in the culture of the organization affecting large parts of the organization then there is a problem that needs a relook

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Observations from my trips – Part 1

I have travelled to many places in India plus multiple states in US and to Ghana, Africa in the past on short trips. Here are some of my observations and learnings from these trips. This is part – 1 of what I have observed. Hope to follow up with more observations & learnings in future.

Ghana:

  • Visited capital city Accra – Some day would want to go back there
  • Calm and spiritual people overall
  • People are friendly and helpful
  • Traffic rules are followed mostly
  • All interactions with customers in offices / places of work were friendly, calm and cordial
  • Many study in western countries and then come back to work in their country
  • You need a car to travel around due to distances
  • Cost of living in hotels is high compared to similar hotels in India

USA:

  • I have visited New Jersey, New York, California, Dallas – Texas, Chicago – hope to visit more states & cities in future
  • They follow queues at the airport
  • Most things are kept organized
  • Weather was good at the times when I went there
  • Many people work with a strong ethic of office hours & off hours which means start at 8/9 AM and leave by 5 or so PM
  • People from many cultures come together and work
  • Upkeep of public and private spaces is organized and well managed
  • Multiple types of options to stay are available
  • Healthy options in food were available in office eateries
  • People work from home regularly
  • Having a car or a network with whom you can go around in private vehicles is an advantage
  • Depending on the city – public transport may or may not be available
  • Offices generally have open and free spaces
  • After 8 to 9 PM traffic and rush on the roads goes down
  • You will find people from varied backgrounds and citizenships / geographies in office

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Navigating Liferay as a Customer & Partner – Part 1

Single ready reference of important links for customers & partners of Liferay:

  • Where is the customer portal: https://www.liferay.com/customers
  • Where do I find the documentation – Version & Product wise: https://learn.liferay.com/
  • Where is the developer portal: https://www.liferay.com/developers
  • Where is the partner portal: https://www.liferay.com/partners
  • Where can I get online trainings: https://www.liferay.com/learning
  • Where are the blogs: https://www.liferay.com/blog
  • Where can I get the case studies: https://www.liferay.com/resources/case-studies
  • Where is the list of upcoming events: https://www.liferay.com/events
  • Where are the details for Subscription services: https://www.liferay.com/subscription-services
  • What is DXP: https://www.liferay.com/products/dxp
  • What is Liferay Experience Cloud: https://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-experience-cloud
  • What are the major Use-cases & Industries that Liferay caters to: https://www.liferay.com/ – Navigate to Solutions
  • Where is the MarketPlace: https://web.liferay.com/marketplace
  • Where is the resource library: https://www.liferay.com/resources
  • Where is the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/liferayinc
  • Where is the LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liferay-inc-/
  • Where do I raise a product request for technical support, licenses and similar points: https://help.liferay.com/hc/articles/360018414031
  • Where is the page for careers: https://www.liferay.com/careers

Compliance in Private Limited firms – Part 1

Most questions that employees raise are around culture, benefits and salary (CTC) in firms. There is a large space of compliances and other work that business owners, investors & stakeholders need to manage.

To start with – various types of firms exist, will not be explaining those in detail here but listing them for reference: Proprietorship, OPC, Private Limited, Partnerships, LLP, Public Limited and so on.

Intention of this blog is to provide a list of compliances that a private limited firm needs. This will be a helpful guide for those intending to setup their own firm.

  • Annual filings with Ministry of Corporate Affairs
  • MCA registration for firm
  • Income Tax
  • GST
  • Professional tax
  • Medical Insurance
  • Group Life Insurance
  • EPF & EPS
  • Udyam
  • Board meetings
  • Balance sheet, income statements & accounting
  • Appointment of CA & CS
  • Director registration with MCA
  • AOA & MOA
  • Shops & Establishments Act
  • Trademarks
  • Patents
  • Digital Certificates
  • Bank accounts
  • Salaries
  • ESIC
  • Shram Suvidha

Each of the topics above is a discussion in itself which we will explore in other parts of this blog sometime in future.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Stories from my career & education – Part – I

Have been observing people posting their stories on LinkedIn and other places. This is my attempt at short summaries of learnings over the years from my career and education – Part 1. As this peeks into 1990s and 2000s, its difficult to recollect details but the overall learnings do remain.

School – Airforce school – 1990-92: Vague memories but the critical thing was holistic learning. What I do remember is a school that introduced us to discipline, computers, games, extra curriculars and more along with good education with a report card having lots of parameters in terms of evaluation rather than only academics. Learnings: Holistic learning.

School – Xavier’s – 1992-98: Place where we led a simple, disciplined life with a happy class of individuals from across the country. Schooling for me included scoring decent marks in 10th, 11th & 12th and getting into engineering along with playing non-stop whole day whenever we got a chance. More than 70-80% of the class seems to be achievers in their specific areas now. Learnings: Values, Simplicity, Good education.

College – LDCE – Civil engineering – 1998-2004: Critical learning was to manage things on your own which included freelancing to get work, learning computers, deciding how to study, being self sufficient, interacting with multi-geographical group of students from across India, making friends and understanding the value of stepping stones and foundation in life. Learnings: Unless you build a foundation of knowledge, discipline and goals – you will continue to face problems.

College – ICFAI Hyderabad / Dehradun – 2004-2006: Learned advanced concepts of technology around Java, Networking, Operating systems and more in a very tight / packed schedule of two years – probably included 25-30+ subjects at a place where I was forced to build a new network of friends. Met some wonderful friends from Northern and other parts of India. Got placed into services part of the then booming Information Technology industry from here. Learnings: Focus on goals around technology & career.

Will come out with part two at a later point of time for 2006 onwards.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

What is changing in education sector in India?

  • Autonomy for high ranking colleges & universities
  • Similarity in rules for PhD
  • Education related code of conduct for Ed-Tech
  • Industry professionals can teach without PhD
  • Universities allowed to tie up with Ed-Tech for online education
  • Online education now mainstreamed and regularized
  • New education policy launched
  • UGC & AICTE top management focussed on better outcomes
  • Positive changes in school ecosystems
  • Tie-ups / collaborations increasing in education
  • Multiple focussed universities coming up in various domains
  • 4 years honours degree and direct admission to PhD after 4 years degree possible
  • Credit transfers & multiple entry / exit made possible
  • Online content sourcing now allowed for universities up to 40%

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Keywords for Identity & Access Management plus Single Sign on with links from Liferay ecosystem – Part 1

Keywords in the identity & access management space along with single sign on:

  • Active Directory
  • LDAP
  • OAuth
  • Kerberos
  • OpenID
  • SAML
  • CAS
  • Seamless login
  • Shibboleth
  • IAM
  • SSO
  • JWT
  • Identity provider
  • Service provider
  • MFA
  • TFA
  • Principal
  • Identity synchronization
  • Identity lifecycle management
  • Entitlement
  • Authorization
  • Authentication
  • Federated identity
  • B2B & B2C

Links from Liferay documentation for above:

  • https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/installation-and-upgrades/securing-liferay/configuring-sso.html
  • https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/installation-and-upgrades/securing-liferay.html
  • https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/headless-delivery/using-oauth2/creating-oauth2-applications.html
  • https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033738332-Authenticating-Using-SAML
  • https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026505211-Authenticating-with-Kerberos
  • https://www.liferay.com/resources/whitepapers/Identity+Management+in+Liferay+DXP
  • https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018176491-OAuth-2-0
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_management

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Why Liferay & what about my performance? – Part 1

An unbiased view on why you should adopt a platform like Liferay and what are the benefits in using Liferay:

  • Having implementations in various domains like insurance, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, education, government, intranets, commerce, energy, customer / partner portals and more
  • Open standards based system built with and around Java & specifications from Java community
  • Tooling options built on top of Eclipse, Gradle and Blade
  • Gogo Shell & DevStudio
  • Has been contributing to ecosystem by community as well as enterprise versions regularly plus has cloud options with analytics & commerce
  • Modular architecture built using OSGi
  • Growing marketplace
  • Maturity of 10+ years in terms of having features in fine grained property file entries, IAM/SSO/AD/LDAP, programming & configuration options and similar inbuilt integrations, workflows, content management, system administration and more
  • Commerce, Analytics, Cloud option & Content / horizontal portal in the same ecosystem
  • Evolving features around Cloud, Personalization, CI/CD, Analytics, ML&AI with the trends
  • Large part of documentation is open for public reference
  • Growing community & partner ecosystem
  • Strong features around content, search, collaboration, chat bots, headless and more
  • Many security, clustering, optimization, workflow, content, configuration features are pre-built with past experiences and evolution for over a decade
  • Programmers & technical people love the open standards based understanding of the product ecosystem

How to overcome some of the challenges around implementing Liferay:

  • Read the official documentation, blogs, forums in entirety and refer non Liferay forums across the web, don’t read piecemeal – that does not help
  • If you struggle with SEO / page load performance problems look at various reports from across the web like GTMetrix, Pingdom and more rather than rely on a single tool and single geo based server. Think of functional, technical and other changes across configurations rather than only one area. Good part is as there is transparency with open standards and open forums, it’s easier to decipher what changes need to be made
  • To avoid upgrade problems, follow the official path for customization & configuration in conjunction with Liferay team rather than customize outside the official process. Also, use out of the box features as much as possible

Liferay case studies

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Notes from Tableau training taken at Nirma University

Below are some keywords and notes from my Tableau training for visualization taken at Nirma University, Ahmedabad. Hope it helps you.

  • Dataset understanding – Functional analysis
  • Data cleaning in CSV
  • Data cleaning / formatting in Tableau
  • Clustering – Automatic & Manual
  • Geographical visualization
  • Filters
  • Tooltips
  • Details
  • Dashboard
  • Constant Line
  • Average Line
  • Median
  • Totals
  • Bar chart with cluster
  • Story building
  • Exclude
  • Explain data
  • Create set
  • Group
  • Cleaned with data interpreter

Reference Links:

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in